Blog

Description is the seasoning that flavours a story. It’s the smattering of details that prevents your novel feeling bland. In the same...

Deciding what kind of writer you want to be is important, but it’s not something most fiction writers think too deeply about. I’m not ...

Metaphors are powerful weapons in your writing arsenal. (See what I did there? That was a metaphor.) A thoughtfully written metaphor u...

Every novel needs conflict, and every novel needs antagonistic forces. But this doesn’t mean you need a villain (a person who ac...

Years ago, I was staying in a tiny traditional guest house in South Korea for a few days on my two-week journey around the country. Wh...

Whether you’re a writer or an editor, it’s sometimes easy to get confused between omniscient and third person narration. O...

In classic fairy tales, characters are often flat and the stories have a disgusting whiff of social control about them … Yet the...

If you don’t know much about steampunk, you probably think this literary genre is just science fiction set in Victorian times. B...

Think about your favourite book. What specifically do you love about it? I bet one of the things you love most is a particular charact...

Cyberpunk is a genre that has been pithily characterised as ‘high tech, low life’. Sure, it’s all about hackers and far-out tech, but ...

I caught up with one of my past clients, Gina Maya, whose surrealist novel Utopia in Danzig I had previously critiqued and ...

Most of us are familiar with surrealist images like Salvador Dali’s Three Sphinxes of Bikini, but even though surrealism was – and sti...