Events

For years I’ve been participating in, and facilitating, writing workshops. I’ve been doing this as a member of writers’ groups, a student and a teacher of writing. These experiences serve as the basis for this guide, which I hope will …

So, you’re writing a picture book – not illustrating (you’re not an artist) and you know that publishers prefer to select for illustrations whoever they think would suit the work best. If you’re lucky it will be a fairly well …

When famous writers decide to get grumpy with their fans, one of their popular complaints is being asked supposedly ridiculous questions, such as whether they write with a pen or a pencil, or nowadays – a keyboard. The last time …

When we put a manuscript away, in that mythical drawer, we don’t always expect to get it out again. Indeed, it can be a big decision when to let an unfinished draft rest, when to work on it, or even …

Fingers. Their performance on the keyboard, pianist-like; this private recital. Their pulsing sensations and rhythms are supposedly at our mind’s service, but really – feeding it, stamping their music onto our vocabulary and imagination. They labour hard. Sometimes they …

As a writer, one has certain responsibilities. Being a guardian of truth and beauty in a howling, godless void is a mere detail. We also have to pay the rent, do grocery shopping, clean the toilet, and have meaningful/meaningless relationships. …

The imminent beginning of yet another year makes me think about other beginnings – those first pages, paragraphs, sentences, words that pull readers into our tales. How do we make them sing?

Most obviously, banality is the enemy of good …

When I wrote my second novel The Secret Seduction and the Enigma of Attraction, I did not set out to write an erotic novel, but a love story between two complicated, intelligent, wounded people who are afraid to love …

1. Not as well-known as their female counterparts, the Literary Wives (LW). Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein’s ‘wife’, for example, is nowadays inseparable from Stein’s oeuvre; Stein even titled one of her books ‘The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’, forever mythologizing

I’ve never been very good at keeping things simple. When I write, I have more ideas swirling around my head than kites at a traditional Japanese festival, and invariably they get tangled up.

Similarly, when I came up with the …