Writing

In addition to my writing career, I have qualified as a coach in NLP, Hypnotherapy and the Three Principles. Since I believe that writing is therapy, I want in this blog to discuss how therapy can impact your writing. I should add that you don’t need therapy to be a writer. But if you’re into […]

Five steps to a perfect movie script might seem an unfamiliar, perhaps even unlikely number. A more usual form that stories tend to follow, at least historically, is the three-act structure, which on my writing course I have labelled the Premise, the Complication and the Resolution. A difficulty is identified for our hero (the premise), an apparent solution arises

   As with so many other things in life confidence in writing arises from experience as a rule. But that should not deter us. There’s really no substitute for just going ahead and getting it wrong. It’s the quickest, the most painful but undoubtedly the most effective way to learn. At the same time it’s never

You should write because you don’t know what you know, and writing is a beautiful, sometimes magical way to find out.     Having read a moving story, or watched a great film, we may marvel at the author’s talent, the breadth of their imagination, the insight and wisdom brought to bear on the subject matter. But while

   In creative writing, as in life generally, we are only ever a thought or two away from the very debilitating state of ‘overwhelm’. (Evidence the fact that the word, as a noun, is a relatively modern addition to the dictionary). Faced with so many competing daily pressures: the need to earn money, raise a family,

During a three month jaunt around America in the 1980s, I happened to lodge for a week in a one-room apartment, for free, with a friend of a friend. I can’t remember the exact connection, but it was a relief not to have to spend my money on a hotel so I was quite happy

There’s a lovely moment in the Wallace and Gromit short, ‘A Close Shave,’ where Wallace’s faithful hound Gromit is languishing in a jail cell, having been framed for a crime. He’s grimly piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, anonymously donated, and he’s too sad to even look at what he’s doing. Only when the final piece

Some years ago, I had written an episode of Casualty, and a woman of my acquaintance caught the show when it was aired. She liked the episode and had evidently enjoyed the storylines that I’d come up with. She then said something quite odd, something that at first made me laugh, but after a while

The clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has attested to the universality of our religious experience and the many and various ways in which it shapes our world view, whether consciously or not. You may or may not agree with his analysis but it’s hard to escape the messianic overtones in many of our most popular stories.

Broadly speaking there are four types of writer, and here I’m not referring to the easy demarcation of genres into crime, sci-fi, romance and comedy, though we can never discount their enduring popularity. I’m talking about what really excites us and motivates us to return to the desk time after time. If we’re looking at