You may be a bit antwacky and arney, and hate garyboys. Here is a translation from Susie Dent’s book: antwacky is a Merseyside term for old-fashioned, and it probably comes from a local pronunciation of ‘antique’; arney means bad-tempered, and as a dialect word it can be found in Sussex and is thought to derive…

Susan Palmquist is a very successful romantic novelist. In fact, she is two successful romantic novelists – she also writes under the pen name Vanessa Devereaux. She has now written How to Write a Romance Novel  firstly to share with fellow writers what she has learned during her career, and secondly to serve as an…

Playwriting has parallels with screenwriting in that structure is very important, and you start by deciding on your theme. The theme is the deep subject that you are exploring, and once you can describe this in a single sentence you are on your way. Structure then becomes the framework on which you build your characters…

When you have an idea for a story, or even a fictional scene, your imagination pictures what is happening. But then you have to transfer the action from your imagination to the page, and the act of reading is very different to, and slower than, the way your imagination works. So the skill is to…

Who are you? That is a very good question if you want to write your life story, which may well simply be a historical record of the events that occurred in your life, from birth onwards. But it can be an even more interesting book if it goes one step further, and becomes a story…

Fantasy fiction is created by imagining impossible things, a technique at the heart of all the genres that can be loosely grouped as fantasy. If this is a field you enjoy writing or reading then you will delight in this study that traces the history and development of fantasy and looks at how the conventions…

The imaginary world that you build could be this one in, say, a thousand years time or it could be set on a different planet with an environment we can only imagine. Its inhabitants might experience weightlessness, or have to survive in temperatures of minus 200 centigrade. Part of the fun of creating your own…

For this kind of writing to work, sessions need to be led by someone who understands how to write which is why local writing groups are often involved.  Kate Thompson’s book is a guide to journal writing as therapy – but be careful what we mean by journal. The word is often used to describe…

The idea of ‘self’ as being the unique part of human beings that encapsulates individuality is sometimes traced back to the introduction of Christianity with its concept of each person’s soul being different from all others and unique to that person. Philosophers and scholars have discussed and developed this theory of the self – working…

Graphic novels are often defined as full-length stories told in pictures. So both the story and the pictures come together, and writing has to be tight and disciplined. The story has to be told in dialogue fitting into speech balloons each no more than around fifteen words. Any narrative is limited to a few flashes…