A writing retreat offers you an ideal opportunity to explore the ideas and the inspirations that move you to write. You can do real work for the week or two that it lasts, revelling in the company of people who take the problems of creating compelling sentences and scenes as seriously as you do. You don’t have to explain to them why a plot problem keeps you up at night. You don’t have to explain why words are of such extraordinary importance to you. But the retreat ends, and your return to...
2 days ago • 6 min read
Today – I’m writing on August 5 – is the anniversary of the day I contracted polio, in Ermelo on the Highveld of the Eastern Transvaal in South Africa, many years ago. It's a day I remember every year, and this year the number is round enough to raise a glass to, if you’re minded: it’s seventy years since I woke up and discovered I could not walk. This week on the water - dawn on Wednesday 5 August I've written before about what that morning did to me as a writer. It triggered into being a...
9 days ago • 5 min read
Hello Reader, I was trying to choose underwater photographs for my new Instagram account (Yes, I’ve been threatening to do it…) I have some big, impressive subjects: 2 metre gully sharks, the swish and sway of a pyjama shark through the kelp, the flap of a giant short-tailed ray. But, for some reason, I kept being drawn to the tiny – the things you wouldn’t even notice if you weren’t looking out for them. I chose the intricate markings of a black and white sea hare, the peacock display of the...
14 days ago • 3 min read
I promised you my thoughts on Agatha Christie this week, so here it is, a little shorter than usual, because I've only just finished reading her, and I'm still working out what I think. This week on the water I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Mysterious Affair at Styles back to back. The puzzle in each held me for a while and then it didn't. Three bedrooms with interleading doors, locked but not always. A stain on the carpet. A chair placed at a particular angle. A view from a...
16 days ago • 5 min read
Hello Reader, Most mornings begin the same way. A diary full of appointments. A list of chores that renews itself faster than we can cross each item off. Encounters with people who are, for the most part, entirely familiar. This is life on the ground floor – comforting, unremarkable, and if we're honest, a little numbing. So, every so often we go looking for a pebble to throw in the pond. This week on the water A beach holiday will do it, though not entirely satisfactorily – we've been to...
23 days ago • 6 min read
One of my great joys is writing dialogue. This week on the water Give me two characters, and a dispute, and I’ll happily invent a two page ding-dong scene in no time at all. Add another character, and things get a little trickier – but as long as you can establish three slightly divergent opinions, writing that conversation should, in theory at least, be no more difficult than writing a two-hander. But let me set you a more demanding assignment. Or at least, let me describe the demanding...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Hello Reader, Thank you so much for joining us for our webinar with Tony Park and Bonnie Espie who shared the craft behind their books. By the end of the hour we hope you came away with new ideas for your own writing, whether you're plotting your first novel or working on the fourth book in a series. It was a warm, generous conversation – Tony and Bonnie were fun and honest about how their books really get made, warts and all. What we covered: Meet Sonja Kurtz and Winifred & Sylvie – the true...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
I was watching the television broadcast of the semi-final between Djokovic and Sinner at Wimbledon when Andre Agassi, doing the after-match analysis, dropped a line I haven't been able to shake since. In this sport, as in life, hope is fragile but hard to kill. This week on the water I've no idea whether he’s used that sentence in a dozen other broadcasts, tucked in his jacket pocket for the right pause in conversation, or whether it arrived fresh, minted on the spot by a man who has spent a...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Hello Reader, I’m bursting with news, so forgive me if I can’t make it through the first line without spilling it. The book I've been wrestling with for a good four or five years, through eight drafts, has just been accepted for publication. With an advance, nogal, which means they must believe in it. There. I've said it out loud. Without touching wood. (I’ve not mentioned this book this year without reaching for wood and clutching at my thumbs.) Now let me tell you what it took to get here,...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read