Hello Reader, I’m sure you’ve noticed that, over the past few months, I have become addicted to the underwater world, and to photographing the creatures, large and small, that I encounter there. It’s not the worst addiction in the world. There are far more harmful obsessions. Like writing, it’s good for you. Creativity strengthens our well-being; it makes us healthy in mind and our emotional selves. I began with a very entry-level camera, which made no concessions to my struggle to keep it...
8 days ago • 5 min read
I've been watching a Netflix series called The Beast in Me. It stars Claire Danes as Aggie Wiggs, a celebrated author paralysed by grief and writer's block following the death of her young son in a car accident. She lives a secluded life, consumed by anger – until a new neighbour arrives: a wealthy man widely suspected of murdering his first wife. What follows is a cat-and-mouse thriller as Aggie investigates her neighbour, convinced she's found both a worthy target for her rage and the...
13 days ago • 3 min read
Let me begin by making a confession: I am a bit of a fusspot. In my writing, I like to shape my sentences in terms both of sense and rhythm as I write them. I don’t expect perfection – but I don’t like my first draft to be that radically different from my final. This week on the water I often say that this habit was developed over the years I wrote drama scripts, where inevitably writers have less time to write them than they’d like. Frequently there isn’t in fact time to write a second draft...
20 days ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, This time last month, I was listening to the bells of Venice in the peculiar silence that comes with an absence of cars. Yes, we were running our ninth annual writing retreat, in the 16th century palazzo in which we gather every year. We’ve been running this retreat since 2015 and, as usual, we made an effort to provide the space and opportunity for our participants to feel their own creative surge. Somehow, the city always works its magic, as does the alchemy of a gathering of...
25 days ago • 5 min read
If I could go back and give my fifteen-year-old self one piece of advice about writing, it wouldn't be about point of view or plot structure or finding your voice. It would be this: be ambitious. Not ambitious about winning prizes or getting famous. Ambitious about what you believe you can write. I spent years approaching writing like I wasn’t qualified to do so. How could I presume to create characters as complex as those in the novels I admired? How could I hope to generate the kind of...
27 days ago • 2 min read
We visited friends in Wiltshire over this most recent weekend. Over a game of mah jongg the subject of imagination came up. “Well, of course,” said Belinda, “I don’t have an imagination – never had.” I tucked the remark away for later dissection. This week on the water I think what Belinda was saying is that she has never dreamt up stories about people and events that don’t exist in the real world. But I suspect that imagination is much larger than that. Let’s start at the beginning with a...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
I've just written "The End" on my latest cosy murder. It should feel like a moment of triumph – and it does, partly. But what strikes me more forcefully is the disproportionate amount of time I spent on those final chapters. Days and days circling the ending, revising, reconsidering, starting again. This morning on the water It is, I suppose, like landing a plane: bringing the big bird down safely is why pilots get paid what they do. Writing a novel's ending is precisely that delicate...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Every morning, or at least every writing morning, I perform the same small dance. This week on the water I open my laptop. I re-read what I wrote yesterday. And sometimes I think: not bad. Maybe even quite good. And then, almost immediately, another thought follows – a quieter, more treacherous one: but can I do it again? That’s when the dance begins. I decide I need another coffee. I check the weather. I wonder if perhaps this would be the perfect moment to reorganise my desk, or re-pot the...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
I wrote this for a morning talk during our recent Venice writing retreat. There's something about Venice – the light, the water, the sense of discovery around every corner – that makes it the perfect place to explore how we summon stories from nothing.I want to trace the birth and evolution of a single paragraph in a story that hasn’t yet emerged. It begins with an initial half-glimpse of a poor thought and ends with what might be called a dramatic possibility. Here’s that first, poor...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read