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Jack’s Blog

  • The Art of Writing No. 30

    Returning to the subject of ‘themes’ in novel writing: a couple of blogs ago I outlined the thesis that you can elevate the quality of your work by having your characters wrestle with issues that are current, perennial, local or universal. In Azimuth one of my central protagonists spends his life searching for enlightenment but,… Know More

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  • The Art of Writing No. 29

    A possibly difficult area for any novelist concerns writing about the opposite sex. We know that in a number of genres, male-written books tend to make women sex objects, crime victims and adornments to their hard drinking, all-action heroes. On the other side of the coin, there are women writers who portray men in an… Know More

    Read more: The Art of Writing No. 29

  • The Art of Writing No. 28

    I began a writing MA at the University of East Anglia around 1970. I was the only student and I followed the year after Ian McEwan. I did not succeed the vagaries of the course which then required you to do two terms of the Literature MA. I left after the first term feeling I… Know More

    Read more: The Art of Writing No. 28

  • The Act of Writing No. 27

    Excelling at what you do, you would think to be a basic human aspiration. It is not. Having, in my previous life, been a management researcher/consultant working with dozens of organizations, I found that a large proportion of staff in these workplaces were content to get by. This lack of drive to achieve cannot be… Know More

    Read more: The Act of Writing No. 27

  • The Art of Writing No. 26

    Many people reading this will be from the new medium of e-book writing. Given the extraordinary sales of e-readers over the last couple of years, it is obvious that this medium is going to be the main outlet for creative writing in the future. The previous blogs seem to me to be equally appropriate for… Know More

    Read more: The Art of Writing No. 26

  • The Art of Writing No. 25

    How deep do you delve into your main character(s)? It is a question that faces all novelists. Revealing character has a spectrum from the implicit to the direct but usually it has to be some mixture of the two. By implicit  (in the extreme) I mean that character is being explored through actions and without… Know More

    Read more: The Art of Writing No. 25

  • The Art of Writing No. 24

    I thought I’d mumble on a bit about first person and third person characters in your writing. In many ways, writing in the first person is more difficult because it challenges the reader to identify with the ‘I’ in your story as opposed to ‘he’™ or ‘she’.  There is a far greater degree of distancing… Know More

    Read more: The Art of Writing No. 24

  • The Art of Writing No 23

    A game I used to play when waiting for someone in a bar or sitting waiting to be called to the departure gate for a plane, in fact whenever I had not had the sense to bring something along to entertain myself, was scenarios. Before developing the fluid structure of the game I had occasionally… Know More

    Read more: The Art of Writing No 23

  • The Art of Writing No. 22

    What differentiates a professional writer from a writer, i.e. any literate individual? In the last blog I showed examples of how we must interfere with regular brain patterns to produce something worth reading as a fictional artefact. Just because everyone can run does not mean that they are athletes worth entering for prizes and being… Know More

    Read more: The Art of Writing No. 22

  • The Art of Writing No. 21

    A further note on writing dialogue. People speak with different sentence lengths or breaks, they use personal metaphors, their language varies in richness and substance yet much of what passes for speech in novels is barely differentiated. The writer often uses his characters to talk the plot along but not deepen our sense of individuality.… Know More

    Read more: The Art of Writing No. 21