What I learned from the World Cup
Bored with the World Cup? Take another look. Football has probably taught me more about people and psychology than anything else ever has. I mentioned the World Cup to a friend of mine last week.…
Psychology
Small things can be important too
Small things can be important too. Sometimes, I sweat for an hour over a paragraph, a line of dialogue, a single word. I’ve known comedy writers argue for ages over whether the number 35 is…
Fighting yourself? Here’s a way to stop.
Fighting yourself? Have you ever started a project and found that for some reason you’re not moving ahead? Maybe you’re trying to write a book and not getting round to it. Making sales speeches that…
Do criminals have free will – or is it all down to good and bad luck?
If you ever thought philosophy was for people with glasses and sticking-out ears who need to get out more, you may be in for a shock. Every crime thriller you’ve ever read is steeped in…
12 top tips for quickly learning a language you’d love to know
Interested in learning a language but think it might be too hard? Planning a holiday or meeting people from abroad? It annoys me that language teaching is so bad in this country that it puts…
Feeling overwhelmed? People love David Allen’s “Getting Things Done.” Are they right?
Feeling overwhelmed by all those emails, all that paper,the to-do lists stuck to the wall or just the things you know you have to do that are running round your head? Everyone I know who’s…
Can you defend yourself from verbal attack? Review: Verbal Aikido Green & Orange Belt by Luke A Archer
It may surprise you that a verbal attack can be much trickier and more difficult to deal with than a physical attack. And you never know when one might come. A few years ago, a…
Want to get ahead? Get good habits – Review: Daily Rituals
If you want to improve at something, you can’t do better than studying the habits of people who’ve already done it well. Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals aims to make this easy with bite-sized chunks…
How to avoid the crime fiction trap
Crime is the post popular genre in fiction and on screen today, but many writers fall into the crime fiction trap. Understanding the crime fiction trap The big trap in crime movies and novels is that the…
Woody Allen on showing up
This is a great extract from a Woody Allen interview and it sums up for me the importance of what I call the Mental Game. That talent or – despite the X Factor – wanting to be successful…
What writers can learn from Andy Murray
I wouldn’t have thought there was anything that writers could learn from Andy Murray, but today I read Barney Ronay in the Guardian on what he calls Murray’s “on-court savvy” – a “supremely un-British skill”.…
6+1 ways to stop research becoming procrastination
Last week a writer asked for advice on how long you should do research and how do you know when it’s time to stop and start writing your screenplay or novel. How do you stop research becoming…
The festival’s over – how do you hold onto the screenwriting energy?
Festivals and workshops are great, they get you out of the house and you get high on a great buzz of screenwriting energy. But it’s only too easy for that energy to fade away once…
Two quick tips for getting back to writing
Holidays are a memory, warm sunshine too, time for getting back to writing. But I know only too well how easy it is for that motivation to slip away. I came back from my own…
Website disaster overcome!
As some of you already know, I had a website disaster last week, when a very nice man in the web host customer support told me to do something which turned out to delete the…
A lesson in first draft writing
Why do we always have to keep learning the same lessons? Wouldn’t it be nice occasionally for something to stick? I forgot one of the fundamentals of first draft writing and it was painful relearning…
Review: Writing for TV: Series, Serials and Soaps
This excellent book on Writing for TV by Yvonne Grace has already taken up a permanent place on my bookshelf. Let me declare first that I’ve met Yvonne twice in the real world, and many…
Can we learn from Bono quote on imagination?
The other day I came across a Bono quote that made me stop and think. I’d been looking for material to help research my next novel, which happens to feature a politicised rock star, and I stumbled on…