Writing Skill: What Happened?

Want to keep the reader on the edge of their seats in a scene, quivering with suspense as they turn each page? I’ve got a thrilling Writing Skill for you: What Happened? This is a splendid skill for creating slow-burn thriller-style tension, and for weaving in purposeful atmospheric description that becomes part of the action, makes the events memorable, fills the scene with atmosphere, and makes the reader feel like they're living inside the story.

So if you want to stretch your suspense skills, have a play with this. Steal ten minutes for your writing, grab a pen, a cuppa, and your notebook, and curl up to write.

To start with, you need two things: an empty public building + something very very wrong.

The empty public building

It might be empty because it's after dark. It might be deserted. It might be in ruins, ancient or modern. As for what kind of public building, it could be a library, CERN, a medical facility, a shopping mall, a college, a pavilion, a church, a school... Wikipedia has a helpful list of public and institutional buildings if you want more ideas. (An aquarium, perhaps?)

Something very wrong

As for what's wrong, well... We're playing with thriller mode, here, which opens up an inspiring range of sub-genres: action, crime, political, spy, legal, science fiction, medical, archaeological, mystical... Do you want them finding evidence of a new disease? A priceless artefact missing? Gothic powers at work? Glowing fish that almost certainly shouldn't be glowing?

You don't actually have to decide what's wrong in advance, mind. You can consider possibilities, then shrug, dive into the writing, and discover alongside your character.

Start writing

You're not mapping out the whole story, in this Skill: you're diving into writing the first scene. Your character (who they are can gradually come clear through writing them) is exploring the empty building. They know something's wrong, but they don't know what yet.

Include plenty of multi-sensory description as they move through:

• What are they seeing? They're hunting for what's wrong: we're looking through their eyes.
• What are they hearing? Sounds are particularly evocative for creating a tense atmosphere, because they also emphasise the underlying silence, and what we can't see.
• What does it smell like? Smell is brilliant for making us feel like we're really there, inside a scene, because it's not easily reproducible, unlike visuals and sounds.
• What sensations are they having? Is the air warm, cold, humid, dry? Do they touch anything? What are the textures? This brings us right into the embodied experience of the character, so we feel like it's happening to us.

All of this will create maximum creepy atmosphere. It'll also be inherently purposeful: they're hunting for clues to find out what's wrong, so every snippet of description is more information about that, for them, and for us as the readers.

Then end the scene at the most dramatic moment. That may or may not include the reveal on the page – up to you. At the moment you gasp, end the scene. (If you can't bear to stop writing, grab another page and continue the scene on that, as a new section. Leaving the reader on that cliff-hanger!)

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Writing Skill: Fairytale Detective

If you want to explore red herrings, to keep the reader distracted from the true reveal you’re actually working towards, I’ve got a lovely playful Writing Skill for you: Fairytale Detective! Red herrings are always a skill worth exercising, whether or not you’re writing detective / mystery fiction, as you never want the reader to see the real ending coming.

So give yourself the gift of ten minutes writing time, curl up with your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, and have fun!

To start, pick a fairytale. If your memory of fairytales needs refreshing, here’s a lovely site which gives you heaps at a glance. And then, as this is detective fiction, you need to pick someone who’s been killed – a main character, ideally, if not the main character.

Next, choose your detective. This can be someone from within the same fairytale or you can borrow someone from another fairytale: the gingerbread man perhaps, or Rumplestiltskin, or the Beast, whoever you fancy.

Now that you’re prepped, you’re onto the main bit: assemble the cast of everyone else in the fairytale, and work out everyone’s motivations to murder the dead character! Only one of them will have actually done it (or more, if they’ve been acting in cahoots) but all of them need an apparent motivation.

You can do this planning-style, if you’re planning-inclined, or just start freewriting to discover. As for tone – you can keep it super-playful / po-faced tongue in cheek, but there is also room to go seriously dark here, in a Gothy/noir way. Think of Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber stories and how richly literarily dark some of those are.

The main thing here is to practise exploring everyone’s motivations, so once you’ve done that, you’re done! You’ve stretched that skill. But you can absolutely take this further, if you’d like to. Here’s some suggestions of what you could write:

• The dialogue from the interviews your detective holds with each suspect
• Character cameos of each suspect plus description of how they present themselves
• Action snippets of the suspects doing suspicious things
• Action of how the detective investigates each suspect
• All four together, writing the full story!

Have fun!

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

A Weekend In Oxford

If you're coming to a Summer of Writing workshop from outside Oxford, and want to make a weekend of it, here are my favourite suggestions for the perfect Oxford weekend. Obviously Oxford has heaps of things to do and a dozen dozen guidebooks, so this isn't remotely comprehensive: it's my idiosyncratic selection of the favourite places I'd take people, having lived here since 2002. Curated, of course, around your writing workshop on Saturday!

Accommodation

Absolutely book yourself a room in one of Oxford's gorgeous colleges, through University Bookings. The students are away so the rooms are available to book, and you get to roam through the college's gorgeous grounds as well, for the complete Oxfordian experience. Most of them do breakfast included, served in the college dining hall or buttery. The prices vary wildly, according to college and whim; this year they seem to start at £70 a night. (Last checked June 2026.) Also ask if you're allowed to leave your luggage in the porter's lodge after you've checked out, so you can explore luggage-free on Sunday.

Once that's booked for Friday and Saturday night, your itinerary begins!

Friday evening 

Your college (for the weekend) 

Check into your college room and have a wander around the quads and grounds of your chosen college, have a look in its chapel and dining hall, make sure to look up regularly for gargoyle-spotting, fill yer boots with Dark Academia inspiration, etc. Don't walk on the grass, though. Even students aren't allowed to, except during games of croquet.

Friday dinner 

For dinner, take a walk into Jericho, past Oxford University Press on Walton Street, largest university press in the world. (Cambridge will say theirs is older. Ours is bigger. And the second-oldest in the world.) And head to either of these restaurants:

• The Standard on Walton Street: best Indian food in Oxford. It's been running since 1972, and for many years had heavily tapestried high seating and an absolute veil of thick lace covering the huge front window. In 2009, the two sons took over from the father, transformed the interior into its lovely open new look, and also updated the cooking style to a fresher, more modern vibe. Kawsar is the brother who works the front of house and he's absolutely lovely.
• The Gardener's Arms on Plantation Road (not the one on North Parade!): beautiful bookish pub with a cheerful garden at the back, serving amazing vegetarian pub food. Their veggie burgers are absolutely stand-out. It's run by Silk, who's also absolutely lovely. (When you're standing at the bar, turn and look in the corner to your right behind you: that's a painting of Silk. Now you can recognise him.)

After dinner 

After dinner, if you want to explore a bit more before bed and get a final nightcap, stroll back into town along the Woodstock Road / St Giles, past the Eagle and Child pub where Tolkien and CS Lewis held their writing group (currently closed until they can fix up the building), past Martyr's Memorial, and turn left onto Broad Street. 

Wander between the colleges, over the brick cross where the martyrs actually died (try not to venerate the nearby manhole instead by mistake, as many groups of tourists do), past assorted bookshops and museums (don't worry, they're on Sunday's list), past the Bodleian Library. Turn right onto Catte Street and almost immediately left onto Queen's Lane, and walk under the Bridge of Sighs. (Cambridge and Venice have one of those each too. Ours is better. Obvs.) Various stories compete to explain its name, mostly apocryphal, so feel free to make up your own.

Immediately after you pass under the Bridge of Sighs, turn left down the little alleway. Trust me. Keep following it, as it twists and leads you past bins, and you'll get to the Turf Tavern: a huge and sprawling tavern dating back to 1381, which proudly boasts its history on assorted chalkboards, patio / outside space on both sides of it, and it nestles up against a portion of the old city wall.

Head back to your college to fall asleep to the sound of Oxford's many, many bells. If you hear bells ringing five minutes after all the others, that's Christ Church's Great Tom: they don't hold with this newfangled modern time, brought in with those newfangled "railways" and their need for consistent "timetables", and proudly stick to Oxford time.

Saturday

Breakfast & packed lunch 

It's workshop day! Breakfast in your college if they do breakfast. You'll want a packed lunch for your workshop and I always suggest something non-carby for writing days, so head to Taylors Oxford on 1 Woodstock Road to pick up one of their delicious customisable salads. (You can pop it in the fridge at mine when you arrive.) If your college doesn't do breakfast, you can also breakfast at Taylors, with a pastry and coffee. NB: There are two Taylors right next to each other across the road from each other. If you're facing them, you want the one on the right.

Off to your workshop! 

Then walk up Woodstock Road to outside the Radcliffe Observatory, where you can catch the #6 bus to get to mine. (Bus stop map-pin.) You're getting off at the top of Woodstock Road, at the First Turn Lane stop (map-pin), and you have a map in the email I'll have sent you.

The 9:36 am bus will get you to First Turn Lane at 9:44, 3-4 mins walk from mine. If you get anxious about bus times and prefer to arrive early, you can get the 9:16 am bus, which reaches your stop at 9:24, and pass any extra time peacefully overlooking the canal (map-pin) three minutes' walk from the workshop. You're welcome to arrive at mine from 9:45 am.

Your workshop starts! (At 10 am sharp. Unlike Christ Church, I don't keep Oxford time.) I'll also give you a little map of the rivers, canals, and woods around mine, so you can have a refreshing wander at lunchtime if you want.

After the workshop finishes at 4pm, we usually go to The Plough pub on the green, three minutes' walk from the house, to toast your success and socialise a bit more.

A good long walk & dinner

I'm now making the bold assumption that you want a good long walk, while all the excitement and new info from the workshop percolates, and now that the heat of the day has eased a little. This is an hour's walk, if you're going at a steady pace, with another half-hour at the other end.

Walk through Wolvercote village, over the railway bridge with its sweeping view of Port Meadow, all the way through the village and past the Trout pub (that's where young Lyra worked for a bit in Philip Pullman's Book of Dust series), over the bridge, and turn left through the gate onto the meadow by the ruins of Godstow Abbey. (That was built in 1133 and housed Benedectine nuns. It also features in The Book of Dust.) The map I gave you at lunch covers all the way up to Godstow Abbey.

You're now on Port Meadow: a stretch of ancient meadow that has never been built on or even ploughed for at least 4000 years. It's still used as grazing, for cows and horses, and you'll probably pass some of them as you walk. As well as heaps of swans, geese, etc. Stroll south alongside the river, soaking in the beauty and the sight of Oxford's spires in the distance, for about half an hour, till you find a gate in front of you with another gate to the right, here (map-pin): that's the gate leading to The Perch Pub. And the bit of riverbank you're standing on is pretty much where Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll had the picnic that led to him writing Alice in Wonderland.

Go through the gate and follow the winding path up to the Perch, with its huge beautiful garden and protected willow trees. Their food's fantastic (the head chef's called Craig, btw) but they're definitely on the pricier side, so if you want a slap-up dinner, have your dinner there (their pies are especially good), otherwise just stop for a coffee or a drink in the gorgeous garden, while you jot down all the interesting thoughts you had while walking. Do admire the truly ancient apple tree, carefully fenced round and propped up to support it!

From the Perch, walk back onto the meadow the way you came, and continue on through the rest of the meadow, crossing the Medley Bridge and the Bailey Bridge, then the last stretch of meadow to Walton Well Road. (Those three links are map-pins, to help you find your way.) 

You're now back in Jericho, so if you didn't eat at the Perch, you can head to the Gardener's Arms or The Standard, whichever you didn't try last night. And if you didn't go to the Turf Tavern last night, you could pop in there - or even if you did. There's nothing like going somewhere twice, while you're away, to make you feel like it's already your usual spot! Or if you want a drink somewhere new (and also very old), head to The Bear Inn in the happy chaos of alleys behind the High Street, with its collection of thousands of tie ends started in 1957. (Time was, you could cut the end of your tie off in exchange for a pint.)  It's popular with academics, so if any are still in town in August, you can eavesdrop some fascinatingly odd bits of conversation!

Or simply go back to your college (it's yours, this weekend) and sit on a bench in one of the quads, with your notebook, writing quietly and peacefully, while the bats dart in and out of the ivy and wisteria. 

Sunday

Lots of possibilities here, so pick and choose from the below, for as much as you want to fit in and how much time you need to travel home. 

Breakfast / Brunch

If your college doesn't do a breakfast, then for a super-trad Oxford experience, Queen's Lane Coffee Shop is the longest-running coffee shop in Oxford, since 1654, and does a lovely all-day breakfast. Or for a very Oxford greasy spoon, Browns Café in the Covered Market (not the posh Browns on Woodstock Road) has been going since 1924! If you're staying near Jericho, The Jericho Café is another Oxford staple. (Note: The Vaults & Garden Cafe in St Mary's University Church, which I used to recommend, has sadly closed down.)

 Then pick your museumy option!

Museumy Option 1: Science and books

The History of Science Museum on Broad Street is my favourite museum in Oxford, mostly because it has the world's largest collection of astrolabes. It's small but beautiful, in a building that absolutely breathes peace. Don't miss the Lyra exhibition, complete with alethiometer, in the one small basement, and the larger basement with the history of medicine exhibits.

Directly opposite the museum is Blackwells Bookshop, home to The Norringtom Room, featuring three miles of bookshelves. (Not all in one long row, obviously.) The first time I saw it, at 19 years old, I started hyperventilating at the sight of so many books and had to go back outside to calm down. Also another four storeys of books, in this huge and sprawling bookshop, with secondhand books at the very top, and a cafe inside the bookshop.

Museumy Option 2: Natural history, cultures, and greenery 

Stroll up South Parks Road to the Natural History Museum. That's pretty cool, but even better, walk right through the Natural History Museum to the Pitt Rivers Museum at the back. (Yes, the one that Lyra visited. We are very much in favour of Lyra's Oxford!) It's an anthropologial museum, absolutely crammed with stuff - so much so that vast swathes of it are in drawers, with signs inviting you to open them! And very beautifully, everything's organised by purpose, rather than culture or time period, so you'll have a cabinet of all the different ways to make fire, for instance. Brilliant inspiration if you write fantasy! The famous / infamous shrunken heads have finally, respectfully, been removed. Do put a coin into the slot with the weird little clay creatures!

When your head is bursting with thoughts, continue strolling up South Parks Road to University Parks. The northernmost side has a lovely tree-lined avenue, if you're after shade, and then you can wander down that to the pond and the river, and fill your eyes with greenery.

Lunch time?

For a bite at lunchtime, The Covered Market has a number of options to pick from: my favourite is Georgina's, up the narrow wooden stairs into a marvellous little cafe. Alternately, if you want to survey the Oxford rooftops, the Ashmolean Rooftop Café serves lunch from 11:30.

An afternoon in a punt

(Sensitive crimes and a book of poetry stained with the butter drips from crumpets optional)

From the center of town, wander under the Bridge of Sighs and down Queen's Lane (map-pin link), through its twists and turns round the backs of the colleges. The fourth time you turn, when you're here (map-pin link), you'll see the pavement widen in a little curve to your left. Go stand in that curve, then turn around to see the fairytale spires of All Souls' College rising. If I were with you, I'd tell you that All Souls' has never had a single student.

(Then I'd pause, before admitting it's a Fellows College, which is why.)

Keep on down Queen's Lane, and as always in Oxford, look up lots: gargoyles are eveywhere! You'll emerge on The High, next to Queen's Lane Coffee Shop (oldest coffee shop in the UK, ignore the lies that Grand Cafe opposite tells) and carry on down the High to Magdalen Bridge. Just before you cross the Bridge, veer to the left to go down to Magdalen Bridge Boathouse, to rent a punt. (If you know you're definitely going to punt, and are prepared to commit to a time, book a punt beforehand, so you don't have to stand in the queue - it can get very long.) 

Then spend a glorious hour or two punting along the river past the Oxford Botanical Gardens (oldest botanical gardens in the UK) and Christ Church Meadow, through river scents and tree shade, all Oxford's spires and spikes showing to their best advantage, with occasional bells. So that when you do, finally, leave Oxford to head home, your eyes, mind, and soul are absolutely swimming with peace and joy.

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Join in the upcoming Summer of Writing

 

The Characters that Let Your Stories Fly

When I started writing more keenly, I thought what I needed most was to plot better. I worked on that, hard, and my stories grew wings… but somehow they didn’t take flight. They felt like planes circling the airport, even with their immaculate flight plans.

What I actually needed to learn took me much longer, because I didn’t realise I needed that: to write characters unlike myself. Not just the wrong ‘uns, all of them. Especially the main characters.

Again and again, in my teaching, I’ve seen other writers hobbled by the same thing. It’s not a glaring lack, like plot, but it stops stories flying. And you don’t know why – because our selves are a blind spot to us. How we are, that’s just normal, right? But other people are different. And until all our characters can be too, including our main characters, we’re clipping our stories’ wings.

It is a blind spot, because our selves are our normal. So before we launch into why it's important, here are two quick tests of whether you’re stuck in characters like you:

• The Three-Traits Test: Can you (and your writing group / buddy if you have one) quickly and easily write three separate personality traits for them? If you can’t, they’re not fully characterised, and likely a diluted version of you.
• The Reaction Test: When your character reacts to something big (a heartbreak, discovery, thrill, frustration), can you say why they specifically react like that? Or is their reaction just “normal” to you? Because them being just normal might be them being just you.

If, in your writing so far, your characters are mostly you, especially the main characters, you have a wealth of discovery and joy ahead of you. Because this is what characters unlike you – again, especially the main characters – will give you.

You get more vivid characters

We don’t see ourselves as clearly as we see other people. Like fish not noticing water, we live inside our own traits without realising how much is specific to us, rather than standard-issue human, so we don’t describe those characters well. Without that clarity, our characters-like-us stay vague, undifferentiated. Worse still, to make the character “not us”, we often strip away what is unique and interesting, leaving the character not only blurry but bland. When your character’s not you, they become crisply drawn with distinct personality.

You vary your characters across stories

Even if your stories are wildly different, having much the same person at the centre of each gives them a sameyness. That gets boring for the readership you want to grow and boring for you as a writer. Different central characters bring fresh sparkle and variety to both your stories and the writing process.

You vary your cast within stories

The disjuncture between different types of people is a rich narrative seam. It increases your story’s depth, intensifies the point of view, and offers wonderful narrative tension as your disparate characters connect and clash. For that to work, all your characters need to be different, not just the “villains” of the piece. That also means learning to see the value in traits very different from your own.

You get wider scope for stories

As your characters open up in variety, so too do your storytelling possibilities. There are stories I’ll never be able to tell about a Meganesque character, even if I dress her up as an astronaut, a religious peasant, or a cursed child in a desert land. As soon as it’s not me, though, I can write about a Machiavellian commitment to social change, a status-driven ambition, a rigid adherence to minutiae, or a stone-cold indifference to others’ opinions, and how those traits play out to the good. When your characters aren’t you, your stories open up in exciting new ways.

You get more consistent characters

Once a character isn’t you, they start shaping their story themselves, because they have a distinct personality, which you can identify, and they act according to it. When your characters are still “basically you” and you’re trying to write a specific story, the events and character are often at odds. A Meganesque character doesn’t make sense as an astronaut: yes, she has the maths skills; sure, I can give her the fitness levels; but an astronaut needs the easy equanimity and (to me) near-bland resilience she simply doesn’t have. That clash will show in the writing. When your characters aren’t you, they stay in character – their character, not yours.

It’s easier to write about autobiographical events

The big things that have happened to you, which you want to approach in fiction or auto-fiction: surely, given they happened to you, perhaps even shaped you, this is where the character should be most like you? Counterintuitively, no. To make fiction about that, or even the thinly veiled memoir that is auto-fiction, you need artistic distance. That’s hard to get about something you feel so vulnerable, pained, or raging about. Putting clear blue water between you and the character – making them distinctly not you, or unlike you, in a few significant ways – helps hugely. It lets you write about it in a way that does draw on your experience, with all the insight that gives, and also with the objectivity that makes it the stuff of story.

You get to step through the magic doorway, regardless

There are times when writing seems impossible: when you’re so stressed it feels like you can’t breathe; when you’re crying so hard you can’t see the words. If you can step through the magic doorway into your story’s world, it’s transformative. You enter a flow state and your breathing returns to normal. Your tears dry and you rediscover a part of your life that doesn’t hurt. I’ve done both, but it’s only ever been possible when my characters weren’t basically versions of me. Having characters that aren’t you lets you step into your story world, whatever’s happening with you.

*

All your characters will always, in some way, be you: after all, you’re writing them. But instead of having mini-yous or bonsaied-yous enact every story, you get to act out being all those different people. Your stories’ freedom becomes your freedom.

And you do have the skills to do it. You live in a world brimming with people who’re very different to you. You socialise with them, work with them, and make a dozen accurate predications a day on how they’ll behave, without even noticing. That’s part of being human. That’s the same skill you can bring to your writing, to create characters unlike you and set your stories free.

Mapping Out Mist

The Chaos of Art

The thing we’re creating doesn’t yet exist.
We’re sat in the mud pit, banging our rocks
and shouting at flowers. Suddenly adult, insist
on a Timeframe of Output, firm, at a desk,
mapping out… mist. We can’t yet exist
in such untrammelled time. Thought-barges collide,
now huge in the fog, already. A list?
We detail the tips of our icebergs and teeter,
the swaying unseen bulk dismissed,
placating the busying Protestant mind
while we grow things that don’t yet exist.

I wrote that in 2023, while I was planning a new novel and also the Planning A Novel workshop. It’s a strange business, planning things that don’t exist, which also can’t exist without a bit of planning. You might have an exciting heap of ideas (as I did with the workshop) or reams of first draft (as I did with the novel). It has a definite existence in potentia, but… well, it doesn’t exist.

I plan a lot of things that don’t exist. Novels, courses, workshops. Every year, when I find out the two new Summer of Writing workshops, I set about writing the workshop descriptions: a line or two introducing the topic, fine; a paragraph of what we’ll cover, cool; and then a paragraph beginning “By the end of this workshop, you’ll have…” My brain skids to a halt so fast it leaves tyre tracks.

How can I possibly say that? I don’t know! The workshop doesn’t exist yet! I haven’t made it! I frown, scribble, cross out, panic, go for a walk. At some point, in the next day or two, my brain will leap forward confidently and declare, “Come on, it’s easy. If you went on a workshop described like that, what would you expect to have done by the end? Cos that’s probably what that bit should be? Duh.” And I briskly scribble that final line.

I’ve tried writing down that sage impatient advice, for future years, but it doesn’t work. I still need the “frown, scribble, cross out, panic, go for a walk” routine. Somewhere in that process, I’m working it out: mapping out mist.

Fog

Fires, canal-side grey. The
faint sparks drown in air. Light
fades and swells, ballooning
flimsy round a lost lamp.
Follow the path – but it’s gone.
Feel for barbed, bare hawthorn:
find where escaped thoughts hide.

The frown-scribble-crossing-out bit is feeding your brain all the puzzles you want it to solve. The moments that you’re walking, or staring out the window, thinking you’re not thinking but actually thinking very hard, are often the most productive. But you also need to capture all those mist-emerging thoughts, and order them so you can find them again. But how do you order something which has no order, because, again, it doesn’t exist yet? And you can’t have too much order, too soon: you need to keep the possibilities open.

Focus

Fixed stare – at nothing – I
float: the brambles have spread…
folding origami
flowers with unseen hands…
Focus! But as my dreams
flit, I see their work: they
fix what I’m not watching.

That’s wild mental work. During this work, I often painstakingly devise the exact thing I need to help me capture ideas. To draw these felt-tip rectangles, it would help to have a straight edge – a piece of cardboard, perhaps? I could mark the length and height of the rectangles on the cardboard, so they’d all be the same. Something firm enough to press a felt-tip against, with regular units of measurement I’d have to create… Oh, look, I’ve invented the ruler. Well done, me.

These pieces of paper: they belong together. But their order might change: I can’t staple them. I need something like a staple, but which I can easily put on and take off. Something that slides on, instead of piercing the paper. Perhaps, with a longer length of thin metal than a staple, I could twist it to fashion some kind of… Oh. I’ve invented paperclips. Again. I’m the Elon Musk of stationery.

When your mind is that full of half-seen story, you become simultaneously absolutely brilliant and very stupid. It helps to have stationery, for a start. A lot of stationery, if only to save yourself the trouble of inventing it from first principles. I’ve gradually learnt to add all the relevant stationery to my writing bag. For the first Planning A Novel workshop, I put in my biggest ever order, to create what we variously termed the “stationery villages” or “non-stationary stationery”:

And alongside the stationery, techniques. Over the years, and some eleven or so novels, I've worked out principles and processes, strategies that now seem as simple as paperclips. I lay my notes on those next to me, alongside the paperclips, the post-its, the slide-binders and felt-tips. I know that even though I haven't yet mapped out this mist, I have the tools of my creative cartography right there: the approaches for how to map out mist.

Esoteric problems often have deliciously simple solutions. "This is how you join pieces of paper you'll later re-order." "This is how you turn a series of brick story walls into things you can explore." "This is how you free your mind to work on one piece of the puzzle, without the whole Jenga-tower of thought falling down." Because if you can sort out the practicalities, the rest of your head is free for the esoteric. We need both: the simple solutions, and the respect for the esoteric, the seemingly-invisible work we’re doing.

And as you veer between the mapping and the mist, in strange ways, with a lot of apparently mindless staring at starlings and some seemingly pre-school-style Busyness With Felt-Tips, you’re conjuring up something that will, and increasingly does, exist.

Lapse

Light slips, between soft sounds:
loose as humming, it’s a
lilt of a moment, mind,
life – a caesura in
liturgy: we forget
lists, briefly, slide into
liquid thoughts, lipid ways.

The Planning A Novel workshop is running on 9 August 2025 in Oxford, exploring how to support all those strange kinds of thinking, heaps of practical solutions, and a truckload of lovely stationery. You can see the complete list of workshops, past reviews, and how to book here.

Tips for a perfect Summer of Writing

Summer is a busy, social time, so in one sense an odd time for workshops – but it's also a creative time. We forget, sometimes, that we're animals. That like any animal, our energy levels rise with the warm weather, alongside our adventurousness, our sense of fun, our enthusiasm, our interest – which is all, in a sense, our creativity. The long winter months often get the credit for creative endeavour, what with staying indoors and not much to do, but creativity isn't a faut de mieux: it's our lifeblood. Our joy. And like the rest of our joy in life, it jumps up and down and does cartwheels in the summer. That's why I run workshops in the summertime, even though it's also such a busy time – it's the perfect time for adventure and discovery. So here are my tips to create yourself a glorious Summer of Writing.

As well as the workshops, book some time off for yourself to write, whether that means from work, from your family, or a pact with yourself. I suggest treating each workshop as a two-day block, so you're just as "booked off" from 10-4 on the Sunday as if you were at a workshop. (That means no other duties, no errands or chores, no family commitments, no arrangements to meet – just a clear space of time for you and your writing.) If you can, look at also booking a few weekdays or a week off from work, as writing time.

Be strict about your start time and protect the writing time like an angel with a flaming sword – but within that time, be free. You don't need to treat writing time like work and it's much better not to. It isn't work, it's a joy! And the more you enjoy it, the more you want to write. (Enjoying it doesn't mean it's always "easy" – we enjoy doing hard things, too. Just think of crosswords and Sudoku. Enjoying it means it's fun.) Don't set yourself up with a bunch of goals, either – throw all that "SMART" nonsense to the wind, forget about aims, wordcount, page counts, estimates, etc. A good writing day is a day spent writing. That is the only criterium. Protect the time, and within the time be free. There's a rock-solid evidence base behind this advice; you can read more about that here.

Write by hand, unless that's genuinely physically impossible for you. There's fantastic evidence that when we write by hand, we write more, for longer, and better quality. Your handwriting doesn't matter, as long as you can read it. A ballpoint pen will quickly tire your hand out though, because it relies on friction to drag out the ink. If you're right-handed, buy a fountain pen – you can get a Parker from WH Smiths for £20 and under, and their nibs are superb quality. (More expensive pens usually have more expensive casings, not better nibs.) Stock up on ink cartridges while you're at it and cache them everywhere, so you never run out. If you're left-handed, and can't use a fountain pen, try a fineliner or a gel pen. (Gel pens are lovely but run out very quickly.) With no friction, you can write happily for hours without getting a sore hand.

The best part about writing by hand, though, is that you can write anywhere. It's summer! You don't need a dim room to see the screen or a powerpoint nearby. Don't lock yourself in a room at a desk, telling yourself you have to "take this seriously" – go outside! Write in the garden, if you won't be interrupted. Leave the house and go adventuring! Find a coffee shop with a garden or one outdoors, like AMT on Cornmarket. Write in a pub garden (they serve coffee, too). Walk across Port Meadow and sit outdoors at the Perch, or try the lovely garden of the Gardener's Arms. Write in meadows, in parks. Take a packed lunch, a bottle of water, a flask of coffee, and off you go! There are heaps of wonderful places to write outdoors in Oxford. (Check for available loos, too – you'd be surprised; even University Parks has well-kept loos in the middle. And AMT is in emergency striking-distance from the refurbished loos by the Covered Market.) If it's drizzling, or chucking it down, find a covered garden – just being in the fresh air is enlivening and inspiring, and the smell of rain on soil contains a chemical which makes us happy. (More than once I've started writing in University Parks, then walked through a downpour to arrive grinning and drenched at the Jericho Tavern, and slowly steamdried in their covered garden. It's fine to get wet, just make sure the writing stays dry!) All the adventuring makes it much more fun and gives you a much wider range of stimulus and inspiration than you'd get at home at a table or a desk.

Once you start adventuring, you might want a Writing Bag: a sacred, adored bag, big enough to carry your notebook / an A4 pad and any assorted pens or notes you want with you, and waterproof. (This is England, to be fair, even in summer.) I have two, a slim one for just a few essentials, and a glorious great multi-pocketed beast for when I need the Full Monty with me and a packed lunch to boot. Both are leather; the first was a cast-off, many years ago; the beast was a £5 charity shop WIN. The writing lives in the writing bag, along with plenty of spare paper and ink / pens. Mine also has a tiny stapler (with eyes) and spare staples, plus assorted coloured pens. (Okay, 90 coloured pens.) Word to the wise: don't put your waterbottle or coffee flask in your writing bag.

You'll probably have your phone with you too, so here's an expert tip: put it on airplane mode. That's usually the only way the battery will last all day and still leave you enough for some texts or a phone call at the end of your writing. Plus, of course, it spares you that enemy of writing: internet distraction. If an idea is tricky, it's so easy to dive into the instant-affirmation of Facebook notifications instead; having it on airplane nudges you away from that. If you do want to look something up, or browse a bit while you're having a break, you can easily switch it back to normal mode, but the fragile battery life of a smartphone is excellent motivation to switch it back to airplane promptly.

Everyone's concentration span varies – mine is almost exactly an hour, and then I need to float back up for a bit, stare around me, eat some water mint, chat with a passing duck, order another coffee, whatever. Don't flog yourself beyond your concentration span; find your natural pace. (That's where having your phone on airplane really helps; it's easier to find your natural pace without distractions. Also, don't eat random plants unless you definitely know what they are; quite a few are poisonous.) After two or three hours like that, I usually need a longer break, which is generally a good moment to eat my lunch, have a wander, maybe change location, perhaps accept that it really is raining and wedging the umbrella handle into my cleavage isn't totally working. Most people can manage about five hours of sustained concentration total a day. That's hard to believe, given the hours most of us work, but nonetheless true. And writing, as well as being enormous fun, is very sustained concentration. Sometimes I spread those hours out, between 10 and 5, with breaks and lunch and walks; sometimes I do a solid block from 12 to 5:30, with only a few float-up breaks. I've learnt not to push it past the 5 hours, give or take. This is summer; this is life; enjoy the rest of the time for other things as well, like a long relaxing walk home, meeting up with friends for a sunny drink, cooking a meal slowly, whatever you enjoy. (Remember not to schedule any Duties, though, that steal the writing time. Duties are for other time.)

A summer of writing becomes an absolute gift to yourself. Suddenly, setting the time aside for writing isn't a chore, something that could otherwise be used for holiday, or meet-ups, or family time – it's a joy, a luxury, a secret delight. You fall asleep the night before excited to wake up, with your writing bag ready, anticipating the time as if it's a rendezvouz with a lover. You spend your writing days surrounded by beauty, gloating in the wonder of it, staring into your secret worlds. You push on into the autumn, layering on extra tights, scarves, and cardigans. You smile secretly in the winter, as you type up the summer's writing or keep on writing with freezing rain hammering the windows, and as you pass your spots. And you feel your excitement rise, as spring finally starts to warm again, at the thought of being back out there, completely free, completely yourself, writing.

Join in the upcoming Summer of Writing

 

How to create an abundance of ideas

How do you conjure up reams of ideas, ripe for the picking? You take a leaf out of magical realism's book, of course. Among its features is "abundance" or "plenitude": it soaks ideas up like a sponge. Anything you want to throw at it, it just absorbs, gleefully. And the kind of fanciful, unexpected, incongruous ideas it likes best aren't the kind that come from frowning at a piece of paper and thinking very hard – they come from the bouncy bit of your brain leapfrogging around. (That's the kind of thinking we traditionally call "right brain", even though it's actually the left brain doing it.) It's a kind of careless, carefree, giggling, half-cut freedom of ideas. So how did I create that space, for the Summer of Writing Magical Realism workshop? And how can you use that to create an abundance of unexpected ideas?