Now A Major Motion Picture, a novel by Peter Wise: for Christmas

November 14, 2025Books, Christmas, Creativity, Fiction, Gifts, Hope, reading, Reviews, Storytelling, Writers, Writing

If you’re wondering what to buy for the readers in your life for Christmas, can I suggest a gloriously-funny, poignant, heartfelt, beautifully-written novel about the hopes and dreams, ambitions and desires of an unknown screenwriter who gets a call from an Oscar-winning director and dares to believe that, this time, one of his screenplays will … Read More

Reading Black Writers

May 14, 2022Allyship, Antiracism, Art, Creativity, Education, Equality, Fiction, History, Human Rights, Literary Prizes, Mental Health in Fiction, Morality, Psychology, Racism, reading, White Allies, Writing

Until George Floyd was murdered on 25 May 2020, I had not begun to acknowledge, let alone unearth, my inherent racism. That racism includes not reading or even thinking about the work of Black writers. But since that May I’ve been reading Black writers and my eyes, ears, heart and mind have been opened (about … Read More

Reading as a writer. Writing as a reader. And the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021

August 14, 2021Books, Creativity, Fiction, Literary Prizes, Psychology, reading, Writers, Writing, Writing Courses

Last week a friend of mine and I talked about the six books shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. We’ve done it before and it’s always illuminating (and fun) but because we both write fiction, our conversations are often also about the nature of reading fiction as a writer. Neither of us read – … Read More

City Tales, and Hive

September 14, 2019Bookshops, Fiction, Places, reading, Reviews, Storytelling, Things I'd Love to Have Made, Uncategorized, Writing

Since 2004, Oxford University Press has been publishing volumes of City Tales, collections of short stories set in European cities translated into English. The guiding idea is to give the English-speaking reading traveller (I paraphrase): Stories expertly translated by writers with an intimate knowledge of the city in question. The collections have black-and-white photographs to illustrate each … Read More

Janet Clare on getting published later on, and Vice’s Broadly.

August 14, 2019Creativity, Cyberspace, Fiction, Internet, Psychology, reading, Rewriting, Things I'd Love to Have Made, Women, Writers, Writing, Writing Courses

I’ve been meaning to read this article by an older writer about starting to write later in life and how, after a very long writing journey and the discovery that every writer makes at some point, that all writing is rewriting, her novel was published. It’s only taken me eight months to get round to … Read More