There’s a scene towards the end of Muriel Spark’s The Finishing School where Rowland Mahler, a frustrated creative writing teacher, lectures his class a few days after the burial of...

Last year, at the launch of my second book, I pulled a stunt on my husband. He was approaching a big birthday, his fiftieth, the following December. The launch was in...

Whenever I’m asked what it is that sets a book, a movie or a piece of theatre apart, my answer always has to be: the characters. While the plot and...

It was a real child who was the inspiration behind The Children of Albion. I was working as a volunteer youth mentor with teenagers some years ago now. One of...

Relationships are the key to drama. Characters can’t exist in a vacuum, and even if the antagonist, or threat, of your story is not an identifiable person, it is the...

There are many ways to go about creating a character. Here are just a few of my favourites: 1. Be Nosy In life, people are born fast. In fiction, they...

Everyone knows the importance of a well-defined and well-rounded characters. If they’re not well constructed, your reader will see through them, they’ll make the story clunky and difficult to really...

It’s a funny thing, being a novelist. One of the first things that friends and family do when they’ve read your book, is to assume that the murderer/victim/hero/policeman was based...

I’m not the best singer in the world. I can carry a tune, but I wouldn’t have the record labels falling over themselves to sign me up. Like most Irish...

‘Voice’. It’s such a nebulous thing sometimes, but it’s one of the qualities editors and agents are always looking for in a manuscript. A distinctive, unusual, fresh ‘voice’. It might...