Posts…
Those Who Wait: the first page…
Drawn to the light, as all ghosts are, he would stand for hours in a thin finger of sunshine, letting it pierce his heart like a spear of burning gold, shuffling sideways an inch at a time as the earth turned; until the clouds gathered or night fell and he froze into a state of…
Failing to reach orbit: David Copperfield
Jack Reacher or David Copperfield—everything can go pear-shaped halfway through the book…
Someday My Prince Will Come
Disney’s projected ‘woke’ remake of its 1937 animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, without the dwarfs, hasn’t gone down overwhelmingly well…
Waiting for the angel
So here I am, sitting at the computer with no very clear idea of what to do next. Maybe if I just keep typing, God will send down an angel…
Spare parts
Rewriting is like emergency surgery: you lay the mangled body out and prod it, limb by limb, trying to decide what can be salvaged and what needs to be amputated…
L’esprit de l’escalier
So you’ve been at this party and some wiseacre has made a smart remark at your expense, but it’s not until you’re out the door and halfway down the stairs that you think of the snappy comeback that would’ve floored the bastard… if only you’d thought of it in time.
Another teenage wizard!
I’m a slow, messy writer. Ideas get jammed into the narrative, then hacked bloodily out. But Mortal does at least deal with the most important question left hanging over by the previous books: how, at the tender age of five, Frank came to kill his father…
The plot folds: Wilkie Collins’ No Name
Wilkie Collins’ No Name kicks off with a plot fold so elegant, so beautifully crafted, that it induces an almost electric jolt of pleasure
By any means necessary
I’ve tried all sorts of approaches to composing a novel; but it invariably ends up in a chaotic mess…
Running on empty: a review of Breathless (1983)
I’d love to know what’s behind that face of yours. I stare at you and I stare at you and I can’t see anything…
Loading…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Follow My Blog
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
Donald Hounam 