Sublime

Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty

Em pretends to cover her ears. “I pay no attention to what writers say about their work. It’s what the work says about the writer that matters.”

my books tend to be based on situation rather than story.

I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety – those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot – but to watch what happens and then write it down. The situa

Anthony Trollope.

Lift out the top layer of your toolbox—your vocabulary and all the grammar stuff. On the layer beneath go those elements of style upon which I’ve already touched. Strunk and White offer the best tools (and the best rules) you could hope for, describing them simply and clearly.