Story structure is the skeleton under every novel you have ever loved, and the good news for a first-time novelist is that it can be learned. Structure is not a formula that kills creativity, it is the craft knowledge of where tension comes from and where payoffs belong. Whether you are writing a literary character…
First person or third person is the first big decision every novelist makes, usually several times per book. First person (“I walked into the kitchen”) locks the reader inside one skull and makes voice the whole engine. Third person (“She walked into the kitchen”) stands back, trades intimacy for range, and lets you move between…
How to write dialogue that sounds real is a craft skill, not a talent. Realistic dialogue comes from giving each character a distinct voice, cutting the parts of speech that nobody actually says, and letting conversation do story work instead of filling space. This guide covers the techniques that make dialogue readable, from voice differentiation…
People ask how a book gets written. The honest answer is: slowly, then all at once, then slowly again. My process is not the one I recommend to anyone else, because every writer has to find their own. But for those curious about how the books on the books page came to be, here is…
Plenty of novelists publish their first book after 40, and often write better ones for having lived first. What nobody tells you about starting late, and why your life is the material.
A strong sense of place in fiction comes from almost anything except description. How characters living in a place make it real, drawn from writing the KwaZulu-Natal coast.
On writing a story about a coastal South African house, the apartheid era architecture of secrecy, and the courage that leaves no trace until someone finds it decades later.
The KwaZulu-Natal coastline is not dramatic in the way most famous coastlines are. It is exactly the right kind of coast for a novel about secrets.
Mireya arrived in a sentence I wrote almost by accident. On finding the central character of The Lantern in the Valley and what she needed to say.
The first version of Naomi was polite and careful and entirely reasonable. She was also someone you would not want to spend three hundred pages with. I rewrote her from scratch.