All information about Alan McCluskey’s novels can be found through the unique link: author.secret-paths.com/alan-mccluskeys-novels/ For your translations (FR-ENG) and texts to edit contact the Text Agency on info@textagency.org. Thanks. Alan.… Read more
Learning outside the box
Rich learning can occur outside formal structures, as experienced by the two teenage characters in “The School Beyond.”
One of the main tenets of my new novel, The School Beyond, is that rich learning can take place in life without any formal structure or appointed teacher to guide it.… Read more
A frame first
What happens when you use the format and chapter length to give additional sense and contain a novel as in the case of The School Beyond.
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
As my approach to story telling gives free rein to the story, I use format to give form to my novels and as a constraint that I have to work within.… Read more
From musical harmony to novel writing
Introducing unexpected elements to disrupt the narrative flow, creating a sense of discord, before returning to familiar ground… inspired by Jacob Collier
Pivoting to the unexpected
Jacob Collier in an excellent video on YouTube talks of the movement from discord to harmony and back as part of both the enriching but also the risk-taking of improvising.… Read more
Tread gently…
The suspense of waiting to write the very last moment to know how a novel ends.
Estimated reading time: 0 minutes
Finishing the final chapter of my latest novel, The Wormhole Tales, this morning I wrote
As I reach the end of my novel, I have to tread gently.… Read more
The risks and joys of writing a prologue
Writing a prologue can be tricky if the story is free to evolve in its own way. Sometimes the prologue is left by the wayside, others it can be strangely prophetic.
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
If you’re impatient to read the prologue or to hear the author reading it, just click here.… Read more
The task of writing a book blurb
Writing a book blurb is challenging, especially when that involves capturing the richness of a protagonist’s wanderings in a short paragraph…
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
How others did it
Writing a short description of a novel is always a challenge.… Read more
The Challenge of We
Language inherently centres on the individual, as the struggle to write about a character experiencing collective thought reveals.
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
The prospect of thinking collectively
The current section of my latest novel, Word’s End – The Wormhole Tales, is an enormous challenge.… Read more
The segmented novel
Experimenting with dividing a novel into short segments, a format that requires a different approach to storytelling.
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
The shrinking novel
There was an interesting article in The Guardian’s Bookmarks mailing this week. In The strange case of the shrinking novel, Emma Loffhagen talks of the tendency to shorten the length of novels and to step up the pace in each chapter as a response to people’s shortening attention spans.… Read more
Positive sides to dyslexia
Dyslexia is often seen as a flaw, but the thinking that goes with dyslexia has many potentially positive sides to it.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Hopeless at spelling
If dyslexia was a potential condition at the time I went to school, it certainly wasn’t a preoccupation of my teachers.… Read more
Making a story credible
I am currently serialising the manuscript of my latest novel, Word’s End – The Wormhole Tales , for my son Iannis. It was his comments about the lapse of time between a character’s choice and the realisation of its implications and the impact on the credibility of the narrative that led to the following reflections.… Read more