Thoughts about writing
Articles about various aspects of writing by the author Alan McCluskey.
Changing stories – About the key role stories play in our world and how we can counter the potential damage their misuse might cause. [2022-10-03]
Chinks in the facade of reality – Beyond the facade of routine and the predictable, lies a rich country full of wonders just waiting to be explored. My writing and photography seek to grant access to that magical world. [2022-07-13]
Courting the unfamiliar – the only sane way to go – One of the most important riches of our world lies not in cultivating familiarity, but in courting that which is different… [2022-06-02]
Emergence: the birth of stories – Writing stories seen as emergence in which the author is more like a medium than a builder. [2024-09-30]
Everyday reality and the reality of fiction – The impact of incorporating elements of everyday reality in a fantasy novel and the evolving relationship between reality and storytelling in a world of implausible public discourse. [2026-02-08]
Exploring an alien perspective – On adopting an ‘alien’ perspective and its relationship to inspiration and writing in a discussion with the author Alan McCluskey. [2023-11-04]
Fantasising, fantasy and acting out – Fantasising is a fascinating if not troubling phenomenon that is often incorrectly confused with fantasy… [2024-12-21]
Flying blind – half way through my latest novel I realised the title and cover were at odds with the story. Changing them brought relief and a sense of direction. [2025-02-20]
Loose ends – As some promising threads remain unexplored in writing a novel, the question is what to do with the loose ends. Cut them out? Or weave a new thread through the novel? [2023-04-02]
Making a story credible – 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. [2026-04-16]
No life without stories – Stories are our way of making sense of a senseless world. As such, they are a great strength, making thought and action meaningful. But they are also our greatest weakness, because we blindly believe them to be true. [2022-12-18]
Poor stories, poor lives? – If stories are our way of making sense of the world, being poor at telling them must surely negatively impact our lives. [2023-04-10]
A possible framework for writing that sparks future narratives – Based on my own novels, some elements of a possible framework for writing aimed at sparking future narratives in readers. [2022-09-06]
The richness of exploring multiple worlds each with many facets – The diversity of the stories I tell is too complex to be shunted into convenient, saleable categories, but there are identifiable underlying forces that characterise what I write… [2022-07-31]
The risks and joys of writing a prologue – Writing a prologue can be tricky if the story is free to evolve. Sometimes it is left by the wayside, others it can be strangely prophetic. [2026-05-28]
The Segmented Novel – Experimenting with dividing a novel into short segments, a format that requires a different approach to storytelling. [2026-05-18]
Stories for the future – Carefully crafted stories can help stave off anxiety due to uncertainty about the future by inspiring individual narratives of ways forward. [2022-09-06]
Stories that twist truth – About the role of stories in making sense of the world and how twisted stories coalesce to undermine truth and reality. [2024-11-10]
Storytelling: How far to the story horizon? – Where does the horizon of your story lie? When it is far off that can be reassuring, but the closer it comes the more the doubts form… [2023-06-18]
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…
Using Chat GPT to work on a text – the challenge of finding a convincing style for a scientific discourse without alienating too many readers and how ChatGPT might be used to extend the text without losing control of the process. [2023-07-20]
The wandering story – An unstructured approach to writing a novel, starting with only a single scene, allows the story to unfold organically. This fosters creativity, but also presents challenges… [2026-01-27]
A wider palette of stories – The significance of expanding the palette of stories that help us understand the world. [2024-11-13]
A writing life built on a scrapheap of stories – It was years of cast-off story fragments and untold wild fantasies that finally formed the foundation on which to build my novels… [2022-12-31]