Or, how to kick-start your book when it dies before it’s even half-finished. — You’ve been there. I’ve been there. We’ve all been there: the one-third slump, when a manuscript runs out of steam maybe thirty-thousand words in. Something about the story simply isn’t working. So what’s gone wrong? When I first started out as a writer, I read up on the different approaches…

Back in 2010, I got commissioned by the German publisher Heyne to write an introduction to a then-new edition of Arthur C. Clarke’s early novel The City and the Stars (Die Stadt und die Sterne). In terms of sheer money per word, it was the best paid writing I’ve ever…

QUESTIONS WRITERS SOMETIMES ASK ME A few weeks ago I got paid, as I sometimes do, to read an unpublished novel and tell the author what I thought they needed to do to make it publishable. As is usually the case, there were a lot of errors that pretty much…

Sometimes, just for the hell of it, especially when I’m working on a second draft of a book in Scrivener, I first save my file then hit the ctrl-z buttons (which delete prior edits one-by-one) and hold them down until what I’ve written over the past five, ten, thirty minutes…

Will Science Fiction one day be eclipsed by the sheer rate of technological advancement? — Perhaps sparked by recent news of 3D printers dropping rapidly in both size and price, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between science fiction and new technologies, and how some believe the former is being eclipsed by the latter. And I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re wrong. It’s an…

Often forgotten and unfairly maligned, John Boorman’s foray into science fiction following Deliverance is full of astonishing imagery. — This was first published by the BSFA in a pamphlet called SF Writers on SF Films: from Akira to Zardoz.

From daydream to execution to publication — (This article first appeared on Torbooks.co.uk) THE SPARK I get ideas for books in one or two different ways. The first is by daydreaming, often in the weirdest damn places, while the second is stumbling across some random paragraph in a non-fiction book or article that sets my spider-sense tingling. When it…