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I still remember the afternoon I cracked open The Sound and the Fury for the first time. I was nineteen, sitting in a humid room in Adelaide with a glass of…

I have never believed that a book becomes worthwhile because it appears repeatedly in a scrolling feed. A novel or memoir asks for a different kind of…

Howard G. Franklin's novel "Gideon's Children" leaves a lasting impression through the people who inhabit its pages. The book weaves the moral urgency of the…

The ethics of naming real people in fiction begins with a deceptively simple question: what does a name do once it appears on a printed page? It can identify,…

I began my memoir believing that its ending had already happened. The final scenes were arranged in my mind with the confidence writers sometimes mistake for…

Three small dots can alter the temperature of a sentence. They may signal hesitation, invite the reader to supply an unspoken thought, or leave an emotional…

Rejection has a particular sound when it arrives by post. First comes the scrape of the envelope through the letterbox, then the quick glance at the return…

A scene is the smallest substantial unit of narrative: a stretch of time in which someone wants something, meets resistance and emerges changed. It may occupy…

The meeting took place on an ordinary afternoon, the sort that can disappear into a lifetime unless someone says a sentence worth keeping. I was in a bookshop…

When a novelist sits down to place a child on the page, the task is deceptively simple. We have all been children. We have all known children. Surely the…