Insights | Alison Morton Author

The big print

Post-machete, post-rewrite of scenes, post-restructuring, I may possibly have kneaded the flabby dough of my master-work into some kind of presentable product. The plot has changed, the tension ramped up, the prose decimated and a sting in the tail (tale?) injected into the ending.

I’ve printed the whole thing out, double-spaced, ready for the tooth-comb. […]

A brain flash…

Perhaps I’ve been a bit slow, but I had a light bulb moment when munching my croissant this morning.

I’ve been playing around with some ideas for a one-sentence ‘hook’ for my novel INCEPTIO and have been researching, scribbling, thinking about it over the past few days. Scanning the Radio Times at breakfast, I read […]

Sad, cross and guilty – the story of an unfinished read

My reading tastes are pretty wide-ranging. I like a challenge. I like a good story. I’m nosy as well as persistent, so however poor a start, I’ll plough on with most books because I want to know what happens.

I’ll read almost anything: from Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon and Kafka’s The Trial to […]

The Arvon experience

Lumb Bank

What magic turns sixteen anxious wannabees with doubts a hundred feet high into confident, capable producers of good writing within a week?

In February this year, I booked the Arvon Foundation course ‘Popular Fiction’ 4-9 October at Lumb Bank, Yorkshire. It was to run from 4 to 9 October, with tutors […]

Weird, or what?

Driving back from swimming today, I was carefully navigating the narrow road between old stone buildings in a village on my route, when the road gently rose to the level of the railway crossing. It’s an unprotected level crossing, from the road user’s point of view perched on a rise in the road. The barriers […]