Bryony's Blog

I have met many people who tell me they would love to write a book but they don’t know what to write about.   The problem as I see it is that they expect an entire story to ‘come’ to them all at once and I would be very surprised if this happens even to the most experienced of writers. It is often a chance remark or a fleeting glimpse of something that gives authors those 'Aha' moments. Here are some tips for getting started.                 OBSERVE   Being a writer requires you to be an observer. Writers are nosy people.   You watch, you record, you remember.   You yourself are probably a bit ‘odd’ or different.   You always feel as though you don’t really fit in.   You’re a loner.   You imagine what it is like to be other people - how do they think, what do they say and do. When you notice the way someone holds their coffee cup or the way they positio...

Africa is a big place.   Really big.   When you fly over it, you get a sense of its immenseness; everything from cities to mile upon mile of open ground.   In turn, it is easy to feel very small and insignificant, a mere dot on the landscape.                 As a writer in Africa, it is also easy to feel a sense of that aloneness.   I live in a small mining town called Solwezi in north-western Zambia.   If there are any other writers here, I certainly have not met them and I am not sure how I would.   There are no writers’ groups advertised, no literary events take place - and no one seems to be particularly perturbed. After all, why should they be?   Writing is a solitary job, isn’t it?   It’s just you and your notepad or your laptop.   What else do you need?                 I am sure...

Agatha and I go back a long way.  As a child, my grandmother was an avid reader of her novels and when I went to the library to change my gran's books for her, I was often asked to pick up an Agatha Christie or two.  So it was that I became familiar with many of her titles and the covers of the Fontana paperback editions of her books (there were the odd Crime Club editions as well).  We also went to watch film versions of Murder on the Orient Express, Evil Under the Sun and Endless Night.  I was absolutely scared stiff and remember having difficulty going to sleep afterwards!  We would watch television adaptations of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot as a family.  No one answered the phone and any visitors at the door were viewed with impatient disdain.  During the adverts, someone would rush out and make a cup of tea and then rush back, often asking frantically 'What did I miss?  Did I miss anything?' The first Christie I read ...

I must admit I've never been one of those people who like horses.  You know the type who stroll about in jodhpurs even when they're not riding and laugh heartily at horsey jokes and talk copiously about stirrups and bridles and strawberry roans? Yes, that's them. I didn't even read Black Beauty or those Green Grass of Wyoming books as a child.  It was as if just by reading about horses I'd be at a disadvantage, not knowing what went where and what the importance was anyway.  Instead, I chose to be a little more than mildly derisive about horse lovers: that they got bow legs and that their faces grew long and their teeth longer, for everyone knows that horsey people begin to look like their equine friends.  (Look at Princess Anne, for example). It is therefore rather disconcerting to have a six year old daughter who has developed a real interest in horses.  I thought it might be one of those passing phases, like the ballet phase she so recently eme...