Articles and posts about writing

Will write for food: a cheese lover’s guide to writing a novel

From a young age, I’d always enjoyed writing. Whether it was notes to friends, love letters, emails, food blogs, essays or Christmas cards, I knew how to fill a page. And, like so many others, I dreamed of one day filling enough pages to write a novel. But it was such a daunting prospect. I was hung up on the idea that I needed a suitably big idea – something poignant and literary that I couldn’t quite determine – resulting in more than a few false starts ...

On the unsexiness of cheese (and how it ended up at the centre of my romance tale)

Cheese isn’t sexy. Nor particularly romantic. It’s not an aphrodisiac and it’s hardly beautiful (at least not conventionally). Eat too much of it and you’re guaranteed to feel pretty average. Feed it to your lover and enjoy that barnyard aroma that lingers on your fingers. See what I’m getting at? The unsexiness of cheese certainly poses a particular challenge when you’re trying to pit it at the heart of a romance novel, but does it have to be an unsurmountable one? And why persist ...