All articles in Fiction
20th March, 2024 in Fiction, Natural World
For the love of flowers
For National Flower Day Emma Timpany, author of Botanical Short Stories, discusses the fascination with flowers. We humans have a universal, innate love of flowers, and go to great lengths to satisfy this desire. The worldwide flower growing industry is worth billions of pounds,…
17th February, 2021 in Fiction
Medieval monsters
Imagination is a powerful thing. The beauty of it is that everyone’s imagination is unique. Different people can look at the same picture of a monster in a medieval book and come up with completely different stories. Have you ever looked at a picture and felt inspired to make up…
23rd July, 2020 in Fiction, History
Medieval England: Filling in the blanks
One of the challenges of writing historical fiction is making sure you get your facts right: nobody wants to read about medieval peasants wearing digital watches or historical characters taking centre stage at a time before they were actually born. But one of the other challenges…
20th May, 2019 in Fiction, Local & Family History
Norfolk in the spotlight: Theatres, fairgrounds, and family fun
All the world’s a stage. As writers, I think we like to work from the wings, pulling strings and scribbling things as our characters perform. Norfolk has a dazzling and delightful history of theatrical wonders, the Georgian Theatre Royal of Norwich, the Edwardian Circus of…
5th February, 2018 in Fiction
Why short stories matter
Short stories provide many opportunities for new and emerging writers to get their work seen by a wider audience. During my school days, I first encountered the exquisite stories of New Zealand modernist short story writer Katherine Mansfield. I’ve always found short fiction odd,…
21st September, 2017 in Biography & Memoir, Fiction, Local & Family History
The origins of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth
J.R.R. Tolkien lived for much of his early life in and around the British industrial city of Birmingham, but he was born in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State in southern Africa in 1892. Both his parents, Arthur and Mabel, had moved there from the Birmingham area and married i…
26th May, 2017 in Biography & Memoir, Fiction
In Dracula’s footsteps
When Abraham Stoker came to Whitby in 1890, on holiday with his family, he could have had no way of knowing that his stay in the town would inspire him to write a Gothic literary masterpiece. A photograph of Bram Stoker, circa 1906 Since its publication, his novel Dracula, origin…
18th April, 2017 in Fiction, History
Resurrecting the dead: Or the delicate art of writing biographical fiction
Biographical fiction is the art of bringing historical figures back to life. It turns a name in the history books into a person so vivid, complex, and yet comprehensible that history itself becomes more understandable. Good biographical fiction provides insight into the psycholog…
23rd March, 2017 in Fiction
Ask the author: Cora Harrison on writing historical crime fiction
Author Cora Harrison is a former head teacher based in Ireland. Her critically acclaimed books include the Burren Mysteries series, which Booklist praised for being ‘richly conceived and authentically detailed’. In her newest historical crime fiction book, The Cardinal’s Court, s…
25th January, 2017 in Fiction, Folklore
What I love about performance storytelling
‘This story is set a very, very long time ago…’ That’s how my story Alice and the Snap Dragon begins. After that… away we go! We can twist, we can shout, we can shake it all about and even make up a song if we want to. That’s what I love about the art of performance storytelling;…
16th December, 2016 in Fiction
A Christmas Carol: A Christmas classic
Published in a single volume on 19 December 1843, for many readers A Christmas Carol epitomises not only Charles Dickens’ shorter works, but his entire output. A wonderful morality tale in which Ebenezer Scrooge is transported hither and tither by a spirit from the world beyond a…
30th November, 2016 in Fiction, Women in History
Queen of Crime: Agatha’s influence
When her car was found abandoned at a beauty spot close to her home in Surrey on 3 December 1926, Agatha Christie’s disappearance prompted a nationwide search involving over 1,000 people – including fellow crime writers Dorothy L. Sayers and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. With newspaper…