by Malcolm Pryce | Aug 12, 2021 | Me being a berk, Writing
My man-servant Igor stands at the door of the lab holding a tray of bread and water. ‘You must eat, Doktor!’ ‘No, dear Igor,’ I cry. ‘There is no time. I’m almost there. The secret formula that has eluded and tormented writers for so long is within my grasp. How to...
by Malcolm Pryce | May 12, 2021 | Writing
Writing tutors are forever exhorting us to ‘show don’t tell’.It’s a bit like being told to eat your greens when you were a child. One man even returned from the grave to remind us of its importance. His name was Sonny Graham. He became, for a while, a tabloid...
by Malcolm Pryce | May 12, 2021 | Me being a berk, Obscure Wisdom, Travel, Uncategorized, Writing
The big wooden door of Santa Maria della Scala hospital creaked open. The Blessed Saint Bernadine of Siena peered through the gap. ‘Yes?’ he said, inspecting me through rheum-filled eyes. ‘I’ve come about the job.’ ‘Job?’ ‘The Corpse-washer.’ I held up the...
by Malcolm Pryce | May 12, 2021 | Uncategorized, Writing
A round-Oxford bus ticket. £4.30. That’s all. For the price of two cups of coffee, you can lay the ghost that wanders through the labyrinth of your heart. You can finally get started on that novel. Begin your pilgrimage in London at that railway station named after...
by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 4, 2021 | Writing
As a first time novelist trying to break in, what’s the worst thing that can happen to you? This: You spend years of your life pursuing your dream of writing a novel. Years of pain, sacrifice, denial, tears, agonising self-doubt, and perhaps a lot more alcohol than is...
by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 4, 2021 | Obscure Wisdom, Writing
You need his time machine. Pick up a few creative writing textbooks, and sooner or later, you will come across a reference to the famous adage coined by Anton Chekhov, called Chekhov’s Gun. It goes like this: If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle...
by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 4, 2021 | Advertising, Me being a berk, Travel, Writing
It was around the end of the last century that I embarked on my journey to the East in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. I had been told I should present myself at the gates of a Zen monastery in Japan and there prostrate myself. The monks, they said, would then...
by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 4, 2021 | Me being a berk, Obscure Wisdom
What does it all mean? This crazy, ineffable mystery of being? What does it mean? Really? As far as I can make out, we have three options. Option A. We are just lumps of meat with a pilot light that flickers for a brief fragment of time before going out. We were...
by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 4, 2021 | Uncategorized
Five years before he died, Elmore Leonard published his Ten Rules of Writing. I agree with them all, but happily break most of them on the grounds that there is no ‘ Writing Cop’. But of his ten rules the one I like best is Rule №11: When you find writing that sounds...
by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 4, 2021 | Writing
Every creative writing course worth its salt will urge you to ‘show don’t tell’. But you would be hard-pressed to find a better demonstration of the concept than this old advertisement for Volkswagen, which appeared in 1959. At the heart of the ‘show don’t tell’...
