Jim Freeman

There is actually a debate going on, among writers of all people, as to whether it’s useful to re-write history’s greatest works in order to protect the ‘sensibilities’ of readers. Those who come down on the side of ‘sensibility editors’ seem to feel it’s damaging to...

David Suzuki writes that ‘Despair Is a Luxury We Can’t Afford’. As a writer, I love the words he chose on a subject we haven’t seen get much traction. It’s almost the polar opposite of my writing, that claims we are short on despair and long on kicking cans down the...

The low-stakes argument “It’s tempting,” he writes, “and fun to argue about the logo. About the way the toilet paper is hung. About how to load the trunk of the car. “These sorts of arguments work precisely because they don’t matter. At all. “And they distract us from...

A word about protecting your protagonist from the dislike, even hatred of readers. There are many books where this is exactly the point and they were written with this in mind, often to great success. Think about Patrick Bateman in "American Psycho" by Bret Easton...

We are story tellers, we writers and maybe it’s time to get comfortable with that. It sounds so old-timey, firesides and marshmallows, the air thick with fireflies and we are grown up now, drowning in information, too sophisticated for a long, drawn out adventure just...

I’m told that the life of a writer is often a journey filled with passion, creativity, challenges, and introspection. I also hear that writers are individuals who have a unique way of perceiving the world, and they use words as their medium to express their thoughts,...

Ernest Hemingway is one of the most celebrated and influential American writers of the 20th century and he left an indelible mark on literature with his distinctive writing style and adventurous life. His experiences as a journalist, ambulance driver during World War...

Thirty years ago, when I first came to Prague to ‘write and live in Europe,’ I made a serious error of judgement. I had access to a 50-year-old motorcycle, a Jawa two-cycle twin and decided to ride it over the Austrian Alps down into Italy to see a friend. In itself,...

Rafael Sabatini is no longer with us, having died in 1950, but he was an Italian-born British writer of romance and adventure novels. Raf is best known for his worldwide bestsellers: The Sea Hawk, Scaramouche, Captain Blood, and Bellarion the Fortunate. Several of his...

Jennifer Lawrence, George Clooney and the other actors out on strike in Hollywood are doing it for the underpaid. You may not be aware, but the average annual income for a Sag-Aftra member is approximately $40,000, which is 32% below the national average. That’s...

Before I turned to writing I was a landscape architect and my theory about truly learning the craft included visiting every site I could access that had been designed by a famous name. And I didn’t want their latest work, I craved the older works that might show me...

A placebo does nothing, but makes us think it does. It’s a human or medical intervention that changes the story we tell ourselves, and what are writers if not story-tellers? Done well, those stories are powerful and who’s to know? If they can save the blues (or the...

Several war memoirs I’ve read recently concern the desires of men who have long been in the trenches and I think about Ukraine and friends of mine who've been to war. Those dreams aren’t often directed at a steak dinner, hot shower, or even sex. The predominant wish,...

In a very real sense of the matter, certainly the writer bears no more obligation than the ordinary citizen. Those who have an opinion on the matter tend to be high on shaming, possibly other substances as well and very low on obligation. Which is as it should be....

A friend I hold in high esteem says, “when we get to where we’re going…perhaps we should stop. Unless the going was the point.” That’s a fascinating premise to me because it explains a lot about the reasons we are here on this earth and if we’re making a difference....

One of my favorite quotes is from Bill Bryson, an American writer who’s written some of the best travel writing I’ve ever read, particularly around and about Great Britain. Bill says, “There’s always a little toothpaste left in the tube.” How true that is. When you’re...

Non-fiction is all too often ignored by the novice writer looking to be the next Hemingway or John Le Carre. But it’s a captivating and powerful form of expression that allows writers to delve into the realms of reality, explore human experiences, and shed light on...

In the current flurry of activity concerning artificial intelligence (AI) and the writing crafts, you are perhaps unaware of the Google project named Deep Mind. According to Google, “when we launched DeepMind back in 2010, many people thought general AI was a...

There was a time I wrote poetry. Then it turned itself off and prose returned. If you write, have you ever had that happen? I’m not really even a fan of poetry and rarely read it for pleasure. And yet for probably a year and a half it simply came to me on a tram, or...

Now here’s something interesting for those of you in the business of writerly endeavor. It has all the essentials of fraud, a touch of gaming the system and a link to ChatGPT. It is, of course, another example of the rich bribing their kids into admittance to top...