How do you maintain your readers’ investment in your story, keep them rooting for your characters right through to the end? Teachers of creative writing tell us it’s all down to motivation: clarify right from the start what the protagonist wants and devise credible ways of stopping them from getting it until almost the last page.

While I can see how this can create tension, I’ve always had a problem applying this “rule” to my writing. My characters refuse to sum up what they’re aiming for in a neat sound-bite and, if they do, they shoot off in the opposite direction a couple of chapters later. I could try reining them in, but they’d only start complaining that I was the one who invited them to act as if they were as quirky and contradictory as real people.

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I used to read for pleasure, then I read to develop my craft. Now I read for the blog and website. Is this how it was meant to be?
Of course, the three aims aren’t mutually exclusive, I can read as a writer and blogger and still enjoy it, but it does affect the content of my TBR and TBrR (to be re-read) piles. In fact, I think I should re-label my book mountain as my TBB (to be blogged) pile.
Reading for the blog definitely requires a higher level of concentration: Do I love this debut enough to invite the author to my Q&A? Would this aspect of plot/setting/ character help bring one of my posts alive? Because it’s not just for me, I’m more accountable and, while I’m not complaining, it sometimes leaves me longing for one of those sand-spattered novels that requires the reader to switch off her brain.

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Dear Jerusha: I have to write a scene in my work-in-progress but the subject matter horrifies me. It’s a crucial scene - I can’t omit it or just allude to it, but I find it difficult to research or think about and I’ve been avoiding drafting the scene for a very long time. Do you have any thoughts on how best to approach writing it?

Darling, you're not alone. One well-regarded writer delivered the really-truly-finished-totally-this-time-long-overdue manuscript to her editor, only to get a phone call: "I love it, it's wonderful. Just one thing. That blank page 327, which just says 'Big Row Here'. What was that going to be?" And the answer was that the row was crucial to the story, but it was in and around an issue that was, personally, very difficult for Ms Writer. She'd done the right thing and decided she was willing to go there, but when it came to the crunch - or, rather, when it came to p.327 - she couldn't do it. She'd do it next time. In revision. In re-drafting. When she'd done everything else...

You know that working with material which is potent for you, as I was talking about to my last correspondent, is the key to getting your best writing out of you, but that doesn't mean it's always fun. Emma has a short story that she wants to write, but it's entirely built round one of her own personal horrors, and two years in she still hasn't psyched herself up. So how do you get yourself to write it?

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I ate my sandwich on a bench alongside the old town stocks, opposite the church where I heard Ruth Rendell talk about her latest book and answer questions about her life as a crime writer. In the same café I overheard someone say she could be 'tetchy', but when I asked her to pose for a photo she agreed at once, and suggested we move to a lighter bit of the church when the first attempt came out blurred. Now I'm a bigger fan than ever.

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Adrian Lockhart is a British clinical psychologist who has fled his failing marriage to work in a psychiatric hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, shortly after the civil war. Adrian is no knight in shining armour; even he wonders what he can offer a country where the entire population has been brutalised, and his efforts are impeded by structures he can't possibly understand. Yet this reflective outsider is an ideal literary vehicle to explore what remains of humanity in the aftermath of war.

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Last time I blogged about prologues, I did so under the title "Why you probably shouldn't, why maybe you should", and I do stand by that. A lot of the prologues I see are trying to do something which would be better done another way. At the worst, they're trying to solve a problem with how the rest of the book works, and even if they manage to do that, they only do so by swapping in another problem. So I'd suggest that your first reaction to wanting a prologue is to see if there's a better way to do what the prologue's trying to do..

But then I dropped in on Jane Wenham-Jones's pilot for a new YouTube series, based on her hilarious and also excellent Wannabe A Writer books. In Episode Two, the lovely - and seriously bestselling - Katie Fforde talks about how the reader "locks on to" the first character they experience, like a baby bird imprinting. (The other episodes are well worth watching, too.)

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It's great to travel, to experience different cultures and/or take a relaxing break from the drudgery of home. Writers especially seem to relish getting away. But how often do we recognise the impact of our holiday on the communities we visit? This year's World Tourism Day draws attention to the importance of water in sustainable tourism. The British charity, Tourism Concern, highlights the problem of water inequity and provides some useful guidance on using water responsibly while on holiday. While I try to do my bit, I'm more of a dreamer than an activist, so my contribution to the day has to be a couple of stories about the ethics of rich world / poor world tourism: Silver Bangles, published by Amarillo Bay, and A House for the Wazungu, coming soon from Chuffed Buff Books.

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This is the second of three Highly Commended entries to the This Itch of Writing 500th Postiversary Competition. I like this piece because it made me laugh, in a rueful, recognising sort of way, but also because it its own blog-sized way it's doesn't shirk the big questions.

Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by literary ambition. I aim for the prose quality of Anne Tyler, the themes of Tolstoy and hope I’ll produce it at the speed of Dickens. Today is a good day. I’m happy to be someone trying her best with an English GCSE, a recordable IQ and no one else to do the washing.
Writers are usually driven to achieve something: beautiful prose, well-developed theme, good story, traditional publication or simply length.

"Write what you know." "Write something each day- a small amount will do." "Create a bad first draft." The best advice encourages us to acknowledge our limitations. Is this possible while reaching beyond them? Or are Humility and Ambition mutually exclusive?

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A writing exercise which the wonderful Debi Alper taught me is to write a two-character scene in first person, from the point of view of Character A (who might be yourself). Then you re-write it, as exactly as you can, from the point of view of Character B. Then you pick one viewpoint, re-write the scene with an external narrator (i.e. in third person), and move point of view once, finding the most effective moment in the scene to shift. Even with veterans, this exercise can be salutary, and in several different ways.

- The Other character becomes pure character-in-action. In the first version you may know almost nothing the Other one, but your intuition or conscious brain still has to work out what they would be doing and saying, which means working out some of what they think and feel. Mind you, when your storytelling imagination is on form and the scene is falling out of your pen, you may genuinely not need or want to dig into in their psyche. Just as the Viewpoint character can't see into the Other character's head, so you as the writer may well not need to either.

- And then you do need to know more, to write the second version. And how big is the gap between these two characters?

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We've all heard that adage 'show, don't tell,' but was C.S.Lewis a bit too extreme in his assertions?

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