If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.

Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.

You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle

Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.

Being a decent human being will require effort and energy.

...Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.

As soon as she'd met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her.