I’m Craig but I publish under the pen name C. M. Taylor because there’s another writer called Craig Taylor who stole my name and foisted these pompous initials on me. Worst thing about it is he’s a really nice guy.
I grew up in England and have lived in India and Spain and Belgium, but am a long time resident of Oxfordshire now. I’ve got two daughters and recently they got so mad that they’d missed our wedding (they weren’t born – it wasn’t a snub) that they dressed up as bridesmaids and made us climb into our wedding outfits – I was podgy; my wife was hot – then got a neighbour round to pretend to marry us again. True story.
I began my writing life as a novelist, and still describe myself as such, but I am certainly equally as interested in screenwriting these days, having co-written a filmed movie, having been commissioned to adapt two of my own novels for the screen, and having developed a course on developing content in the age of streaming for the degrees I teach on at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing.
If you’re somehow inclined to know more, there’s my Wikipedia page.
Here’s where I work down the bottom of my garden in Eynsham, a village six miles North West of Oxford. I call it my battery, because it’s where I go to get charged back up. Life’s busy, you know.
Interviews and articles
- The Nightbuilder, a short story I wrote for the Inventive podcast
- A piece I wrote for The Social London on Sobriety and the Solace of Music
- A piece I wrote about republishing my novel City of O
- A piece for Retreat West about learning how to write and about teaching people how to write
I wrote a short series of articles for my colleagues at Jericho Writers on various aspects of writing
• The first deals with villainy and antagonism in narrative art, addressing such questions as: What is a villain? Why do villains matter to fiction? Does every story need a villain? How to create a memorable villain.
• Another entitled How To Create a Great Inciting Incident deals with getting your story going, with before and after, and addresses questions such as: What is an inciting incident? How soon should an inciting incident take place in my novel?
• A third blog considers how to write a great scene addressing questions such as: What is the unique purpose of the scene? Is the scene thematically congruent? How does the scene turn? Are you clear on your point of view?
• Finally, I compiled a list of some of my favourite instructive aphorisms about writing, ranging across more than 2,000 years of the craft. Within these quotes you will find agreement on what constitutes good writerly practice, but you will also find a decent slice of disagreement.
- British Library Keystroke Project, 2018
- How To Wallpaper A Dungeon: Writing Platform article, 2018
- British Library Keylogging data, 2018
- ‘Planning a Novel’ for Jericho Writers, 2018
- Staying On launch interview, 2018
- Interview with Woven Tale Press, 2017
- Interview with Retreat West on the transformational arc, 2016
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