These Tangled Webs
...day setting up interviews for a music theatre show with a verbatim element that I’m working on with another composer. After completing a full-length musical with each composer, we agreed...
A Mirror To Life
...comprehensible is elitist. But, as Declan Kiberd points out whilst discussing James Joyce’s famously difficult novel Ulysses, many tasks done by ordinary people every day are highly complex or frustratingly...
Haunted by Gesualdo
Ihave often heard playwrights asked what inspired them to write a play. Answers vary. They were invited to write to a brief in collaboration with a director or company. They...
When The Words Won’t Come
...step outside their comfort zone and put their ideas, views, strong opinions into print — whether as reports, promotional material or even detailed emails covering important issues. In creating communications...
In Praise Of Dialect
...difficult to write in their regional dialect. Their answers saddened me. It seemed they’d come to university to learn how to write ‘properly.’ A lot of my students come from...
Collaborating With Other Writers
...Gumball, and they’re quite competitive environments. There’s pressure to have the funniest ideas and lines and I think the competition leads to a good standard of work. Part of the...
Nearest And Dearest
...is an essence of memoir. Through writing we come to compassion, and compassion comes from the balancing of dissonant truths. Researching trauma, recently, I discovered that this is known as...
Should I Have Heard Of You?
...and the trolley comes round. The drinks relax us and we get talking. Sooner or later the question of what I do for a living comes up. I say I...
Under The Influence
...creativity — a sad, self-fulfilling prophesy in so many ways for those boozy writers who came and went, and come and go still, forever, but never really come back. Neil...
Walking on Bones
...en la sombra Aparecen los muertos Como luces y frutos Como vasos de sangre Como piedras de abismo Como ramas y frondas De dulces visceras (We bite the shadow And...