Writers Writing About Writers Writing
Unless you’re, say, Philip Roth, it’s hard to see why, as a writer, you would ever want to write about the writer’s life, with all its drudgery, ennui, despair and...
There Is Always The Other Side…
When I first read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys I was just twenty years old. At school I had read Dickens, Shakespeare, Yeats, Fitzgerald, but in the years before...
The Woman In The Window
An acquaintance of mine once joked, ‘Why doesn’t Nick look out the window in the morning? Because then he’d had have nothing to do in the afternoon.’ But the truth...
Spilling Off The Page
First meeting. First question. ‘What’s your practice?’ ‘I write. I write plays.’ ‘Yes, but what’s your practice?’ I feel out of my depth, out of my language. I’m not a...
The Ten Things Required Of A Writer In Order To Write
1) Level desk: Clearly, a level desk. You don’t want stuff rolling across that same desk and onto the floor or, worse, into your keyboard/A4 pad right at the moment...
Canine Companions
If you’re Edgar Allan Poe, you have a raven. If you’re Margaret Atwood, you have a cat. If you’re Lord Byron, you have…well, an entire menagerie. But I like to...
How I Fell In Love With My House In Lockdown
A few weeks into lockdown a strange phenomenon occurs. A blackbird appears to be singing its little heart out in our tiny en-suite shower room. The full-throated song is so...
Creative Compost
In this era of cultural cut-and-paste, we consume our stories in an ever-increasing variety of forms: the app, the computer game, the graphic novel, the audience-led drama, the compellingly viewable...
A Researcher In Humans
At the Royal Court in the noughties, I was lucky enough to attend Stephen Jeffreys’ masterclass on dramatic logic. An edited collection of the late playwright’s teaching was recently published,...
All At Sea
As Hugh Laurie observed: ‘Screenwriting is the most prized of all the cinematic arts. Actually, it isn’t, but it should be.’ As a literary ‘Jack of all trades’ I always...