The Writer Laid Bare

The novel The Hot Guy started out as a joke. My co-author Mel Campbell and I are both film reviewers, and we often go together to preview screenings as part of our job. One day we started talking, jokingly, about …

Last month I blogged about the importance of failure for writers arguing that failure is (unfortunately…) an intrinsic, and healthy, part of the writing process. In my experience at least, feeling like I was a failure while I wrote my …

I write about dead people.

Not ghosts. At least, not so far. I write fiction set in the past. It’s not the smartest career move, to be honest, but apparently I can’t help it. Historical fiction requires years of meticulous …

Recently I came across an intriguing quote about the nature of artistic process by William Bailey, a notable visual artist. Apparently he said: ‘I believe that every painter is in a state of continual failure.’ At first I was puzzled, …

I have met quite a few writers who, like me, have written novels, plays or collections of poetry within the framework of a PhD.  The motivation for writing within the University is sometimes a scholarship, which offers financial support for …

Fiddling with fiction can be so very, very tricky, structural editing in particular. Henry James referred to editing as ‘the butchers’ trade’: we dissect, we cut, we rearrange the parts. Ten years as an editor and I still worry that …