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Tag: Writing

Insomnia

At three o’clock in the morning, I had a revelation. Christopher Hitchens was wrong. It isn’t religion that poisons everything. It’s thinking. Lying awake in the blanket silence, the rest of the household sleeping, the mind tends to go into overdrive. Your entire life becomes the subject for debate, except there’s no-one around to field the questions. I’ve suffered from insomnia for short…

Publish and be damned?

All writers want to be in Waterstones shop window, now, today, this minute. One small obstacle stands between us and the realisation of a lifetime’s dream. Publishers. Today’s climate is not encouraging for the budding novelist, intent on seeing his work in print. Literary agents, those much maligned creatures who practise cunning evasion techniques to avoid dealing with the slush pile,…

Time off for bad behaviour

Two weeks without a word commited to paper. Well, I have allowed myself the luxury of this blog. Otherwise, it’s the pauper’s equivalent of lounging by the pool with a fruit cocktail and a paperback, enjoying a brief hiatus from the frontline. Alas, these soujourns are not all they’re cracked up to be. Already I’m suffering. The novel that has consumed…

When the dust settles

I get bored easily. I can’t do the meditational thing and sit in a chair doing nothing. My mind feeds on constant activity. I need to be doing something at all times, even if it’s only thinking about doing something. This, of course, is the disease or dis-ease of the human animal. Those of us who haven’t spent the last…

Notes from the wood shed

You know what you want to say, but how do you find the right way to say it? Finding the voice is one of the many challenges in writing both fiction and non-fiction. Get it wrong and your project might end up being postponed or, worse still, abandoned altogether (147,ooo words is a huge chunk from anyone’s canon, but that’s…

Sorry, the lifeboats are full

I wasn’t on the Titanic but, boy, do I know that sinking feeling. The gestation period for my second novel is over. By now, well into the third rewrite, I should be flying. But alas, the flowing pen and nimble fingers of the earlier drafts have given way to that old favourite, disillusion. My commitment to the project is total. I…

The song is over

The second draft of my second novel is finished. My favourite blue pen has been laid to rest in the third drawer of my desk, overlooking a trout stream and weeping willows and will remain there until further notice.  (Editor’s note: Trout stream?) Now begins the note taking and fact-finding, checking research details and e-mailing prospective researchees. The standard of the next draft needs…

Keith Talent

Of all the anti-heroes in modern literature, Keith Talent has to be the best. He plays darts, drinks beer and watches pornography, secure in the knowledge that life is too short to work and pay taxes. His criminal enterprises are dogged by failure and a sense of impending disaster that taints all the other aspects of his life, including his beloved darts. Martin…

Mining gems from the Cesspool

Writing is perhaps the most beguiling of art forms. In fiction, for instance, we tend to avoid the more unpalatable facts of our existence and settle for a glossy approximation instead. We allude to these depths without being too explicit. And with good reason. Think what goes through your mind in an average twenty-four hour cycle. Would you really want this carnage imposed on your readers?  The…

Who wears the Crown?

After reading a spate of fairly disappointing British novels, I decided to venture further afield. Where better place to start than America, that vast and undeniably fertile land of dreams. At first I was sceptical. I’d read Hemingway and Faulkner but doubted their modern counterparts would have the same impact. Then I chanced upon Philip Roth. The cover blurb for…