When is the best time to write a book?

I recently read an excellent article by Professor Alexandra Harris in The Author Magazine about the best weather for writing. Traditionally people have associated springtime with artistic creativity, all those budding plants and trees somehow linked with the...

Do you have a distracted writer in your life?

There’s nothing worse than indecision. It is debilitating, frustrating and exhausting. All those ‘Should I/shouldn’t I’s, ‘But what if’s, ‘Which’s, ‘When’s and ‘How’s cause our little brains to work overtime, jumping from one option to another like demented fleas. And...

Would you be happy if you’d won Wimbledon?

So Andy Murray has won Wimbledon (and the Olympic gold and the US Open). He has even managed to improve his public profile, not just by playing well but by showing us that he is a quirky, public spirited, generous and mildly humorous young man and not, it seems, the...

No time to read?

It’s an odd phenomenon. Everyone is writing novels. It almost seems as if more people are writing them than reading them. Certainly that is the impression you get if you take a quick look at Twitter. The problem is that having written them these new writers expect...

Take it easy …

People often remark that I must be very disciplined to be a writer. If only they knew … (see my earlier post about life getting in the way!) But displacement activity aside, there is an element of truth in the observation. There is certainly more to writing than...