King Death Life-Like Lilian’s Spell Book (My Mother’s Seven Spirits Demand Justice) Notes for a Young Gentleman (O: Short Stories) Patience Mutants Wrestliana Dead Boy Detectives Vol 1: Schoolboy Terrors Dead Boy Detectives Vol 2: Ghost Snow Free Country: A Tale of the Children’s Crusade Vastation (opera) with Samy Moussa Toby (album) […]
‘I’m usually waiting for you to stop talking, so that I can. Concerning two-way streets I have to say that I am not a fan.’ The American songwriter, John Grant, nails Ignoring dialogue in his song ‘GMF’. GMF stands for ‘Greatest Mother Fucker’ – and this is also helpful to me in defining Ignoring conversation, […]
HIDING DIALOGUE The English playwright Harold Pinter was famous for his dialogue. This is what he had to say about the reaction to his work: We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: ‘Failure of communication’… and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that […]
(This is the written version of the podcast I did for my publisher, Galley Beggar Press. If you’d rather listen to it, you can do so on Soundcloud or Stitcher.) Could you just sit still for half an hour. Just that. Sit still, without distraction or interruption? For thirty minutes. No phone, no screen, no music, no […]
BACK TO THOSE THREE MODELS OF DIALOGUE I am going to give you three models of dialogue, to help you think about what’s going on when people speak to each other on the page. (If you’ve read the Starting to Write – Lesson 4: Writing better dialogue, you’ll have seen a version of what follows. You can […]
My mother had a stroke. Luckily, it was quite minor. She was still able to read, though more slowly. There was a gap in her vision – an absence where sight simply didn’t take place. Because of this, she wasn’t able to drive. My mother’s stroke changed our family. None of her children had started […]
Receipt ‘Would you like the sea?’ I say yes, puzzled. Tamp, and another afternoon’s second coffee – she is Russian, or Ukrainian, and so I realise she said receipt. ‘I gave you a hard time earlier today,’ her Indian boss says, alongside the machine where she’s making my milk bluff. And she, ‘Not so much,’ […]
Today, Galley Beggar announced they will be publishing my novel Patience in August 2019. I feel differently about this book to others I’ve written. It seems, to me, the best thing I’ve done. Not just written, done. This is largely because I was visited by Elliott, a once-in-a-lifetime narrator who is nicer, wiser and generally […]
There were some things I didn’t expect to be able to find out, whilst researching Wrestliana. For example, in the ‘Preliminary Observations’ at the beginning of his novel Henry and Mary, William Litt says – I have observed real dates and facts, which prevented me from complying with the desire of several friends, who wished me to introduce […]
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