It’s Too Original Your novel is ahead of its time. This means that no-one is equipped to understand it, because in order to understand it’d they’d have to have read it, and no-one has yet read it because – when they try – they find they’re not equipped. A very vicious circle, this. However, your […]
The opening of the new novel: and the opening of the new novel: Until you have read this through, do not write in it. If you choose to do so thereafter, that is your own mistake. It was spooked England, all laid out below and invisibly rushing up towards one—thirty-two feet per […]
2017 saw the first performances of The Itch-Witch, an opera for children of around nine years old – to be rehearsed and performed by them. Emily Hall wrote the music. It was a Snappy Opera commission from Mahogany Opera Group. I wrote a lot more lyrics than were used. This one tells the origin […]
I have been taking this blogging business too seriously; trying to come up with finished statements, rather than put something out. I doubt I’ll be able to change, but here goes. It’s usually easier for any generation to acknowledge the qualities of the generation above the one above them – not the mothers, the grandmothers. And […]
Around the time of the launch of Mutants: Selected Essays, I did an interview with Caroline Edwards of Birkbeck about the Future of Fiction. It’s here. In podcast form. Caroline asked some difficult stuff, and I said more than I meant to say.
A while ago, I wrote a novel – a ghost story… Lilian’s Spell Book was written compulsively, under the power of the story, which was – at the same time – very complicated and very simple. I was hoping to publish it under a pseudonym – Alex Warden. And it went out to editors, […]
EUSTON STATION A year or so ago, inside Euston Station, I bumped into a former student from the Birkbeck Creative Writing MA – Nicole Burstein. Since I first met Nicole she had gone, I hope she won’t mind me saying, from submitting some very angsty, introspective, scrappy prose for her first Writing and Reading workshop to […]
Normally, when people come along to a creative writing class, they are hoping to learn how to write better, not how to save the planet. A couple of years ago, I was teaching a Guardian Masterclass on ‘Storytelling Secrets’. Among those attending were three representatives of an international environmental activist network. They were young, casually […]
I wrote this little essay on fame, bands, Jack Nicholson and new writing as the introduction to Birkbeck’s annual short-story anthology MIR13 (The Mechanics’ Institute REVIEW). A new issue of this, MIR14, is being compiled right now. It is taking UK wide submissions until Friday 10 February 2017. Details on how to submit here. So, […]
I wrote Lilian’s Spell Book to be a really gripping supernatural adventure story, a Chinese box of a haunted house mystery and a study of a normal family in a very weird place. It’s been compared by some of the readers who’ve found it on Wattpad (where I serialised it a while ago) to Mark […]
