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Just as one thought that lewdness, licence and let-it-all-hang-out had saturated contemporary literature forever, that morals and upright thinking had no place in fiction, along came Rebekah Roth.

For the great majority of people, revision is about learning material for forthcoming examinations. For the writer, revision is trying to look at work done with a fresh eye, scrubbing out and re-writing, perhaps again and again.  This is a messy business at best.  Do I jettison that well-crafted, irrelevant phrase, never to be used again?  If I’ve questioned it: yes.  Do I pare down the work to the point where I lose voice and perhaps heart as well?  No.  Where do I get the a

How much research is necessary to write a novel?

The vicar was a soppy thing called Morley. Rather than the Syrup of Figs trick, which I had planned for the wedding, so amusing but effective for only a limited number of hours, I thought the best idea to avert the disastrous forthcoming nuptials altogether was to appeal to Morley’s sense of reason.

There is a disconnect between writing and performance.

I’ve been here one hour, eleven minutes, thirty seconds, so far.  If you want to lengthen your life, or seem to, this is the way to do it.  Sit in the Disabled carpark in the cold, by a tall hedge, facing a row of blackthorn that haven’t bothered to blossom.  Wait at least two hours for Grandad to get out of the clinic.  Turn on the radio, by all means, but don’t change channels in case you can’t get back to Radio 3.

When I taught Theatre Studies in the dim and distant past, I often thought  what a survivor the bourgeois theatre director, Konstantin Stanislavsky was.  Not only did he survive Stalin. His texts are unreadable in English, due to the stranglehold of the original translators; he never came to a conclusion about how to produce a play: in fact, on his deathbed he threw out all of his previous ideas and was about to begin all over again with a new theory, when Death finally broug

With regard to the damp and the cold and the endless rain, I buy logs to put on the fire. Even though I am surrounded by damp walls indoors, where the paint will not dry, and fallen and cut trees out of doors, I avoid struggling in the wet to cut up the free wood. I wouldn’t know where to begin.   Turn up the central heating: the real business of logging involves the noting down of work achieved this week.

If I have to choose between plot, characters and symbols, I’ll take the symbols to work with.

It must be ten years since I published a book; and that is quite slack of me.  I don’t like letting a piece of work go unless and until I am satisfied with it.  You will be glad to hear that I have been working on Between the Shafts, but not very quickly or efficiently. Writing in the second person is experimental, to say the least; and I am finding that the second person narrator is often answered back by an infuriated protagonist, so that there emerges a dialogue.  That was