Learnings

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.

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

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