Nonsense and outsiders

July 16, 2009

When I wrote ‘The Shrimp and the Radiator’, I was thinking of Edward Lear. It was ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ that made me invent a mismatched duo, gloriously happy to live outside convention, but it was ‘There was an old man of Whitehaven’ that made me avoid a happy ending for my odd pair.

Ghost stories

July 3, 2009

There’s a moving scene in Justin Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil. O’Neil has just witnessed the birth of his first child. Alone in the hospital in the middle of the night, he makes calls to his relatives. Then he remembers his parents.

My audience

June 18, 2009

In the publishing world, the focus is often on the size of your audience. The more people buy your work, the more money you make. But there’s an alternative approach.

The claim to truth

March 5, 2009

So one of the important things about biographies and autobiographies is that they claim to be true. But many works of fiction claim to be true as well. So how do we tell the difference?

Belief

February 26, 2009

Belief is a really, really important part of how we perceive the world: more important than factual truth.

Beginning again

February 19, 2009

Philip Pullman tells a nice story about how he invented dæmons for use in His Dark Materials. I like Pullman’s implication that he isn’t really the author of this story – that the details were something for him to realise rather than invent.

The real story

February 12, 2009

My wife and I share a conflict of opinion about Doctor Who. She doesn’t like it, because in every episode the monsters nearly kill the humans but they get away in the end. I like it, because in spite of that it tells me a believable story about a lonely man. Which of us is right?

Origins and destinations

February 5, 2009

I believe that at the heart of storytelling lie two questions: where do we come from, and where are we going?

20 auto/biographies you should read

January 21, 2009

Here’s a list of 20 pieces of life writing (autobiography, biography, anything in between) I loved reading. In most cases that also means that, in reading them, I learned something new about writing lives.

The myth of the myth

January 14, 2009

Myths are fashionable, especially in biography and other kinds of truth writing. The thesis is: the first story conceals the truth through myth; the second story reveals it through facts.

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