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Read about my journey into becoming a creative freelancer, interviews and reviews with great authors, and advice on writing and creative living.

If there's something you'd like advice on or a book you'd like me to take a look at, do get in touch, I'd love to hear from you.

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Jun 29, 2015
3 min

How to be Both

What are the conditions needed to be truly moved by something? I like to think it’s intensely personal, like falling in love. The intricate web of circumstance, location, what you had for dinner that day, your mood, how difficult it was to get where you were going. All of these elements can combine to produce a few treasured months or years, or perhaps a chance meeting that you sometimes think about but you never led to anything. So too, with art. I’ve watched films that have

Jun 18, 2015
1 min

What Inspires Your Writing?

I’m a winner! Check out this fantastic article which the lovely Timothy Pike wrote about the things that inspire my writing here. #writing #literature #creativity #article #motivation #comment #inspiration

Jun 12, 2015
5 min

The View from the Other Side

I’m trying to write a book with a dual narrative. It seemed like a good idea at the time. When I found myself wading in a sea of post-its, spending three hours on a Thursday afternoon shuffling them around to try and figure out how to intersperse the two stories I’d written independently of each other, it didn’t seem like such a good plan. It’s so much more complicated than I realised. The first go was simply to figure out what happened where, to whom, and when. The next phas

Jun 3, 2015
4 min

Office Politics

I’ve never worked in an office. I remember a teacher I used to work with swapping for a more ’normal’ job. She spoke of the euphoria she felt when she could go to the toilet, literally, whenever she wanted. Non-teachers don’t understand the true meaning of bladder control, that feeling when you look at your timetable and realise you can’t wee for the next three hours, or when it gets to 5pm and you suddenly realise you haven’t gone since 7:30am and you’ve drunk four cups of c

May 23, 2015
6 min

Writing the Unwriteable

So what’s your book about then? It’s the obvious question, once you’ve fessed up to what you spend a large chunk of your time doing. There are several options here. You can keep it vague, although you run the risk of sounding pretentious: It’s about gender identity. You can make it very specific, more about the actual style: It’s a dual narrative, looking at the same event from a male and female perspective. Or, the more blunt reply (which probably gets everyone looking terri

May 13, 2015
4 min

How Does a Completed First Draft Feel?

It is done. The very last words of the first draft, complete. What a…well, I’m not sure really. In the first case, it’s not actually the first time I’ve got to the ‘end’ of it, so to speak. I did that a few weeks ago. Since then, I’ve read back through the whole thing and jiggled it about, written a surprising number of new scenes (this is what happens when you change your structure half way through) and generally moved stuff around a lot. But in this process, there are sever

Apr 25, 2015
5 min

Does Margaret Atwood Get Depressed?

I really don’t know why Margaret Atwood never appeared on my reading radar for so many years. I only ended up reading The Handmaid’s Tale because I had to teach it for A Level. I’ve just finished reading Oryx and Crake. Another fantastic example of scorchingly observational science fiction in this stark tale of post-apocalyptic USA. Through each particular lens, she is able to examine the minutiae of current existence, through taking elements of them and exaggerating and expa

Mar 13, 2015
5 min

Dear Terry,

I’ve been meaning to write this for a long time. It was on one of those lists that you make, along with changing the address on your driving licence and washing the curtains. Now you’ve gone and spoiled it, by dying. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the irony, you yourself might have had a little dialogue with the man himself, I won’t even attempt to write that, I wouldn’t presume to possess the stoical wry humour you managed to find in the darkest moments of the human experi

Feb 23, 2015
3 min

Myself and I

I’m reading Margaret Atwood On Writers and Writing. It’s lovely to read an author musing on being the very thing that they are without sounding too grandiose or other wordly. Long have we been exposed to the accepted narrative that The Writer operates on some higher and more noble plane than mere mortals, and it’s pleasantly comforting to hear such a great writer talk about the insecurities her young self felt when treading out into these rather murky waters. Something that r

Sep 2, 2014
4 min

The Not-So-Tortured Artist

Of course we’re all familiar with the supposed formula for artistic success. Largely, unhappiness. From the huge list of writers (male and female) who were alcoholics, to the artists who cut off their ears/fingers/genitalia(rap artists at least). The most tragic of these are of course, cases of suicide. As the terrible news of the treasured comic and actor Robin Williams emerged, it seemed to confirm that the brightest lights do indeed fly closest to the sun. So where does th

Sarah Scribbles

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