#literature

Blog

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.

If you enjoy reading my thoughts on writing, people, books and the world, please consider supporting me, for the price of a coffee. All donations get a reward. You can also become a regular subscriber for exclusive content.

Sep 17, 2015
2 min

Are You Sitting Uncomfortably?

This week, I experienced a familiar feeling. Awkward, a little sweaty, over-exposed and defensive. This wasn’t a first date, or a public presentation, but a lesson on the novel Noughts and Crosses. In the incredibly diverse secondary schools I’ve worked in all over London, it always feels a little disappointing to answer, ‘here,’ to the inevitable question; “Miss, where are you from?” While I’ve been told I sound Australian and look French (?!) there is nothing particularly

Aug 25, 2015
3 min

Exposure

One of the key pleasures of reading (and, as it turns out, the one that makes you a better person) is the way you can be completely dissolved in the experience of a person which you will never know yourself. As a white woman living in London, there’s absolutely no way I can truly understand the myriad feelings experienced by a Nigerian moving to the USA. Being able to read about a fictional character’s experience in Americanah, through the eyes of Chimanda Ngozi Adichie, I ca

Aug 14, 2015
1 min

The Enemy

The nugget of something Is there But in the act of putting it on the page It disappears No flare of wit or will Nothing to separate Me From all the other people struggling to take bits of language and string them together in a way that is meaningful Wavering in the face of the need to be Decisive Shadowed by all those Names and Ideas and Prose that people Praise Writer’s block Is simply the scorn of myself Nothing that can’t be seen In a mirror The wall that rise

Aug 5, 2015
5 min

Editing Backwards

I find myself in the glorious position of having completed the second draft of my novel. It feels infinitely more satisfying than the first. Then, I knew there was a mountain of work still to be done, endless shuffling about of scenes and ideas, and there was a long road ahead. Already, this one feels more polished and together, so although there’s still long way to go, it doesn’t seem quite as insurmountable. Thought I’d share a few thoughts on what worked for me. 1. Write i

Jul 23, 2015
3 min

Encouraging Thunder

Blogging sometimes feels like throwing a pebble into a tunnel/cave (insert metaphor of something large and dark). You tap away, have a flurry of excitement each time you put something up. Dutifully read by friends and family of course, but you’re never entirely sure that it’s reaching anyone else. However, it would appear that the little rock I chucked in has indeed bounced off a train (not sure about this now) as the wonderful Annika Perry has nominated me for this award. Yo

Jul 9, 2015
5 min

Wasting Time

Sometimes it feels like the more time I have, the less I get done. I’ve had an erratic work schedule for almost two years now, doing everything from paternity leave in a school which took up five days a week, to doing nothing but evening and weekend tutoring to make ends meet while I write a book and complete my Masters. It’s a strange sensation, not having fixed work hours, a fixed income, a steady schedule to take you through each day. It also ups the pressure at the time I

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

May 2, 2015
3 min

‘The Seas’ by Samantha Hunt

Haunting prose, well sculpted book. From the outset, this has a very distinct voice. The prose is flooded with (har har) metaphors for the sea and water, the style is quite childlike and innocent, and it is clear from the outset that the reader is seeing the world through a very distinct and warped lens. What’s interesting about this novel is that it also manages to put an interesting and compelling story together, without relying too heavily on the prose style to simply take

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

Jan 26, 2015
4 min

Being A Man

We all like being in a club. It gives us a sense of belonging, camaraderie, having someone on your side. It also usually helps if you have an opponent you can set yourself up against. The one ‘club’ that is often presumed to be pre-ordained, is that of your gender role. I’m not sure it’s quite so straightforward as that. Just the other night, me and my friends got into a discussion about Gigi Gorgeous, a transgender Youtube sensation (apparently) whose boyfriend insists that

Sarah Scribbles

Blog