I’ve drawn on Japanese literature and culture a few times over the years, and I’ve been asking myself whether I would, could or should do those projects now in the same way I did them then.
Even though theatre was where I first got properly started as a writer, and even though theatre has been where my career has focused for the last twenty years, I stopped referring to myself as a playwright long ago.
It seems fairly commonly accepted that if an artist - or more specifically, a writer - is to produce good output, they must make sure to absorb good input as well. By which is usually meant, if you want to be a writer who writes, you also need to be a writer who reads. This once led me to make a terrible mistake when I was teaching, and I have gone to great pains to ensure I never made it again.
I have to confess that I’ve become a bit impatient with people who say they would like to write, but who don’t actually do any writing. I can’t think of many circumstances, even in times of the greatest extremity, when it would be totally impossible for someone to write if they really wanted to.
Something has happened to the word “art” and its offshoots — “artist”, “artistic”, “the Arts” — in recent years, and it troubles me. More and more, the word “art” seems to be being replaced by the word “creativity”. “Creative” as a noun and as an adjective often appears in places where “artist” and “artistic” used to be found. “The Arts” is now a very rare phrase to come across indeed.
How much research to do, and then what to do with it, has always been something I’ve struggled with, no matter whether I’m writing for theatre, writing prose, shaping the texts for exhibitions, or anything else.
Not long after writing the blog post 'On when writers get it right', the sad and shocking news broke about the death of Alexei Navalny during his imprisonment in a remote Siberian penal camp.
I don’t fall asleep easily, so for a good many years, I’ve listened to audiobooks and radio plays in bed — and now I’ve got an elasticated headphone band to make it a more comfortable experience.
I’m a word nerd and proud of it, and not just in English, either. I used to love taking out the Usborne language guides for kids from Rushall Library as a child — I can’t remember now if they were the Picture Dictionaries or the First Thousand Words in… [insert language] — but whatever they were, I loved them.
One of the things that marks out a great writer for me is when something they have written in fiction eventually seems to be paralleled by something that happens in real life, often years or decades after they’ve written it.
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