I've got to thinking more about a technique which I've used more often than any other in all of my writing. It's the thing which even helped to give this blog its title. I'm talking about my great love of digression.

If writing long sentences is the crime that readability analysis (including on this site) makes it out to be, then many of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century writers who have had a big influence on me are serial offenders.

In order to say yes to one thing, you have to say no to another. That’s how time is protected. That’s how the art gets made. But it starts with you, saying yes to yourself, for yourself.

The computer I’m writing on is not in the best of health today — it’s just come back from a service to investigate a defective trackpad, and is now functioning even worse than it was before.

When someone asks me what the last good piece of theatre I saw was, I often struggle to come up with an answer. But more than that, I often catch myself quite unnecessarily jumping in to say what I’ve seen that I didn’t like. When I get started on that, I often find it difficult to shut myself up again.

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.

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.