“I saw! I know!” "He knows! Don't go home!"

Whatever you’re reading at the start of 2026, I wish you joy in discovering some new friends and in reconnecting with some old ones.

Here's to a 2026 filled with daily bread — the kind we bake for ourselves, with craft and sweat and discipline and love.

Ballard's trick, or technique, or whatever you want to call it, is deceptively simple — observation, which gives the impression (especially with hindsight) of being extrapolation.

The thing I will always love about Tom Stoppard is his spectral hand in the script for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Is dickishness, I wonder, a price worth paying for access to the joys and freedoms of curiosity and imagination?

I'm twitching nervously because I've realised we’re venturing into the territory of reader-response criticism here...

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood."

"If you're making a statement, artistically, then when you're making that statement, as far as you're concerned, it's an absolute."

Are humans the only creatures who engineer the circumstances which bring about their own boredom?

Have you ever felt like a broken accordion sometimes?

Does it really matter what accent an actor uses to play a character, or does it not?

I use it so often that I’ve got a shortcut set up on my keyboard so I can reach for one whenever I want — Shift + Option + -, pressed all at the same time, in case you were wondering.

The whole thing was not, in fact, about a young man on a boat in the middle of the ocean with a tiger and a zebra and a few other animals at all.

How do we make our work space more of a play space? What toys does it need to be filled with?

The only thing that should ever be described as “emerging” is The Very Hungry Caterpillar out of his chrysalis.

I’ve been saying for years, usually to drama students in training, that audiences are always locked in a race with whatever they encounter.

You’re not accountable to them. Only to yourself. So, really, you might just as well uphold your own truth in the first place — in writing, and in all other things.

While I’ve never, ever gone in for writing every day myself, it is something I have encouraged some other people to do, under certain circumstances.

In the space of thirty-six words, they have consolidated everything I'm going to keep reminding myself to do in 2025.

I took part in a workshop led by Liam Brown, exploring AI’s capacity to write good ghost stories — and by extension, our own. Who would do better — us, or it?

In six days' time, I'll be embarking on a thrilling/foolhardy (you decide which) literary experiment, writing a 90,000-word novel in the space of a calendar month — and not only that, I'll be on show for at least 20 of those days, in full public view.

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.

On the basis that you’re supposed to write the books you want to read, that’s precisely what I’m setting about doing.

On a recent trip to London, we finally made it to the Design Museum so we could catch the exhibition of work by the Italian design legend Enzo Mari.

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.

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.