The smile was almost the same. Those heavy-lidded dark brown eyes may have become a rather warier over the twenty years since we had last met. The handsome black face was a little more lined, but still conveyed interest, affection,...
The page before you is blank. When you try to write a sentence, it is like dragging your feet through a quagmire. With every slurpy step, the idea that you are a writer seems more absurd. Story? Hah! Who is...
There was once a man called Jimmy Savile. He was powerful and did bad things. Although some people suspected as much, he was allowed to continue being powerful and doing bad things for two main reasons: he was a bully,...
On a home-alone New Year's Eve, I find myself sternly noting resolutions to myself for the creative year ahead (the personal resolutions can wait). Of course, they may not work for everyone... Enjoy yourself at work. Even when it...
It will catch any serious writer in the end: that familiar dread of the blank or page or screen as it stares back at you, daring you to give it some words which, the blank page just knows, will be...
Some time in the early 1990s, the writer Willie Donaldson devoted his weekly column in the Independent to an account of how the editor who had commissioned him to write his memoirs was so desperate to get the book delivered...
It is an undeniable (and frankly rather unattractive) aspect of a writer's character that it needs to be finely balanced between arrogance and insecurity. Confidence is needed to write in the first place; a degree of self-doubt is necessary for...
Look at the first of these two rules, and you'll see that nothing divides authorly opinion like writer's block. Most of these insights are either self-pitying or briskly unsympathetic - successful writers seem to believe in tough love when dispensing...
Here's a funny thing. Writers like to play down research. 'Just live your life and use that as your material,' seems to be the message. Even, 'And don't have too exciting a life while you're at it.' Here is a...
The people's philosopher, Alain de Botton, has been considering Rolf Harris and his wandering hands. In de Botton's funny-yet-serious spoof of newspapers The Philosophers' Mail, he takes his customary rosy view of things. The Harris case and others like it,...