The Writing School

‘Their bodies say as much, or maybe more, than their faces. Or they may say something different.’ He paused, marking this paradox for the upturned faces. ‘A person might be smiling, but you can see from the way they hold themselves that they’re angry, in which case the body may be a more trustworthy guide to a person’s character or state of mind th

Even so, I was entranced by the woman’s story. To lose your sense of everything, to have to relearn everything, even how to use a cup, sounds like a rare opportunity to start from scratch, to grasp the workings of the world in a way we never get as adults, because we have been picking this stuff up since babyhood. There was something intoxicating a

We were calling this a Life Class, except that the group had to describe the various positions we asked our models to strike in words, rather than with pencils or pastels. I reckoned writers had as much to learn working from a life model as artists did. They too should sit in circles studying the human form, both naked and clothed, striking differe

don’t know what kind of old ladies we’re going to be. The past may be a foreign country, but at least it’s one we’ve all been to

Charles Dickens might walk twenty miles in a day, or all through the night. In Night Walks he describes passing the Bethlehem mental asylum in Beckenham and wondering if darkness brought the people inside it and outside closer. ‘Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming?’

Today I arrived at work to find a woman at my desk who said it has been permanently assigned to her. She was wearing a tag that said Head of Leadership, making her somehow incontestable. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘I’ve never known exactly who you are.’

‘You mean fictionalizing your experience? Or writing something different inspired by it? Or just totally different?’ ‘What do you think?’ ‘I think making stuff up is harder.’ It was like being a doctor sometimes, sitting there at my desk, hearing about symptoms and trying to locate their source, dispensing advice while discreetly keeping an eye on

Perhaps all of us walk among ghosts, along haunted streets. Oxford Street and Piccadilly teem with unseen millions. We brush past Virginia Woolf in Russell Square and Charles Dickens on the Strand. We glimpse shadowy figures at the end of ancient alleyways. We’re connected with the past and future – but we can’t always make sense of the connections

When I’m in the thick of a project ideas come all the time, but they’re more likely to strike in the middle of the supermarket, or on a walk, than at my desk. So now I’ll stop, wherever I am – under a tree, beside Frozen Goods, at a bus shelter – and note the thought down on any scrap of paper I can find in my bag – a receipt, the back of a ticket,