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Trolling through the internet, I came across something called “survivorship bias”. Have you heard of it? Wikipedia puts it very succinctly: “Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical [...]

By now you might have realised that I’m a dreamer. I return to wakefulness most mornings with the shreds of dreams falling about me, like confetti on a groom barely conscious of his duty.  Now, I [...]

As a child my parents possessed a large radiogram. In the middle sat a turntable, below a radio, and on either side two narrow cupboards for long playing records. I don’t believe they cared at [...]

I’m not sure where this is going to lead me today, but I’m going to take a chance and risk writing something that might end up going nowhere useful at all. Bear with me. Let’s start with the idea [...]

A friend recently sent me a link to the acceptance speech given by the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, Olga Tokarczuk. It takes the form of a meditation on fiction, on truth and, [...]

I’ve always regretted having a memory that dredges up numbers, but not conversations or passages of writing that I’ve read and loved. Memory – not only of conversation and texts, but also of [...]

I was listening recently to a programme on the radio in which musicians were talking about their relationship with their instruments. These were all professionals, leading violinists or cellists. [...]

Together with what sometimes appears to be the rest of the world, I have followed the debate around ChatGPT – the artificial intelligence search engine and chatbot –  with great interest. And [...]

Frequently when we’re asked to assess someone’s manuscript, or help a writer brainstorm a story idea, we have to begin by stating a fundamental principle of fiction. It is, we say, a really bad [...]

I continue to mine George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain for practical writing wisdom, and found myself rereading a section on revision, which I think is well worth retailing. I think [...]

We thought we’d escaped the worst effects of the latest cold spell to grip these emerald isles. In December, ten days of sub-zero temperatures left the lake on which our houseboat floats frozen. [...]

I’ve started off the new year with a close and thorough examination of a list of the four hundred plus literary agents of the United Kingdom – in search of one who’d love to represent an [...]