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This post goes back to a day some time ago when I got on a train and went to a ‘meeting’.
I know. I’ll give you a minute. It’s been a while.
In case you still need help, a ‘meeting’ is a gathering of individuals, often in a ‘meeting room’, to talk about a subject in order to agree a way ahead. Or something like that. Like I say, it’s been a while. Read more “Voicing Concerns”
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Only four days in and November really hasn’t been the best, has it? Without repeating every line of the list of rubbish things that have happened and those that are, as I write, ‘rubbish-in-progress’, the first week of November 2020 is fast becoming the very model of Rubbish First Weeks.
One item on that list which has really got to me is that, as a consequence of England’s second lockdown, bookshops will close along with pubs, restaurants, gyms and all other ‘non-essential’ businesses. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the decision, the prospect of the potentially terminal damage to those independent, bricks-and-mortar bookshops which have taken such huge pains to keep going during and after the first lockdown is heartbreaking. Read more “‘… on the shores of darkness…’”
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I’m just finishing the first draft of a book I’ve been working on since January. To get to this stage, the author and I have had to improvise slightly. Pre-lockdown we followed normal procedure, meeting in Starbucks in Westfield Stratford City (the glamour), a standard London-hour commute for both of us; post-lockdown we switched to a meeting place called ‘Zoom’ which turned out to be a doddle to get to.
Now, as I add the final notes and comments to the draft, I’m taking the first tentative steps with a new author. We’re setting up dates and times for interviews but we aren’t discussing location. That’s a given. We’ll be using Zoom.
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Over the past few months, I’ve been reading Will Storr’s excellent The Science of Storytelling (William Collins, 2019). I know, I know, I can already hear the question: ‘Really, another book on writing?’
Yep, sorry.
But I think this is an interesting and practical addition to the list. Will Storr is a journalist, novelist, non-fiction author and a ghostwriter. A lot of his journalism has been on scientific subjects – neuroscience and psychology in particular – and his angle is, perhaps unsurprisingly, what does science tell us about how successful storytelling works? What can the application of the results of recent research do to advance or reinforce our understanding of the way we tell stories?
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We are gridlocked in a dodgy area of a dodgy city in a country thousands of miles from home. A bus has stopped halfway across a junction 100 yards further up the street and nothing can get by. We haven’t moved for ten minutes and are now surrounded by two lanes of angry traffic, each car jostling for a millimetre of advantage that will take them precisely nowhere.
It’s midday on Saturday and the pavement teems with people. I watch one man on the curb performing on-the-spot ear-piercing – his client winces as his lobe is punctured and the new stud is pushed in. Shoppers mill about the stationary cars carrying bags and checking their phones. There are four of us in the car. My host (let’s call him Ian), two of his friends from the US, and me. As the temperature rises outside, our tiny Suzuki Swift is struggling to keep us and itself cool. Read more “A Day of Extremes”