A Literary Life

An interesting post on Jason Arnopp’s blog today – read it first, then read my response. I love stories like these. I’ve not been to a Cypriot bar like the one he describes, but I could smell its drink-stained walls, hear the familiar hubbub of patrons, and see my way into his dingy, unsafe but much loved flat. I read a story like that, and I have a whole world bubble up in my mind. I see a short story, a setting, there is so much potential. It makes me think, I would have loved an experience like that – and I think that because it takes distance to realise how much those days truly mean. Living in rural Wales my whole life, there have always been a few pubs I can go in where everybody knows my name, the drink I have, and what I do. The town where I currently live there are three pubs where this is the case. I can go in them just once a month and they remember. I know all the regulars and can have the same drunken conversations again and again. This is why my ...

W. Somerset Maugham wrote ‘The Summing Up’ in 1938. He was sixty-four years old, and his greatest literary achievements – ‘Of Human Bondage’, ‘Cakes and Ales’, ‘The Moon and the Sixpence’ amongst others – were all behind him. The world in which he lived was about to enter into a bloody war, and society as he understood it as a younger man had changed irrevocably. At was at this crossroads in his own life and the life of the world that he felt the need to sum up all that he knew. ‘The Summing Up’ is a blend of material: it is autobiography, writer’s guide, and philosophical treatise. Late on in the book he writes, “The best homage we can pay to the great figures of the past… is to treat them not with reverence, but with the familiarity we should exercise if they were our contemporaries.” Somerset Maugham has become one of the great figures of our literary past, but when one reads his books his world retains familiarity, though the days he describes have long passed. I ...

Okay blog, I admit it, I’m a crap friend. I set you up, fill you with high expectations, only to dash them all. But I’m back. And hopefully for more than just one post! So what’s new? I wrote - and failed to sell –a CBBC pilot – something of which I’m still proud. I’m convinced the BBC Writersroom only rejected it because of a two scene similarity with Back To The Future. Their rejection letter singled those two scenes out more than any other – but beyond those scenes they were full of praise – great characters, cinematic presentation, snappy dialogue. They did feel I hadn’t quite got modern 16 year old speak down perfectly at all times, but that was a more minor quibble. Nevertheless, I still think this pilot has great potential. I’m thinking of adapting it to a YA novel. I wrote – and failed to sell – a CBeebies pilot. I didn’t want to write for CBeebies, but the opportunity was there and so I had to go for it. I think the show I came up with was ...