A Literary Life

I’ve returned from my sojourn to the Big Smoke and my visit to Elstree Studios where I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop run by James Moran and Dan Turner, organised by Studio Five . This eight hour workshop – whose contents I won’t divulge, you can just go and pay to attend their next session – was engaging, interactive and extraordinarily informative for someone looking to break into the TV/Film writing business.   I think I learnt more practical tactics for advancing myself as a writer than I did during my whole two year M.A.   And I paid a fortune for that.   This was just £40.   A flipping steal if you ask me.   And they were funny too. What I will say about the workshops contents was that it was divided into how best to generate ideas for a script you’re developing in the first half, and the second half examining how best to put your ideas out there into the market place and how you sell them (and yourself) when someone’s mad enough to ...

I’m clearly not any good at this blogging thing.   I broke my promise, twice now.   So I can’t blog continuously for thirty days.   But I will try and blog frequently(ish) or until I got so lost in something new that I haven’t the focus any more. So what’s new?   I’m about to embark to London Town for a one day workshop with James Moran (the wonderful writer of Severance, the Pompeii episode of Doctor Who, amongst many other ghoulish outings) and Dan Turner (director of the very scary Stormhouse, written by another ghoulish writer, Jason Arnopp) so that should be fun. Insights into how to get my brand new, sparkling scripts into the hands of people with money (and hopefully the passion to throw lots of it at me to make the thing).     I’m reworking my script for the BBC Wales Drama Award 2012 – an award open to all new writers of Welsh residency that I just know is going to be swamped with material of such high quality that I’m going...

The one unassailable fact with fiction is that it will contain characters – characters that live and breathe on the page in their own unique ways.   The characters may not necessarily be human (Paul Auster’s Timbuktu [1999] is from the point of view of a dog) but there will be some quality within each character that endears them to the reader.   A qualification: this endearment may not necessarily mean that the character is likeable – think of one of the most beloved figures in British fiction, Heathcliff, and how his passion at times overwhelms into madness.   He is not, by any definition, a loveable character, and yet he is loved.   Or there is Becky Sharp, a character defined by her abrasive wit, and yet it is this that makes Thackeray’s Vanity Fair [1847–48] such a joy.    Guy de Maupassant   A sentence beloved of Ford Madox Ford and Henry James comes from the Guy de Maupassant story, Le Reine Hortense [1883] and it is this: “He ...

In 1955, Vladimir Nabokov published his most famous work, Lolita .   Lolita was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 and was fourth in the Modern Library's 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.   Its reputation is vast; its influence is bigger still.  What follows is an extract from my PhD where I discuss this novel and gives great insights into the creation of one of the greatest novels ever written. Lolita did not come to Nabokov fully formed in the mid-1950s.   In 1939, he wrote a novella that remained unpublished until 1986, following his death in 1977.   That novel, entitled The Enchanter , Nabokov would go onto describe as “the first little throb of Lolita ” in an essay that would subsequently be attached to that great novel.    Like Lolita , it is concerned with ephebophilia and the same technique of a predatory older man to gain access to his desire as Humbert Humbert...