Railway stations are rarely quiet. Even when nobody is speaking, they have their own vocabulary. Footsteps. Brakes. Announcements delivered in a voice calm enough to suggest that missing your train is a minor administrative detail. A suitcase with one damaged wheel. The distant metallic sound of something arriving before you can see it. Stations are … Read more
Rain is one of the oldest tricks in storytelling. Writers have been using it for so long that I sometimes feel the weather deserves representation. Need sadness? Rain. Need tension? More rain. Need someone to stand beneath a streetlight and reconsider every decision they have made since childhood? Heavy rain. It is effective. Perhaps too … Read more
I have a habit of walking through unfamiliar cities without knowing where I am going. This sounds more romantic than it is. Most of the time, it involves taking a wrong turn, refusing to admit it for several streets, and eventually discovering that the interesting building in the distance is considerably less interesting when viewed … Read more
I have never entirely trusted photographs. This is probably unfair. A photograph does exactly what we ask of it. It captures a fraction of a second and keeps it with remarkable discipline. We are the unreliable ones. We return years later and expect the photograph to explain what happened. It cannot. It can show us … Read more
I buy notebooks with unreasonable optimism. Every time I open a new one, I seem to believe I have become a different kind of person. Organised. Disciplined. Possibly even someone who writes dates at the top of pages. This illusion rarely survives the first week. By page twelve, there is a sentence without context, the … Read more
Every city has a street people stop seeing. Visitors notice it immediately. They look up at the buildings. They read signs. They stop without warning in the middle of the pavement and cause small traffic accidents involving irritated locals and takeaway coffee. Locals simply walk. I find this fascinating. Familiarity is supposed to make us … Read more
I have a simple test for characters. I imagine having coffee with them. Nothing happens. There is no mystery to solve. No message arrives. Nobody is watching from across the street. The waiter is not secretly connected to an organisation that disappeared twenty years ago. It is just coffee. The question is whether I would … Read more
I spend a surprising amount of time looking at maps. Not because I am particularly good at reading them. I am not. Maps are very good at telling you where things are. Streets. Rivers. Railway stations. Bridges. They can show you the fastest route between two points and, increasingly, warn you that someone has decided … Read more
Stories rarely begin with page one. By the time a reader reaches the first chapter, hundreds of decisions have already been made. Most of them will never appear on the page. A city has been chosen. A street has been walked, at least in the imagination. Someone has stood beside a window that does not … Read more