Week 4. Day 7. Quiet

How are you going with your daily writing prompts, I wonder? I hope that you are beginning to remember your own creative instinct. I hope that you are casting aside the inner editor and making mess on the page. I hope that you are connecting playfully with your own...

Week 4. Day 6. Babble

Have you seen that viral video of two babies talking to each other in a kitchen? Nappies dangling, they slap their thighs, wave their arms around in front of the fridge and nod vigorously as they have a lengthy and intense conversation conducted entirely in babble....

Week 4. Day 5. Listen up

Last year I visited the Opera House to see a play with some friends, one of whom is a playwright. Outside, during the interval, we began posing jokingly for selfies (or “facies” as my mother used to call them). A woman standing near us asked that universal tourist...

Week 4. Day 4. White Fang it

In Week Two, I asked you to think about the artists who are your role models – to consider those artists, dead or alive who make you want to create more, who make you want to stretch to your full promise. Today, I want to dig more deeply into that question. Some years...

Week 4. Day 3. Connect with the body

A few years ago I went to see a dance-theatre production in Spain, Ponte en sus Zapatos, a physical theatre exploration of the concept of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. (The title literally translates as ‘Put yourself in their shoes”). At one point, each of...

Week 4. Day 2. Find your Mrs Brown

In 1924 the young novelist Virginia Woolf stood in front of a group of students at the University of Cambridge, to speak about the state of the novel. Her talk became the basis for one of her most famous essays, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, which she published the...