Slow Is Fast, Fast Is Slow
I always want things to go faster than they do. As soon as I figure out what’s possible, I tear off immediately, trying to make it happen as fast as I can. Sometimes this pays off. Being decisive and having a bias for action are excellent traits when you own your own business. But a…
Creativity Doesn’t Need Your Pain
Today I read a piece on Brain Pickings (which, despite its awful name is full of interesting philosophical essays), about the loneliness of creative work. And while I love the writers referenced in the piece — Rachel Carson, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway — this particular essay pissed me off. The idea that creative work has to be…
Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
Last week I wrote that when you know yourself, you know what to do. I believe that’s true. But I also believe that ‘knowing yourself’ is both a) not as simple as it sounds, and b) a lifelong process. It’s about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. Figuring out what really matters to you, what doesn’t matter,…
Write About What’s Good
One of the unfortunate quirks of the human brain is that it’s much easier for us to fixate on everything that’s bad in our lives than it is to see all the good (aka the ‘negativity bias’). We ruminate endlessly on our mistakes, constantly overthink, and get ourselves down about everything we’re not good at…
Test Your Assumptions
On the morning of the second of April last year, my sweetheart and I were loitering in a carpark down by Lisbon’s train and ferry terminal. It was mostly empty, the first Covid lockdown just having come into effect. It was eery, and when the dark van pulled up in front of us, we were…
Leave This Part Out
Right now I’m reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong. It’s powerful and vivid, and I’m trying to go slowly rather than racing through it like I usually do with novels. The thing that has struck me most about this book is what’s not in it. Vuong has made a whole art form of…
When You Know Who You Are, You Know What To Do
Today I was chatting with my agent about some pitch material for my new book, and I was trying to distill its essence down into a single line. And ultimately, after maybe 20 minutes of back and forth about this, it came to me: When you know who you are, you know what to do.…
Creativity’s Tangly Twin
Your best work is behind you. It’s all downhill from here. It’s one of my worst fears. It’s certainly the most poisonous — starting out small in the back of my brain on the days I’m feeling flat, and steadily ballooning until it’s taken over my brain entirely. You’re done. You fluked it. Things have…
Lessons From The Dog Whisperer
In order to go on our little holiday last week, we left a very anxious Obi with one of his favourite aunties, who has definitely been a dog whisperer in at least one previous life. Not only has his play-biting habit vanished, but she had him out in the park at 7am for a few…
Happy All The Time
It has been slowly coming to my attention in the past few months that I have, for many years, been quite the literary snob. If I’m being perfectly honest, it’s something I cultivated without thinking too much about it. Much of my thinking was roundly dismissive — commercial women’s fiction has little to offer the intellectual…