Do negative emotions make for better creative decisions?

Do negative emotions during the creative practice make for better decisions as a writer?
That’s one suggestion that comes from the recent article by Jonah Lehrer on the ‘upside’ of sadness. Lehrer examines research, published in Psychological Review by Andy Thompson and Paul Andrews, psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist, which offers the idea that sadness and depression [...]

Ian Jack on the unsteady British

A twitterishly short post as I wait for A to arrive by train in Oxford. I’ve read through half of Ian Jack’s collection of writings The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain and — at this point — the words of the unsteady, the unstable, the unhinged — are peeking out at me from the [...]

Writing destitution: some ideas

I’m involved in a new project to look at homelessness and destitution. The idea is to get a wide spectrum of writers either telling their own or retelling the stories of others, leading to a theatrical or film project, to update some of the ideas and emotions found in, say, Orwell’s Down and Out in [...]

In writing, don’t chase your themes

I’m off to see Peter Brook’s 11 and 12 in April at Northern Stage. On Radio 4 a few weeks ago, a fellow guest on Start the Week challenged Peter (and Lucy Prebble, the playwright behind the story of Enron) on how a writer could not be aware of the themes of her/his writing. Surely, [...]

Tense affects between creative & critical

I’ve just put in my abstract for the PhD conference here in Newcastle in April: ‘Creative Friction – How do the different modes of creative practice intersect with the world of traditional academia?’
The theme looks at how the two parts of a creative practice PhD – the critical and creative – interact, and what are [...]

Writing balance between ‘doing’ and ‘being’

This week I began a set of sessions focused on personal development and coaching, courtesy of the prize money attached to a Teaching Innovation award I won from my employer (a UK-based university). I only half-joke that my employer is paying for me to find a way to a new career.
Gut Feeling
It wasn’t too far [...]