Sometimes writing is a challenge. We sit at our desks, pens in hand or fingers poised over the keyboard and….[drum roll]…… NOTHING. I had a spell like this during lock down last June. With no where to go and no one to see, I had plenty of time to write but every day, I sat in the garden, and laboured away with limited success and much frustration. Finally, I remembered something important (the cure for writer’s block!). Writing is not the only work.

Like everyone else with a Netflix account, I was obsessed with the first season of Stranger Things. The Stephen King font and creepy opening music, the retro 80s vibe, that nerdy kid with no teeth....all of it hooked me.

A podcast I love is Imaginary Worlds, a show about "how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief." Even though I'm not a sci fi/ fantasy nut, I'm hooked on this show. Mainly because it gets at what I am interested in: story telling and fiction-making.

The most recent episode, on the topic of character, is especially instructive. Good versus evil and all the shades (six, to be exact) in between.

You know when you’re baking, cracking eggs into a bowl and one is rotten? This happened to me once: the green and grey ooze slipped between my fingers, the sulphur turned my stomach. A bad book is a rotten egg. That stink, it lingers. When I say bad book I don’t mean purple prose or dud dialogue. When I say bad, I mean dangerous.

Recently in a fiction workshop someone asked the question every sensible writer dreads: how do I write characters who are outside my own personal experience, who are not white/ straight/ cis? I say that every sensible writer dreads this question because in my experience the ones who steam roll right in with more bluster than caution are morons. And their lazy attitude is doing everyone - their readers, their characters, and other writers - a disservice.