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Time is a hard-won tool, but once a writer earns some time they can spend it when they please. Some writers are larks, arriving at their desks before dawn; some are owls and can only work when everyone else is in bed. Some prefer to write just after the lunch rush at their favourite coffee shop. Writers can work at midday or at midnight; at dawn or dusk or only between 3pm and 6pm. Time, once earned, is flexible.

Action: Hiding in the bathroom at a family party because there are no more words to explain why you’re still single or why you don’t have a proper job or why you’ve styled your hair in that funny way.
Do Read: If you like your family then read Bad Science by Ben Goldacre for something interesting to start a debate about; if you don’t like your family then read Maggots, Murder and Men by Dr Zakaria Erzinclioglu for tips on how to dispose of the bodies.

I would never purposefully hurt someone’s feelings in my daily life, but in writing everyone I’ve ever met is just fodder for stories. For reasons I can’t really justify, I think this is acceptable. If creative writing is a merging of experience and imagination, then what do writers really have except what happens to them? All I know to write about is my life, and if other people happen to be present for those experiences - or to cause them - then of course they have to be part of the story too. So I wrote about those people, and I never told them.

by Kirsty Logan
When I was four years old, my father sat next to my bed and read ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ aloud to me as I fell asleep. His voice got deeper and quieter as he drifted off, the poem so familiar he didn’t need to refer to the book in his [...]