We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.
I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.
An eerie atmosphere leeched from the soot-damaged walls. It was as if the house had died, and yet she felt she belonged here. It was as if the old place wanted to claim her from the grave.
You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before...
The library is a symbol of freedom.
When you're depressed you retreat and you go into a smaller world. This is why Brighton worked well for the story, because it's a smaller world than London.
As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going...
When the first book out my sister-in-law read it and we were chatting at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and she said, "Oh my God, chapter six, sex and a murder," and her five year old wandered into the ki...
Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.
I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.
For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.
Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think.
This is the cusp of an age at least as exciting and as brimful of potential as the early days of the printing press.
I am completely unflustered by whichever medium people choose to read my words. I'm just delighted they're reading them at all!
The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial.
I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing...
I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good.
Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind.
He didn’t look as if he’d been through a whirlwind exactly but he’d certainly endured a stiff breeze.
We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.
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