Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes "I woke up and it was all a dream" at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it's a cop-out, it's the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

On the table is a pot of tea Jasper doesn’t recall making, the core of an apple he doesn’t recall eating, and a page of staves, notes, and lyrics he knows he wrote.

For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, meters of ink ribbon, and pints of Tippex. Poor sods.

And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.

Only one-tenth of what you write will make it into your manuscript, but when you knock on that tenth” – I rap my knuckles on the table – “you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue.

Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat." "Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me." "But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.