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Man booker prize winning author, DBC Pierre’s book Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out of It offers sound counsel on how to write a novel.  The hardest thing about writing he says isn’t putting words on paper, but keeping himself at the table long enough to do something.  The key is to release the bats and let the imagination run free on paper.  He argues that the most important thing for both writer and reader is to get the engine, that is, the brain, running.  You can spend a whole chapter describing a beautiful beach, and it might conjure images in your mind, but when you put one abandoned shoe on the beach, then the engine is running.

Kei Miller is an award-winning Jamaican poet, and novelist.  Kei’s novel Augustown is a vivid modern fable peopled by mysterious oddities, which brings together the past and the present in the events of one day. Writing a novel he says should be a journey of discovery for the writer as well as the reader, and his characters only revealed themselves to him little by little, sentence by sentence.

Meilyr Jones is a singer songwriter who seeks inspiration in all forms of art and literature.  He says he finds it hard to separate himself from the world around him and in his songs he grabs everything that comes into his head.  That lack of discipline he says can be both emboldening, but also very dangerous.

Mark Haddon is author of the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but he’s also written short stories.  The process of writing in the long and short form, he argues, is not that different, but the short story is more about the physical details of the world. A huge influence on his writing is Paul Farley, whose poems contain very few human beings, but are so haunted by human presence.