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Bridget Blankley<\/strong>, Art History MA student tells us what life in lockdown is like for a writer<\/p>\n What do you call a writer who isn\u2019t writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n In my case it\u2019s a research student. After staring at a blank page for too many months I told my publisher that I was taking a break and signed up for an MA in art history. (But perhaps it would help if you didn\u2019t mention this to my supervisor. It\u2019s best if she thinks I\u2019m motivated by a love of conceptual art rather than my inability to progress with my day job.)<\/p>\n The plan seemed to be working, I was enjoying being a student again, and I was writing again \u2013 then we were hit by Covid-19. Like so many people, my ability to concentrate seemed to be inversely proportional to the amount of time I spent indoors. Before long I\u2019d got out of the habit of writing every day. My supervisor understood, unfortunately my publisher didn\u2019t. I had to remind myself what made me start writing in the first place. My last book, The Ghosts and Jamal<\/strong><\/em>, was about a teenage boy who made a 600Km journey through Nigeria (with a little help) in search of somewhere to call home.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t mean to set it in Nigeria, I wrote it after I saw a kid in a refugee camp on the news – that\u2019s the problem with writing, the book takes on a life of its own. I used to get annoyed when I heard authors saying that they didn\u2019t know what their characters would do next, but it\u2019s true. Well, it\u2019s almost true, I knew the how the book would end from the moment I wrote the first sentence. What I didn\u2019t realise was that, without meaning to, I had set the story in Nigeria, where I grew up. That\u2019s another thing about authors, we write what we know, we change names and move locations, but if you look closely enough, you find that we\u2019ve hidden part of ourselves in our books.<\/p>\n You can buy the Ghosts and Jamal<\/strong><\/em> directly from the publisher HopeRoad, or order it from your local independent bookshop. And look out for my next, post-Covid novel, which will be set in the murky world of animal trafficking.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.hoperoadpublishing.com\/the_ghosts_and_jamal<\/a><\/p>\n Bridget Blankley, Art History MA student tells us what life in lockdown is like for a writer What do you call a writer who isn\u2019t writing? In my case it\u2019s a research student. After staring at a blank page for too many months I told my publisher that I was taking a break and signed … Continue reading “What do you call a writer who isn\u2019t writing?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":572,"featured_media":890,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/culturalcalendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/culturalcalendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/culturalcalendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/culturalcalendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/572"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/culturalcalendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/culturalcalendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":892,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/culturalcalendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions\/892"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/culturalcalendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/culturalcalendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/culturalcalendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/culturalcalendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/culturalcalendar\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/70\/2020\/06\/ghosts-and-jamal-188x300.jpg\")
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