Tag: Tracy Ryan

Tracy Ryan What are you able to build with your blocks? Castles and palaces, temples and docks. Rain may keep raining, and others go roam, But I can be happy and building at home. (Robert Louis Stevenson, “Block City”) The imaginative nature of the writer’s life suggests intuitively that it’s linked to earlier play in childhood, and of course Freud makes this connection explicit in his famous if inevitably limited essay/speech, “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” (1907). I say limited because Freud does not develop in it all the ideas he raises, and many of his points are arguable. Nevertheless,…

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Tracy Ryan Novels about writers are sometimes decried as running the risk of being boring, self-indulgent, or failing in imagination, as if their author was doing nothing more than lazily transcribing from his or her own life. And perhaps to some degree that risk is quite real, since the main activity of a writer is often solitary, quiet, assiduous, and looks dull from the outside… Planning, note-taking, researching, thinking, revising, scrapping and starting again – hardly the stuff of high drama. Maybe that’s why popular films about real-life, historic writers almost never show them actually writing – how static would…

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Tracy Ryan We probably all have our list of favourites from early in life, but what about the books it took us a lifetime to get to, the ones we’d heard about but never got around to reading, or that had never crossed our path, till much later? Sometimes these belated reads can come like a bolt out of the blue, just when you thought your reading tastes had either stagnated or at least settled into the shape they were always likely to take. For me the first of these bolts from the blue was the French novelist and general…

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Tracy Ryan Over the last decade or so I’ve become increasingly interested in suspense fiction. Though “suspense” is an element in most fiction, I mean the sort where it’s the main engine or driver of the work. Suspense is a crucial factor in, say, detective stories and thrillers, but even those are not exactly what I mean, though there’s some overlap. At fourteen I was an Agatha Christie addict – and I still admire the skill with which her books are constructed, as well as those written by many others in the genre, or those who have innovated within the…

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