John Baker’s Blog

What phases are involved in the creation of a text?
In terms of my experience of creating a story, the framed Beckett quote ripped from a magazine that hangs over my desk offers a rough guide: ‘Try again, fail again, fail better.’
As to how that translates into the phases of creating a text, I’m almost embarrassed [...]

The Meanest Flood is the sixth novel in the Sam Turner Series and was born out of a cocktail of ideas. The main aim when I began the narrative was to get Sam and Geordie away from York. To give them an outing away from their usual surroundings. This came from a preoccupation with the [...]

In the lives of many of us there comes about a place that replaces our childhood home. A place that becomes a second spiritual home, closer in some ways than our original home. For writers and perhaps for some readers this can be a fictional place. One thinks of the landscapes of writers like Daphne [...]

A sense of belonging, of having a past that helps to explain you and perhaps went a long way to making and moulding you, comes through strongly in the fiction of such diverse novelists as Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner, of Graham Greene, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Gustav Flaubert. Not to mention contemporary authors like [...]