John Baker’s Blog

The charm of a character in fiction is not achieved directly. It is useless to try to describe it in a lift of the shoulder or the twinkle of an eye. For so important an ingredient your reader will only take the word of another trusted character, and only then, if that second character has [...]

1. Why do you blog?
Because I want to be immortal. Maybe in the waning years of my life I would want to indulge in my thoughts and preoccupations over those hidden periods in my life. It’s like a diary, but a diary that I can open any time, anywhere and read.
2. Which author and/or book [...]

We were at a reading by JM Coetzee at the University this afternoon.
Coetzee’s early life was in South Africa. In the early sixties he lived in England, working as a computer programmer while doing research for a thesis on the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Later in that decade he was in Texas studying for [...]