Suw Charman-Anderson's Blog

Plus working class writers, and the cats of Porto.

The Duoro River flowing through Porto with the historic port cellars on the left, the Ribeira on the right, and the marine layer coming in from the Atlantic over the Ponte da Arrábida.

Hi there,

After a marvellous week off in Porto and a bank holiday yesterday, I’m now back at my desk looking at the apple tree from my office window and thinking about ideas.

Whilst on holiday, I woke up one morning with a fully formed idea for a TV drama, complet...

Plus, what Labour can learn from South Korea, Richard Osman and Marina Hyde on the Edinburgh Fringe, and an update on Grabbity’s health.

Hi there,

We’re having another one of those melty days as I write this, so I’ve moved down to the lounge where it is cooler and am now surrounded by cats who think that they ought to be snuggling me. Much as I would love to have a cuddle, it’s 27c down here (I hate to think how hot it is up in my office), I have a wet tea towel cooling my feet, and the the last...

Charlie Riedel’s amazing photograph of Simone Biles at the Paris Olympics

Gymnasts get the twisties. Golfers get the yips. Can writers get the typies?

In 2021, gymnast Simone Biles pulled out of the Tokyo Olympics saying that she was “having a little bit of the twisties”. Last week, she was back at the Olympics in Paris, once again performing incredible feats of gymnastics and demonstrating the grace and strength that has made her famous.

But what are the twisties, and what do they have to do wi...

Plus genre hopping, top UK streamers, the ‘nivali’ mystery, and a fresh-faced Grabbity.

Hi there,

When I was a kid, my Dad defined summer as “Three sunny days and a thunderstorm”, and this week appears to be cleaving to that prognostication. And just as summer seems to be coming in random chunks this year, so is Covid, because I’m currently enduring my second bout in five weeks. It’s much milder this time round, which is something to be grateful for, I suppose. But I’m still hacked off that I mi...

It’s just utterly boggling my mind, all the weird concern trolling and catastrophising that people are doing about the new Labour gov’t. Not just from Tories either – most of what I’m seeing is from people I know to be left-leaning. Concerns no one had about the last Tory landslide are suddenly common currency.

Firstly, when did was start expecting a gov’t to ‘win hearts and minds’ as well as a majority? Did the Tories win hearts and minds in 2019? 2017? 2015? 2010? Did Blair in 2005 or 2001? Pe...

It might be a messy, complicated thing with a variety of causes and potential solutions, but it absolutely does exist.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks since my last newsletter. I finished the first draft of Fieldwork, my half-hour sitcom pilot script, and wrote about how much prep went into it, compared to the 8 hours and 41 minutes it took to write. And there’s been a lot going on with the day job, which is all to say that when I came to write this week’s newsletter, I really wasn’t sure what ...

Plus some more publishing industry angst and a detailed rebuttal.

Hi there,

At the end of the last newsletter, I promised to share my excess links on Substack Notes or Bluesky. Well, that was two weeks ago, and I’m afraid I got a bit busy. That’s probably a good thing, because I was so busy that I’ve not been doing my usual reading and listening and am a bit short of stories this week. This newsletter might be a bit lighter on links than usual, but as I was the right kind of busy, I hope you won...

How Shaun of the Dead, Ted Lasso and Cabin Pressure use callbacks and repetition to create gags, move the plot forward and develop characters.

It’s been a couple of months since I’ve written about the insights I’ve gleaned from Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone, so this week I’m taking on his rather rambling chapter on Narrative Structure which, ironically, shows very little actual narrative structure. Despite its messiness, Johnstone makes a couple of useful points, the fi...

Plus audiobook news, Colleen Hoover’s writer’s block, SFF book length advice, and the state of British TV.

Hi there,

I’ve got a veritable smorgasbord of links for you today, so I’m breaking away from my usual newsletter format and where I’ve got a lot of related links I’m grouping them by theme, otherwise this would be a very, very long newsletter!

Also, happy Three-Quarters-Of-A-Century Newsletter to me! Yes, this is my 75th Word Count newsletter, which also coincides with the arrival of my 300...

What does science have to tell us about writer’s block?

A couple of years ago, Sarah J Ahmed and C Dominik Güss from the University of North Florida published a paper, An Analysis of Writer’s Block: Causes and Solutions, in the Creativity Research Journal (£/academic access required). It’s a fascinating read that has quite a lot to teach us about writer’s block and its potential solutions.

Ahmed and Güss recruited both fiction and non-fiction writers via various writing organisations, s...