What do you enjoy most about writing?

I’ve written four books. Two non-fiction books were academic books published by Loughborough Design Press. These were relatively easy to write because I was writing about a subject I had enormous knowledge of: art and creativity. In Drawing for Science, I joined this knowledge with the history of science, which took a lot of research to do. It was complex, not least of all to get my facts right, but it was fun. Professor Alice Roberts wrote the foreword for the book, and it sold quite well. My next book, Drawing to Learn Anything, was my attempt to show how drawing can help people learn. I’m enormously proud of that book, and I got a kick out of writing it. Getting a book published is hard. The publisher really scrutinises every word and puts you through the wringer to make sure it is right. I then self-published a book of short stories about my own life and teaching days. I wrote it all in a café and used pseudonyms to protect people’s identities. It was effortless to write and great fun, but I think it lacked that publisher’s touch to iron out the faults. At its heart it is funny and heart-warming.

What I really love is telling stories. My novel, The Arthrobot Scriptures, was very tough to write because it was a work of fiction. It is incredibly difficult to write a good story, I think. When you read a good story, it absorbs you and takes over you. You become the character. So to write something like that, something prosaic, something poignant, something that paints such a vivid picture that your audience is captivated, takes enormous skill. And it’s harder to do that when the whole thing is imagined. You have to weave a compelling narrative, structure a good plot that is set at just the right pace, construct authentic characters with strong backstories, and place everything in a fictional world of your own creation. That’s why it is so much harder than non-fiction.

These days, I just enjoy writing my blog. The daily prompt is a challenge, and I like interspersing my responses to it with philosophical posts about my own spiritual journey. I hope they resonate with other people and that in some way, I can help other people find meaning and peace on their own journey through life.