When it comes to arts funding, we’re doing it wrong. We need to come at it from another angle, if we really want to bring writers, artists and filmmakers to their full and climactic potential. It’s a pun-filled manifesto.
Every writer with a day job dreams of writing full-time. It’s the holy grail of writerdom. But what’s it really like? Is the reality different from the dream? And what is it going to mean for your bathroom?
Hardly anybody is achieving writing greatness in their 20s anymore. Why is this? Have we become complacent? Or is our arrested development entirely down to antibiotics, narcissism, and an inability to properly research an article making a grand sweeping statement?
Did you know that Facebook is reading your WhatsApp messages? Or that it’s scanning all the apps on your phone? Did you think that internet browsing histories were only good for crime thrillers? Think again. Because Facebook has written the book on you.
Why do so many female comedians struggle to be taken funnily? Is your mother to blame? Do you like broad beans? And why is there an ‘X’ in First Person?
Why is everybody writing personal stuff these days? Do we have to talk about ourselves in order to get cultural traction? How much do you really want to know about somebody, and have you read personal things you wish you hadn’t?
When we mourn famous people we’ve never met, we’re also mourning the people we once were. And that’s okay. Because there’s a lot of feeling wrapped up in all that.
The Secret Actress is currently writing anonymously for the Guardian newspaper about the stuff nobody will admit publicly in Hollywood. It’s time for The Secret Author to do the same for the writing community. Are you the next online Superhero?
Ten years ago we could never have envisaged a situation where we could be personally insulted by lots of people we’d never even met. Aren’t we the lucky generation to have all these opportunities, and more? What upsets us most on the internet? Is it trolls? Contradictions? Or simply someone who doesn’t agree with what we’re saying?
Batman v Superman is proving that nobody takes a blind bit of notice of 5 star reviews. They are meaningless, and yet authors and filmmakers continue to chase them relentlessly. Why? And how do we make it stop?
Tara Sparling writes 