I recently stumbled across a long overlooked essay by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Before being shared on the MIT website, ‘On Creativity’ had been gathering dust for nearly fifty years in a filing cabinet at the Allied Research Associates, a thinktank tasked with generating ‘outside the box’ ideas…

Today is a big day for me. It’s the UK launch of my book ‘Creative Demons & How to Slay Them’. I’d like to share 7 things I’ve learned about writing a book in the hope that it’s helpful to any other unlucky soul burdened by the suspicion that they…

Well, let’s start with the obvious: the image of the boy. This is no ordinary photograph of a child. Those grey green eyes blast you out of your complacency as you flick through the newspaper. They’re big, in close up and they break the fourth wall. Yet Kiran Master’s image…

Most of the time when we encounter a work of art it is because the artist sought an audience. Painters hang their paintings in galleries, musicians play gigs and make records, and writers write to be published. So it’s rare to encounter an exceptional creative endeavour whose intended audience was…

If you’re a creative person, perhaps someone who makes a living from their imagination, then there’s a good chance that you were first inspired to pick up a pen, a camera, or a paintbrush by looking at the some of the best work in your chosen medium. You encountered the…

There is a great deal of mysticism about the creative process. And justifiably so. No one truly knows where great ideas come from. The trouble with this mysticism is that it’s not terribly helpful when you know you have to come up with an idea quickly, say in response to…

I’m not a fan of pitch templates. There is no surer way to deaden the vitality and spark of a creative idea than to compress it awkwardly into a pre-formatted PowerPoint or Keynote document. The best pitches are those that are as creative as the ideas they’re selling. Often a…

I’m on a deadline. One of the most important deadlines I’ve ever had. In May I have to deliver my first book. The book is about creative demons. And the devilish irony is that in writing a book about self-doubt, procrastination, disappointment and constraints, I’ve experienced self-doubt, procrastination, disappointment and…

For the last few years I’ve immersed myself in the lives of great artists, writers, performers and musicians. I’ve read memoirs and biographies; listened to radio programmes and podcasts; watched documentaries and biopics. Over time I’ve discovered that almost all of them, no matter their medium, have one surprising thing…