I’ve read my fair share of writing guides – I'm inordinately slow at figuring out how to write a book and it doesn’t seem to be getting easier – but Sol Stein’s struck me as particularly useful because of its stance. Look at that title: the implication here is you’re going to have problems.

It’s an old book but its posture feels refreshing and new. Most fiction-writing manuals give you a guide to writing from the blank page forwards, and as a result have a sort of baked-in breezy optimism. Simple, they seem to say, just build your story this way and there won’t be any hiccups.

Sol Stein though, was an editor. He knew that first, second, even third drafts of novels are a hot mess; misfiring structure, flat characters; plots beset with myriad problems. He assumes you’re already writing something shonky and you need help, and that perspective is sooo useful.

If you want convincing, take this: “There are eleven matters to think about before beginning,” Stein writes, “twenty-three to refer to while writing, six ways to get unstuck, and twenty-two matters to think about while revising.” Then he lists them for you.

​It’s like having Yoda on your shoulder.      

I was in Grizedale Forest, Cumbria, recently, enjoying some fine Lake District rain. The visitor centre had an exhibition of David Nash’s sculpture. Nash was artist in residence at Grizedale in the eighties and produced some of his most iconic work there; if you don’t know his vibe, it’s sculpted shapes, some figurative others abstract, hewn from fallen trees.

Some are beautiful, others twisted, wizened, magical. And one, Running Table, scared the actual snot out of me.

Nash, I’m pretty sure, would be disappointed and puzzled by this reaction. I can’t imagine giving the viewer nightmares was top of his list of intentions when he assembled the piece. I’m not going to describe it here – words couldn’t do this thing-of-horror justice – but what I will say with some confidence is that Nash isn’t a fan of jump-scare movies.

Where he sees a table, I see a monster.

It’s a crooked, terrifying thing that recalls the strange forest god from The Ritual. It looks like it moves in painful loping strides; part dead, part alive like the combination of man and machine at the end of The Fly.

​Most frightening table ever? Google it, folks, and see for yourself.

When I was a kid, my dad played me Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 LP Alice’s Restaurant and I was hooked. Back then I had genuinely no idea you could use a song to tell a story, thinking lyrics were all confessional, first-person and largely abstract. I blame too much Joni Mitchell.

I’ve loved songs that tell stories ever since, and this week I’ve found myself returning to my fave example of a macabre subset of narrative song-writing, the murder ballad. Ladies and gents – I give you Blitzen Trapper’s Black River Killer. It’s a tale that begins in LA and features a victim whose (spoiler alert!) ‘mouth was sewn shut but eyes were still wide.’ Of course our sorry narrator gets thrown in jail for the crime, and stares at the graffiti on his jail-cell wall wondering whether he'd rather shuffle off this mortal coil than remain incarcerated.

Then the warden shells out ‘five dollars and a second-hand suit’ and lets our singer go. Bad move, lawman - two more killings follow, both brutal and remorseless before, in a sinister final scene, our murderer takes a bath and a shave in the Black River, and, portentously, sharpens his knife.

Pretty nasty, huh?

Carpenter’s movie – the original slasher – came out in ’78 so I was too young for it. I watched it once in my twenties, once again more recently and then, to really get into the spirit of the season, I listened to a Rewatchables episode on it yesterday.

And I confess I hadn’t quite grasped the movie’s significance until Simmons and Ryan dissected its history and context during their discussion. It’s like that with certain experiences right – what seems the unremarkable fabric of your cultural tapestry turns out to have been a big frickin’ deal back in the day.

Like for example it was the first ever movie to put together what seems head-slappingly obvious now; Hallowe’en and a killer disguised in seasonal fancy dress. And there’s more: it was the first example of the stalker vs babysitter trope, the second(?) example of the final-girl trope, the first time a movie had ever been called Hallowe’en (that hadn’t occurred to someone before ’78?) and an early example of a killer being overtly masked in a sinister way.
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It seems quite bizarre that in the winter of 1977, none of the above existed. None. I mean – what the hell were we thinking?   

Locke and Key played a significant role in my life through the years it was serialised.

I started out reading it in 2008, a happy-go-lucky, kid-free thirty-something unpublished author; ended in 2013 as a dad and legit writer with a soon-to-be published debut novel. It’s a visceral, violent and magical sequence of stories that have an effortlessness that suggests a sort of inevitability. The kind of story that makes you go Of course! Why hasn’t that been done before? Also the sort you put on a high shelf so the (now ten-year-old) kid can’t reach ‘em.

Its prominent place in my affections goes some way to explaining my reluctance to watch the Netflix show. I saw S1E1, then put it all on hold in case it was going to screw everything up for me. But I have been able to enjoy the magnificent score. Torin Borrowdale handles sentiment exceptionally well, going for a palette of strings and French horn that recall Thomas Newman’s work for Shawshank or Green Mile. Sprinkled cymbals, plucked harp strings, a plaintive oboe… yeah, it’s good stuff.
 
For a writer who like me, who works to cinematic background music it (mostly? almost mostly?) hits the right notes.