"When you’re writing a novel, it’s agony. It’s complete agony. It’s a horrible thing to put yourself through. All of the instinctive kind of rushes of creativity, the energized outpourings, anybody can do that. That’s not what makes you a writer. The bit of this job that makes you a writer is when you don’t feel like that. When you feel like you never deserved to even imagine that you could have been a writer. When you hate every word that you’ve made. When you doubt every single part of your brain. To sit down in that space and work because you’ve got a deadline to meet, because you’ve got a novel to write. You know to ignore your brain in that moment, because your brain is defeating you. You have to be able to trust your hand."– Kate Tempest, in this episode Kate Tempest is a force of nature. She won the coveted Ted Hughes award for her epic poem Brand New Ancients, which she toured internationally as a stage show to massive critical acclaim. Her novelistic 2014 rap album Everybody Down takes hip-hop in entirely new directions. And with 2016's The Bricks That Built the Houses, she has reworked these ideas into a deeply moving and powerful novel (her first) about four friends in her native South London. Our conversation starts here, with the challenges and discipline of novel-writing and travels through deep and personal territory, as Kate talks passionately about art and the human heart in our "tragic and troubling times". NOT TO BE MISSED: Kate's breathtaking, spontaneous poetic monologue at the very end of the show. On this week's episode of Think Again - A Big Think Podcast, Kate and host Jason Gots go deep into these topics and more. Surprise discussion clips in this episode: Augusten Burroughs on writer's block and William Shatner on science and imagination. Kate Tempest song sampled in the show: Europe is LostLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices