Writer in Residence take the form of a TV-style interview and continues Sutcliffe's interest in collage as a means by which to shake certainty and to surreptitiously undermine. Sutcliffe poses the melancholic hallucination that is Adrian Leverkuhn's meeting with the Devil in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947) in direct counterpoint to the conception of positive existentialism presented by Colin Wilson in his novel The Outsider (1956) - a philosophical standpoint that was, in turn, developed through Wilson's own critique of Leverkuhn's meeting with the Devil.