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Browsing All Posts filed under »Writing«
Young Man’s Game?
Over on his blog, Keith Brooke has been considering the announcement of the annual Granta Best Young Novelists under 40 and, prompted by a Twitter conversation on the subject, asking: what’s the big deal with 40 anyway? And it’s a decent enough question. Why should all the attention be given to the kind of novelist […]
Not quite daily bread
March 18, 2013
Just caught up with the first instalment of the new Paul Hollywood series on BBC2. I’ve been baking my own bread for about six months and, I think, getting steadily better at it. Lunches in the respective offices in our house often comprise homemade soup (courtesy of the bidey-in) and my homemade bread. And they […]
Moving on…
March 2, 2013
So yesterday was a good day. That’s an understatement. Days like that are the rewards for working hard, and reworking harder, and then doing it again. And again. And, as soon as the moment has passed, it’s time to get on with the work again. But before I get down to it my Saturday morning session […]
Charlie says…hands off!
November 23, 2012
One of the risks of being the kind of writer who has more ideas than they can focus on at any one time (and that pretty much is *all* writers, right?) is that sooner or later one of your really good back burner ideas will get picked up and used by someone else. Their treatment […]
Cutting room
November 21, 2012
Heading out in a moment or two for my lunchtime session of “making a long book noticeably shorter”, it strikes me how much I’m enjoying the process. In early drafts my tendency is to sprinkle the words around to make sure I get the atmosphere across or provide a bit of scaffolding for a scene. […]
Spark
November 5, 2012
I touched upon this a little in my Toronto post, but something that’s been running around my mind recently has been the value of inspiration. With the state of the book industry the way it is you might think writers would be tempted to play it safe and aim for writing the kinds of stories […]
Silvergold bright and edgechill
October 7, 2012
My favourite season has always been autumn. On a bright September or October morning, I love the balance between sun warmth and air chill, an excuse to pull on a jumper and enjoy the caress of wool. And I love the clarity of the light, not slow and honeyed like a summer morning, but gimlet […]
Writer’s Holiday
September 22, 2012
Everyone knows that writers don’t take holidays. Their brains just aren’t wired that way. They’re always switched on, receptive to ideas and chewing them into the building blocks of stories. The problem for many writers, in fact, is having enough time in their lives to get those stories written down, in words, on screens, and […]
Working music
September 14, 2012
There are two types of writer: those who find it difficult to write with music on, and those who find it difficult to write without it. From the former group, the most common complaint is that music is a distraction: that it disrupts their ability to concentrate on the rhythm of the prose, that they need […]
Dead Darlings
September 12, 2012
When I began the project I’m editing at the moment, there was one scene that for me summed up perfectly what I wanted the story to be about. It was the heart and the touchstone. It was the workings of the whole thing in microcosm. And it was literally the first thing I wrote when […]
April 18, 2013
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