When I took time in my early 30s to nurture my long-held dream of becoming a published novelist, I didn’t set out to write crime fiction. But the genre had always been part of my reading mix, and it seemed …
Events
Is It Research Or Procrastination? A Guest Post by Leah Kaminsky
The Nazis thought that they could train dogs to speak, read and spell, and that this would afford them a secret tool for espionage to help win World War II. The Tier-Sprechschule ASRA was set up in the 1930s and …
Time After The Book, or – getting in the car.
This January my new book, Imperfect, came out into the world. In it I explore how our appearance can affect our lives – the choices we make, the opportunities we are afforded, our self-concept and even personality. My own …
The Problem with Writing Trauma: Guest Post by Meera Atkinson
The title of this post is something of a misnomer, for there is more than one challenge inherent to the creative writing of trauma. The most frequent claim in trauma theory is that trauma resists representation because it is, by …
The Politics of Writing: Guest Post by John Tesarsch
My third novel, Dinner with the Dissidents, is set mainly in Soviet Russia in 1971. It is about a struggling young novelist, Leonid Krasnov, who is approached by the KGB with the promise they will make him a literary …
Starting. Again. A Guest Post by Andrew Hutchinson
Self-assessment is a critical skill for any writer, and it’s something that I’ve worked hard to develop, to find ways to establish a distance from the content, in order to see things as another reader would. But practicing this skill …
Unmasking
Once upon a time, I began my writing life the way all writers did in my dinosaur days (the 80s) – as a fiction writer. Or that was what I thought I was. ‘What you’ve written is a diary,’ the …
Looking for Self in a Bibliomemoir: Guest Post by Jane Sullivan
One of those ever-popular media stories about writers is the ‘Books that Changed Me’ feature. Writers are asked to name outstanding books in their reading memory that have wrought some deep change. Often they name the great classics: War and …
To Know Place: Guest Post by Cassandra Atherton
I am a terrible traveller: I get motion sickness, I’m a germophobe, I always pack too much stuff, I melt down when I can’t get wifi and I lose things at inopportune moments. So, I’ve often asked myself whether I …
Re-drafting in Isolation: Guest Post by Angela Meyer
At a crucial stage of writing my debut novel, A Superior Spectre, I travelled to the Scottish isles of Islay and Jura. I had been to Scotland three times already, but on this occasion I wanted to experience the …