As a young journalist and TV producer starting out in the misogynistic, rough and tumble world of commercial television in the 1980s, I quickly learnt that in order to survive, I had to hide any outward signs of vulnerability. Despite …
Life & writing lessons from Etgar Keret: A Guest Post by Laurie Steed
It is strange to consider one’s earliest male literary influences as a short story writer when one was not, at least initially, influenced by their gender. Well, I say, I wasn’t particularly influenced. There was, however, a writer who in …
Fear as a Tool for Creativity: A Guest Post by Magdalena Ball
Reading and writing are intertwined activities for me. I am drawn to reading and writing for the same reasons: to engage in a story, in different worlds, in extraordinary words. I can’t remember a time in my life when I …
Reading Like a Writer – on a Micro Level: A guest post by Michelle Wright
When I opened Lee’s email and saw her kind invitation to write a guest post for her blog, my instinctive reaction was – ‘Oh shit!’ Not, of course, because it was from Lee (whom I adore and admire), but because …
Digging into My ‘Writing Soul’
Last year an editor I’d worked with made what I initially thought was a puzzling remark about my writing. ‘I find your Russian worldview fascinating,’ she said. The work-in-question had nothing to do with Russia. Plus, while I’ve written in …
Matching Structure to the Subject: A Guest Post by Mandy Sayer
‘ . . . books, if they need to be written, will always find their moment.’
Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage
As writers, we often experience the thrill of discovering a new narrative strategy and applying it to …