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 …
The Writer Laid Bare
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 …