When I was in my final year of literary studies at university, our professor ran a tutorial on characterisation. Half of the session was dedicated to creating likeable females. ‘Women are motivated by two things,’ he mansplained. ‘Safety and service.’ …
Events
The Ecstatic Truth in Creative Nonfiction: A Guest Post by Jayne Tuttle
I never set out to write nonfiction. I’m not sure what I write is nonfiction. I don’t know what it is. I don’t really want to know. My first book, Paris or Die, contained the account of a bizarre …
Vulnerability Matters in Memoir: A Guest Post by Anita Jacoby
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 …
The Writer: To Do and To Be. A Guest Post by Luke Stegemann
The recently departed Spanish novelist Javier Marías, asked once to identify the moment when he knew his vocation was that of writer, responded that in fact he had never wanted to be ‘a writer’. He drew a fine distinction between …
From Nothing to Author: A Guest Post by Warren Ward
I grew up in a house without books. My parents loved TV, and occasionally listened to one of our two LPs — Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley — but they weren’t in the habit of reading.
One day, I heard …