Australian author Michelle de Kretser once said that her excitement at receiving a publishing contract is not so much due to the promise of being published, but the pleasure of being edited. ‘No-one, not even my own mother, will read …
Events
What am I writing now? Writing Process Blog Chain.
I’ve been invited to participate in a Writing Process Blog Chain where writers who blog describe their current writing process by responding to a standard questionnaire. Belinda Castles, who writes wonderfully lyrical novels and whose lovely company I enjoyed during …
A guest post by Kathryn Ledson, the author of Erica Jewell series: How I became an author
I hadn’t considered the question of what led me to become an author until I was asked it by some of my readers. And then, as I mentally retraced my steps over the five decades of my life before getting …
Writing unfaithfully
To my mind, the craft of writing resides not in formulaic rules (e.g. ‘don’t use any adverbs’ or ‘no more than one adjective per noun’), but in that elusive process when our innermost, vaguest dreaming eventually shapes itself into a …
A Guest Blog Post by Susan Blumberg-Kason, American memoirist, on learning not to hold back in writing.
Six years ago I started writing a memoir about my marriage to a man from central China and how I thought I would thrive in this cross-cultural marriage. But I soon realized that my years of studying China and Mandarin …
The book that changed my (writing) life
All serious writers I know can name literary influences that have shaped their emotional landscapes, linguistic sensibilities, writing themes, literary tastes and perhaps even worldviews.
British novelist Ian McEwan, for example, cites Phillip Larkin’s poetry as his major influence, saying …
A Guest Blog Post by Stuart Beaton: Teaching writing in China
A few years ago, I had a weekly column in China Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s English Language newspaper, in which I gently poked fun at a number of things that I saw in everyday life here in Tianjin. At …
Seven Effective Ways to Kill Your Novel
Six years ago, after several years of working on a novel I’d provisionally titled The Russian Book of Lost Love, I discovered that it is possible to kill your own book. If you, too, contemplate murder, here are some …
The enemy in my hallway
December for me has always been the month of retrospection, soul-searching, summaries.
This year has been my first year of living the tricky life of a writer-mother.
I delayed motherhood until I reached the ripe age of 39 for several …
That damn first draft
Now that the year is coming to a close, I am at work on my writing plans for 2014. I always need lots of plans to produce a little something. Making plans is one of my favourite activities. Plans make