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 …
Events
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 …
Fifty Shades of Self
One of the first questions I ask myself when I begin a new creative non-fiction work, short- or long-form, is existential in nature (and stolen from Shakespeare). To be or not to be? Am I going to appear in my …
Second Book Syndrome: Guest Post by Bram Presser
Having come from the world of music (well, punk rock, which to some might not count), I’m all too familiar with the curse of the sophomore album. A band bursts onto the scene with a killer debut only to come …
Writing the Silences: Guest Post by Alice Nelson
Many years ago, in one of those serendipitous but fateful-feeling writing discoveries, I came across an essay by the American poet Louise Gluck. In her poetry, Gluck said, she was attracted to gaps and ellipsis, to disruption and hesitation, to …
A Book in Identity Crisis: Guest Post by Amra Pajalic
I first started writing my recently completed memoir, Things Nobody Knows But Me, when I was doing my Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing. I titled it then Sins of the Mother. I was 20-years-old and even though I …