Quote of the Week

Column inches in the blogosphere are infinite and, for those who need to weigh in and for readers hungry for something uncensored, it’s a bonanza. Our mission may be different, but maybe we can learn to do things differently. Instead of catering to people who don’t read, why not try going after those who do? Call it an experiment. And let’s not get caught up in the legitimacy game of who is the real critic and who isn’t. For now, it’s whoever has the gumption to write and post their opinions. By the way, check out all the posts in […]

The fact of the matter is that the people who struggle most with writing are drunks. They get hammered at night and in the morning their heads are full of pain and adverbs. Writing is hard for them, but so would golf be, or planting alfalfa, or assembling parts in a factory. The biggest whiners are the writers who get prizes and fellowships for writing stuff that’s painful to read, and so they accumulate long résumés and few readers and wind up teaching in universities where they inflict their gloomy pretensions on the young. Writers who write for a living

It’s easy to get distracted thinking the stuff you do (like blogging, or sorting your files, or doing a lot of research) will help you write the novel. Wrong. Nothing takes the place of actually writing. Nothing. Get busy. Quit reading this blog, and go write. There’s nothing on this blog that is going to help you finish. Stop reading Miss Snark and go write

“I think it is a misuse of literature. I don’t think literature at that level should be used to settle scores. And I don’t want to be portrayed as the horrendous woman of literature.” The author & the ‘alimony whore’: Alison Summers says the double Booker Prize-winning novelist has ‘misused literature’ to ‘settle scores’ about their divorce. And she’s not having it, she tells Anthony Barnes

Starting salaries at Ottaker’s are just over £10,000 and the policy is to pull in over-qualified eccentrics in the hope that some of them will so love working with books (they can borrow hardbacks free) that they’ll stay and transmit that passion to customers – at least until their careers as novelists or rock stars take off. Odd man out in a cut-throat world: James Heneage, founder of Ottakar’s, a much-loved and quirky chain of bookshops, tells Cassandra Jardine he fears for its future

When editors and agents reject a manuscript they tend to use a tried and trusted formulation: ‘Thank you for your submission, which I read and enjoyed. Unfortunately I don’t feel it is quite right for us.’ John Howard’s children’s book, The Key to Chintak, garnered so many of these identikit responses that he suspected the editors and agents weren’t even bothering to turn the title page. So he sent in a new manuscript, The Tin Drum, not his own words this time but extracts from a washing-machine manual. After a delay the replies started to arrive. You’ve guessed it: ‘Thank

Sure, just like everybody else I felt stupid that I’ve never really understood the difference between “that” and “which,” but I didn’t let this shame stop me from confessing my ignorance repeatedly to colleagues until eventually one told me to look it up. And this shame didn’t stop me from calling that same old friend a year later and announcing, in a panic, “I’ve got a copy-editing test tomorrow and I looked up ‘that versus which’ and I still need help.” That final humiliation seems to have done the trick, because by the end of the night I got it.

Whether due to the short attention spans of readers, the churn of the book-publishing world or some kind of writing meme, authors are slicing and dicing up their experiences and their studies into rapidly digestible, often bestselling 12-month packages. 365 days, gazillions of readers

Hey, You Can’t Do That: How I Got Away with Not Having a Real Job for a Pretty Long Time Ink Q&A: Christopher Moore

If the word “inspiration” is to have any meaning,’ TS Eliot wrote, ‘it must mean just this, that the speaker or writer is uttering something that he does not wholly understand – or which he may even misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him.’ Divine inspiration