history of writing

 
Is Writing a Real Job?
'Is this how people view what I’ve done for the last ten years? That publishing a novel is the result of casually tapping at a keyboard between wild swimming, making bread and having time on your hands to idle, dream, and ‘do a bit of writing’?' Penny Hancock on the blood, sweat and tears of writing that no one sees.
Elizabeth Cook
04-04-2024

Elizabeth Cook speaks with Ann Morgan about the experience of seeing your words set in music, the physical craft of writing and the difference between creating poetry and prose.

Outsiders
The reader is a newcomer, to each book. We enter every novel on its first page to find, within it, a world that already exists; a world that has, seemingly, been going on without us — and so we, too, feel to be outsiders, momentarily.
Confessions Of An Odd-Object Essayist
Essays help attune the ear to the music of things. But I’m still startled — and delighted — by the sheer unexpectedness of the connections that proliferate once I start to really listen to the notes that sound in the objects that catch my attention.
Writing and People
25-01-2024

Royal Literary Fund writers explore how their writing relates to the people around them, taking in everything from working with community groups to dealing with isolation.

Menna van Praag — The Writer And Technology
'When informed that this cloud hadn’t magically saved all my lost books, I burst into tears and, when the online customer support person told me – brightly – to ‘have a nice day’ it took all the willpower I possessed not to scream expletives in response. '
Michaela Morgan — Getting Published: What No One Tells You
'Gather a few authors together in a room and does the conversation veer towards culture, philosophy, art…literature? No, it does not. It focuses on complaints — publicists, publishers, party invitations (lack of), editors and of course…earnings. '
Alex Nye — The Writer And Nature
'I note that the café has an atmosphere of carefully crafted urban decay, mostly accidental. Nature is everywhere. It’s ugly and visceral and full of decay. It's in the rust on the bicycle and the weeds appearing uninvited between the cracks. '
Richard Lambert — Rejection
'I began to internalise the rejections, to believe in a way I hadn’t when I was younger, that the editors, agents, publishers were right — my work wasn’t good enough; of course they didn’t want it. The rejections began to affect me. They began to fray me.'
Martyn Waites
07-12-2023

Martyn Waites speaks with Doug Johnstone about learning crime writing on the job, adopting a female pseudonym and the joys of writing daleks.

Alison MacLeod — The Writer And Technology
'How will we ever code for experiences of wonder, grief, joy and awe? How will a humanoid artist ever yearn? Such experiences will never be reducible to simulated feelings, even if simulations might be transmitted across our neural networks. '
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