The following are just my personal pieces of advice. They won't be the same as someone else's, and they may not fit your life or practice, but maybe you'll pick up something useful.
Before a bookstore event in Chicago in November to celebrate the launch of Shell Game, the 19th V.I. Warshawski book, Sara Paretsky sat down to talk about her writing career, her inspirations and false starts, the beginnings of Sisters in Crime, pioneer journals, and much more. Read more
I'm still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you're doing - so I'm headed that way, but I'm nowhere near there. But, for what they're worth, here are some of the things I've learned along the way.
There's a big, voracious elephant in the room when I encourage writers to live in London: finances. Yes, this is a pricey city that's getting pricier, as people on lower and less stable incomes get pushed further out from the city center. Read more
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying. -Anton Chekhov
Edgar-winner James Lee Burke is the bestselling author of more than 30 books, most recently House of the Rising Sun. Burke shares his writing tips. Read more
Whether you are an indie author struggling to get discovered, a well-known traditionally published writer, or somewhere in between, writer's block may sneak up on you once in a while-maybe even more than once in a while.
Writers work successfully in so many different ways, I never assume that what works for me is best for someone else. But if a common denominator exists among us, it might be attitude: the enterprise of writing a book has to feel like walking into a cathedral. It demands humility. The body of all written words already in print is vaulted and vast. Read more
In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 rules of writing published in The New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian reached out to some of today's most celebrated authors and asked them to each offer his or her rules. Read more
'Dear Aspiring Writer, you are not ready. Stop. Put that finished story away and start another one. In a month, go back and look at the first story. RE-EDIT it. Then send it to a person you respect in the field who will be hard on you. Pray for many many many red marks. Fix them. Then put it away for two weeks. Work on something else. Finally, edit one last time. Read more
'Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.'
Do genre writers receive adequate respect from the literary establishment? ‘Everything's upside down. They assume that to do something that appeals to a huge audience is somehow easier than to do something that appeals to a tiny audience. Because we do a book a year people think you just crank a handle and out it comes.
It's funny, but if you'd asked me a few years ago (when I was 14 and had just finished the first draft of Inside Out) whether the book had anything to do with my disability, I would have given you an emphatic "No". My writing has always been a part of me, much like my disability, but for a long time I kept the two things stubbornly separate. Read more
On a cool winter's day in Cairo, I stepped into the Marriott Hotel and wandered over to the local bakery tucked away near the lavish hotel gardens. In the far corner of the small room sat Umm Kulthoum Mahfouz. We were meeting to discuss her recollections of her father, the late Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel laureate author, who still held the most recognizable name in Arabic literature. Read more
Picador has announced "with great sadness" news of the death of Clive James, who passed away peacefully at home on Sunday 24th November after a long illness, aged 80. Read more
As the decade began, there were reasons to be optimistic: America had elected its first black president, and despite a global recession just two years earlier, the world hadn't cascaded into total financial collapse. Obamacare, for all its flaws, was passed, and then came the Iran deal and the Paris climate accords. Read more
Until the 2010s, if you were reading, it generally meant you weren't doing it online. Though change had been in the offing, this was the decade that irreversibly altered how we consume text - when the smartphone transformed from a marvel to a staple. Suddenly, the sharpest cultural and political analysis came in the form of a distracted boyfriend meme. Read more
Indigenous literature has been one of the top-performing categories for local booksellers in 2019, and international publishers are noticing a similar increase in interest for books written by Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander authors. Read more
My first love was in a band. His advice about music translated easily to the writing life-or I made it fit, those nights I was killing time backstage in dive bars during sound check. "Leave them wanting more" was his advice on playing. So I won't drone on when I give readings, erring on the side of reading too little. Read more
After 20 years of writing, my first novel, Swapping Purples for Yellows, finally entered the world in August of 2019. The book took four years to write, another two to sell, and 18 months to edit and prepare for publication. Read more
‘Everything's upside down. They assume that to do something that appeals to a huge audience is somehow easier than to do something that appeals to a tiny audience. Because we do a book a year people think you just crank a handle and out it comes. All my peers are smart, intelligent, well-informed, interested in the world; everybody puts in a huge amount of effort. It's not easy to do. Read more
'If you aren't growing as a writer, you are dead.'
'Dear Aspiring Writer, you are not ready. Stop. Put that finished story away and start another one. In a month, go back and look at the first story. RE-EDIT it. Then send it to a person you respect in the field who will be hard on you. Pray for many many many red marks. Fix them. Then put it away for two weeks. Work on something else. Finally, edit one last time. Read more