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Creative writing

Creative writing courses - a good investment for writers?

19 May 2014

Creative writing courses continue to proliferate on both sides of the Atlantic .Many writers believe that enrolling on a course, particularly a university one, will make all the difference to their writing careers.  Read more

Do creative writing courses work?

10 March 2014

Following on from Hanif Kureishi's attack on creative writing courses this week, this old chestnut of a question has turned up again. Kureishi has dismissed creative writing courses as "a waste of time" and said he would never have gone on one himself, despite the fact that he currently teaches a writing course at Kingston University.  Read more

Agents combine

11 March 2013

The announcement that 50% of London agency Conville & WalshSee Conville & Walsh listing has been bought by Curtis BrownSee Curtis Brown listing UK is the latest news in the consolidation which is going on amongst literary agents. This purchase brings a successful smaller agency into a bigger one which has not perhaps been so dynamic.  Read more

Are creative writing courses worth it?

14 February 2011

The big questions about creative writing courses still remain, although there's no doubt about their popularity, nor that the universities and colleges see them as real money-spinners. There are now a huge number of writing courses in America - no less that 1,000 - and, after a slower start, about 100 postgraduate courses in the UK catering for the creative writing student.  Read more

Writers and depression

24 January 2011

An interesting study published recently in the US suggests that writers are at greater risk of depression than most other occupations. The study puts artists and writers among the most vulnerable of professionals, alongside other "at risk" jobs including care workers, teachers, social workers, maintenance staff and salespeople.  Read more

Is a creative writing course worth it?

27 September 2010

Can creative writing courses really open up the world of writing to the students who pay heavily for the privilege of taking them? As students begin the return to college or university across the northern hemisphere, this seems a good time to examine whether or not creative writing courses earn their keep.  Read more

Explosion in titles published in the USA

8 March 2010

The staggering number of 285,000 new titles and editions were self-published and published by community presses in the US last year, balanced against a slightly lower figure of 275,000 coming from traditional publishing houses.  Read more

Agents feeling the pain

25 January 2010

So are agents really feeling the pinch now? Long regarded as the fats cats of the industry, there are signs that the London agency constituency is really beginning to join in the pain. You cannot escape the conclusion that there will be redundancies, closures and mergers of agencies. Independent agents have few enough overheads in any case and will cut back on the new authors they take on.  Read more

No country for old typewriters

7 December 2009

It didn't seem a slow news week, but the amount of coverage which has been given to the sale of Cormac McCarthy's typewriter in the last few days has been truly astonishing. The American writer bought the machine, an Olivetti Lettera 31, from a pawnshop for $50 (£30) in 1963.  Read more

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29 June 2020 - What's new

June 2020
  • 'Like any social media platform, the more you use Twitter the more you will get out of it. So keeping your account as active as possible - i.e. tweeting as often as possible - is perhaps the most valuable tip of all. But that raises a common anti-Twitter excuse: "Oh, I wouldn't know what to talk about...
  Read more

Why and How Writers Should Embrace Twitter

29 June 2020

Like any social media platform, the more you use Twitter the more you will get out of it. So keeping your account as active as possible-i.e. tweeting as often as possible-is perhaps the most valuable tip of all. But that raises a common anti-Twitter excuse: "Oh, I wouldn't know what to talk about..."
  Read more

‘Books say: she did this because life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own,'

— Julian Barnes

22 June 2020 - What's new

June 2020
  • 'The demands that are made of women can be ferocious, but the demands made of men can be equally tough. I don't know what it is to be a boy. I have a lot of male friends and my best friend when I was nine was a boy, but there is an extra imaginative leap you have to make, I know intricately what it means to be a girl and I don't know who gets to say whether a character is real.
  Read more