Skip to Content

Comment from the book world in October 2018

October 2018

An unknown intern… now set for SF stardom

29 October 2018

‘I couldn't believe they'd built something that had come out of my brain on that scale. It was really mid-blowing - and humbling. I thought, there are hundreds of people who've done this from me just writing something in my bedroom...

I wanted to tell authentic stories about those cultures rather than, as you so often see, a collection of white American people leading a mission.'

From helping out on Netflix's The Crown, Mika Watkins has been overseeing Origin, her own blockbuster YouTube series with a multimillion budget, launching on 14 November. Our Comment is from the Observer.

'It's the rewriting I enjoy most'

22 October 2018

‘Whenever I talk to kids about writing and tell them it's the rewriting I enjoy most, they groan. I guess if you're in school, rewriting means copying your papers over. But to me, rewriting is the most exciting part of the process. When I'm rewriting, I feel most creative. I've got all the pieces to the puzzle and now I get to put them together. I go through four or five drafts of each book. (When I was writing Summer Sisters I went through twenty drafts!)

Read your work aloud! This is the best advice I can give. When you read aloud you find out how much can be cut, how much is unnecessary. You hear how the story flows. And nothing teaches you as much about writing dialogue as listening to it.'

Judy Blume, author of Are You There God. It's Me, Margaret, Wifey, Forever and 29 other books in her series on writing on her website.

 

A ghost writer on ghostwriting

15 October 2018

'So, true story... I was asked once during a Q&A session whether I would use a ghostwriter to write my own memoir. Ha ha ha, everyone in the room laughed. Funny question. ‘But really... would you?' my questioner insisted. I thought for a moment and then came up with a surprising answer: ‘Yes!' And the reason is that if I wanted to make it a damn good read, I would need another person's perspective on my life story. The ghostwriter and their subject are two different people and, as the old saying goes, two heads are better than one. You may be blessed with immoderate levels of self-awareness and an uncanny ability to see the cause and effect of your behavior, but we are all utterly incapable of stepping outside our own heads...'


Kay Weitz, ghostwriter of 10 published memoirs with an 11th due out in 2018, on the Andrew Lownie Agency website

'All reading is good reading'

8 October 2018

‘I have always loved reading, but when I was at school, especially in primary school, I didn't realise that I did. The reason for this was that what seemed to count as ‘reading' was, in fact, something much more specific: reading meant fiction, and it meant chapter books. To read a book also meant to start at the beginning, and to finish at the end. When I was at school it was true that I didn't particularly enjoy reading fiction, and I found it hard to sit with a book for a long period of time, working my way through it in a linear fashion. But looking back, it is most definitely not true to say that I didn't like reading. I loved, and continue to love, factual books and anything to do with geography and history. I loved comics and newspapers. I loved dipping into a book with no pressure to read it from cover to cover. I was, and am, a reader, and when I visit schools I do my best to help pupils see that reading does not necessarily mean just one thing. All reading is good reading.' Joshua Seigal, author of I Don't Like Poetry and two other children's poetry collections. https://readfoundation.org.uk/blog/love-reading/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMedia&utm_campaign=JoshuaSeigalBlog

'Editors are readers first and foremost'

1 October 2018

‘One of the great joys of being an editor is sharing your enthusiasm with colleagues and seeing others really get behind a project, so I suppose that's a strength - feeling that I'm able to gather a team around a book so that it might be published in the best possible way.

Editors are readers first and foremost, and when I love a book my first instinct is always to approach its acquisition and publication with that readerly passion. But of course that's not always enough. I've had to really reign that in sometimes and remind myself to always consider the market.

My favorite part of my job is editing - it always feels like the most extraordinary privilege, so I certainly hope I'll still be acquiring exciting new voices and working closely with authors to make sure their book is the best version of itself it can be.

The other thing that drives me is helping build writers' careers. In a few years' time, I hope I'll be able to look across my list and see some of the authors whose debuts I've acquired continuing to succeed on their second, third, fourth books.'

Sophie Jonathan, Pan MacmillanOne of largest fiction and non-fiction book publishers in UK; includes imprints of Pan, Picador and Macmillan Children’s Books/Picador senior commissioning editor, interviewed by Porter Anderson in Publishing Perspectives