February 2016 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• 'The latest fashion in women's writing is explored in an article we provide a link to this week. The authors think that the rash of bestselling books with ‘Girl' in the title are appealing to a female crime fiction audience and they're probably right, but these books are also the heirs to a longer tradition...'
• 'Nick Clee asks in this week's Bookbrunch if you need to transcend a prize to win it, inspired by the Costa win by Frances Hardinge's children's book. In this age of proliferating book prizes it's a reasonable question to ask, but does anyone really think that literary prizes should be thrown open to those who are writing, for instance, category romance or horror fiction?...' This week's News Review.
• 'A survey carried out by Booktrust in association with the Open University has found that children of 0-8 prefer reading print books, rather than ebooks. An astounding 76% showed a preference for print books for reading for pleasure and 69% prefer print books for educational reading too...'
• 'According to a study funded by the Quick Reads sponsor Galaxy, 27% of the British population have been inspired by a book to make ‘positive life changes' and 41% of regular readers regard the habit as a better antidote to stress than meeting friends... News Review on the power of reading.
• 'It's a slightly demanding read, but Mike Shatzkin's latest post on The Shatzkin Files is essential reading if you want to understand the contemporary bookselling scene and how it is increasingly controlled and shaped by the huge conglomerates which dominate the web...'
• 'Getting published is a major preoccupation for many writers. How do you get an agent? How do you self-publish? And how do you decide which to do - and when to give up on agents and go for self-publishing? These are the questions which reverberate around writers' heads. Most writers can hugely improve what they've written with the right advice, and then they stand a much better chance...' News Review on Publishing your book.

Comment

• ‘Writer's block is a reluctance to make decisions. You're trying to keep your options open and hoping a simple idea comes along, so it's hard to commit to one. My wife once told me, as I was having trouble getting going, "That's because you're trying to write the book, and you just need to write a book..." Our Comment is from Christopher Brookmyre, author of Quite Ugly One Morning and Black Widow in the Independent on Sunday.
• ‘I knew this book would be my last chance and admit that before I wrote it, and even in the early stages, there was a fair amount of despair. People, like I was, are intrigued by what they see or imagine on a travel route. I'm sure, too, that Rachel's weaknesses as an unusual and troubled person, can be identified with...' Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on a Train, which shot to the top of the bestseller lists in the UK and US when it was published last year, provides this week's Comment.
• ‘Novelists are often asked which of their characters is them, as if imagination has no part to play. Most of us will answer that characters develop out of the need of the story itself. So my Cassie and her murderous actions are necessary in The Taxidermist's Daughter for the plot to work. She's not me, any more than is Freddie in The Winter Ghosts or Alais in Labyrinth...' Our Comment this week is from Kate Mosse, author of The Taxidermist's Daughter and Labyrinth, in the Sunday Times.
• ‘Like a lot of authors I have galloping imposter syndrome: as far as I'm concerned I have cunningly infiltrated the writing community. With each book that gets published I have this dread fear that I'm going to be found out. Certainly when The Lie Tree was published, I thought: ‘This time they'll see through me for the fraud I am.' Things have not panned out as I expected!...'Frances Hardinge, winner of the 2015 Costa Book of the Year 2015 with The Lie Tree, in the Guardian, provides this week's Comment.
• ‘From our positions as individual creators, whether of fiction or non-fiction, we authors see a landscape occupied by several large interests, some of them gathering profits in the billions, some of them displaying a questionable attitude to paying tax, some of them colonising the internet with projects whose reach is limitless and whose attitude to creators' rights is roughly that of the steamroller to the ant...' Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials and many other children's books and President of the UK Society of authors, in the Bookseller provides this week's Comment - 'The steamroller to the ant'.
• ‘Once I get an idea in my head it's an adrenaline rush, and I'm racing to get to the end. I think fast and write fast. It sounds uncreative, but I write from 9-5, four days a week. I have two kids and have had to be very structured. I start a book every January, it's due in June, I edit during the summer and it's published during the autumn...' Cecelia Ahern, author of PS I love You and The Marble Collector in the Telegraph's Stella provides this week's Comment.
• ‘As Taylor makes clear, over the past century the exigencies of making a living have never been enough to stop writers and commentators from debating, noisily and disputatiously, about the direction of literature, its distance from popular taste and which self-appointed minority is fit to interpret and pass judgement on it. These are questions that matter to Taylor too because the vibrancy of our literature, summed up in this wide-ranging, entertaining and thoughtful survey, is a marker of our wider cultural health... Our Comment is from Michael Prodger's review of D J Taylor's widely-praised The Prose Factory: Literary Life in Britain Since 1918 in The Times.

Quote

'Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write. If all feels hopeless, if that famous 'inspiration' will not come, write. If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write.'

J B Priestley