March 2016 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• 'The battle rages on about whether self-publishing or traditional publishing is best from the author's point of view and it all seems to come down to your own experience. If you're happily settled with a publisher and content with what they're doing for you, then of course you'll advocate that...' News Review this week - To self-publish or be traditionally published?
• 'One of our links this week points the way to a final article from Digital Book World about hybrid authors, those who manage to combine the benefits of self-publishing in terms of control with the advantages of being published by a traditional publisher. Not every author wants to market their own book and many are not comfortable or confident about their ability to do so...' News Review
• 'In our links this week we've teamed up a cosy story about finding an agent with a downbeat one about how publisher consolidation and focus on obvious big books is restricting authors' possibilities. If you are looking to get published traditionally, this is not a cheering situation...' News Review
• Ebook sales plunged in October 2015, with adult books dropping 22% in one month, compared to children's ebooks which went down a whopping 44.7%. As we've discussed elsewhere, the children's market has a strong preference for print books, with both parents and children preferring them. News Review looks at the way ebooks are finding their level.
• '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.

Comment

• ‘The debate about whether you can teach creative writing is a funny one. Nobody ever says to a pianist, "Oh, you don't need a conservatoire, why don't you just practice your piano, then you'll get good." Good creative writing courses provide discipline, advice and criticism... But there is that extra magic fairy dust that good writers have that can't be taught...' Tracy Chevalier, author of At the Edge of the Orchard and Girl with a Pearl Earring, in the Sunday Telegraph's Stella provides this week's Comment.
• ‘I tend to do what I want to do. For a long time I did not write fiction. Then suddenly a fictional world was in my imagination, so I wrote it. It's ridiculous to say I'm passive in relation to these things, because obviously I do exactly what I want to do...' Marilynne Robinson, author of The Givenness of Things and Housekeeping, in the Observer provides this week's Comment.
• ‘Quit your job! The day I quit my job was the best day of my life. I wanted to be a writer. It took me four months, and resulted in How I Live Now. I found my fame and fortune with it, and I thought, "Publishing people are so friendly!" But they aren't, not always! Despite that book being a big success, my second, Just in Case, was turned down flat by both my UK and US editors...' Meg Rosoff, author of Jonathan Unleashed, her first book for adults, in the Independent on Sunday provides this week's Comment
• ‘I can't talk to people. I'm very shy. It feels like an enormous restriction in my life, like I'm exploding because I can't express anything. But if I'm writing then I don't have that problem. For me, literature is a place where I can gain some freedom, to write whatever I want...' Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle, a six-part autobiographical sequence which has been an international literary sensation provides this week's Comment, Writing bestsellers about your inner life.
• ‘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.
• ‘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

'If you do not have an alert and curious interest in character and dramatic situation, if you have no visual imagination and are unable to distinguish between honest emotional reactions and sentimental approaches to life, you will never write a competent short story.'

Edward J O'Brien