There are countless books that purport to teach you how to write. Many of them are good. Some of them are not quite as good. This is the usual way of things. However, I am always most excited to come across a book about writing by an author whose work I already admire. That is, it's one thing to get advice from a professor or a critic or an editor, but quite another to hear it from someone who has been in the mines and come up with gold-those who can teach and do. To that end, I've put together a list of 25 writing manuals and book-length musings on craft from famous authors, along with a bit of advice drawn from each book.
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12 February 2018
Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, Ursula K. Le Guin
The sound of the language is where it all begins. The test of a sentence is, Does it sound right? The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms marking their relationships. Both the meaning and the beauty of the writing depend on these sounds and rhythms. This is just as true of prose as it is of poetry, though the sound effects of prose are usually subtle and always irregular.
Between 2008 and 2012, I was a judge for the Eric Gregory award for poets under the age of 30. The prize was founded with the aim of encouraging young poets. Who could possibly object? One person did: a friend of mine in his 60s, who grimaced when he heard I was judging the prize. "Why is all the encouragement directed at young writers?" he asked. "What about those of us who first get published in our 50s?"
The best crime novels deepen our understanding of human experience. Most of my favourites - A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine, Broken Harbour by Tana French, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie - include female murder victims as well as male. McDermid's A Place of Execution is a devastating critique of the violence that is rightly disapproved of by the Staunch prize, yet it would be disqualified. That's why I'm going to ask my publishers not to enter any of my books for the prize, even if I write a thriller in which the worst thing that happens to a woman is someone spilling coffee on her new shoes. Perhaps one day someone will argue that this too - having shoes ruined by coffee - is a negative experience that only male fictional characters should be allowed to have.
That said, I tend to think that every writer who reads George Orwell's essay "Why I Write" sees themselves in some part of his description of his early life. "I was somewhat lonely," he tells us, "and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued."
Maybe everyone has such feelings, but again it is a question of degree. Given Orwell's keen understanding of the writer's mind from the inside out, and his diligent pursuit of his work through the most trying times, we might be inclined to give him a hearing when he claims, "there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose." Orwell allows that these motives will be mixed, existing "in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living."
Tensions over the decision to allow US authors to enter the Man Booker prize have flared up yet again, with 30 publishers signing a letter urging the prize organisers to reverse the change, or risk a "homogenised literary future".
The letter, which was intended to be private and has been seen by the Guardian, argues that the rule change to allow any writer writing in English and published in the UK to enter has restricted the diversity of the prize and led to the domination of American authors since it came into effect in 2014. Previously, the prize only allowed citizens from Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland to enter.
Responses to the rule change have been varied since it came in. When it was first announced, author Philip Hensher wrote: "I don't think I've ever heard so many novelists say, as over the last two or three days, ‘Well, we might as well just give up, then.'" Julian Barnes, who won the Booker in 2011, branded the change "straightforwardly daft"; broadcaster Melvyn Bragg said the prize might lose its distinctiveness; and Susan Hill, who judged the prize twice and was shortlisted once, wrote: "Not sure I can see a reason for this. Why can't we have a prize of our own?"
For years scholars have debated what inspired William Shakespeare's writings. Now, with the help of software typically used by professors to nab cheating students, two writers have discovered an unpublished manuscript they believe the Bard of Avon consulted to write "King Lear," "Macbeth," "Richard III," "Henry V" and seven other plays.
The news has caused Shakespeareans to sit up and take notice.
The findings were made by Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter, who describe them in a book to be published next week by the academic press D. S. Brewer and the British Library. The authors are not suggesting that Shakespeare plagiarized but rather that he read and was inspired by a manuscript titled %u201CA Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels,%u201D written in the late 1500s by George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth, who served as an ambassador to Sweden.
If you know any writers, you may know that almost everyone hates their own book at some point. Usually it's between draft 13 and draft 37, when there's no end in sight, and they're questioning everything, from the main character to the font. But some authors grow to dislike, disown, resent, or regret their books after publication-whether because of an unexpected critical or popular response, changes in their own views, or simple aging.
To be clear: Fleming did like this novel, at least at first. Then he heard what the reviewers had to say, and he was so upset that he wanted to more or less disown it. The book is a departure from the rest of the James Bond novels - narrated by a girl, for one thing (saints alive!), and James Bond only comes into the picture later on. Fleming wrote the book this way for a specific reason, but the reviews were bad. In a letter to his publisher, dated only three days after the novel's publication, Fleming wrote: Both I and all of you have treated the whole of the James Bond saga with a light heart and so, with one or two exceptions, have the reviewers, most of whom for the first nine books have been very kind. But in the reviews of The Spy I detect a note of genuine disapproval. This surprised me because of the genesis of this particular book which should perhaps now be explained to you.
A couple of years ago, I published an op-ed from Attica prison in the New York Times. A young man wrote me afterward, and we became pen pals. One time, he wanted to send me a book. The problem was, he couldn't simply buy it at a book store and mail it. Nor could he order it for me online. Plus it was a new release with a hard cover, and that wasn't allowed either. Yet we found a way.
A prison directive allowed for five printed pages to arrive in each regular mail envelope. So my friend broke copyright laws and photocopied 300-plus pages, stuffing them into more than 30 envelopes and sending them my way. He figured the publisher Spiegel & Grau, and the author Bryan Stevenson, wouldn't mind.
Here's the thing. Restrictive policies didn't deter me from smuggling drugs and doing drugs. Opportunity did. In 2010, at Attica, I joined a creative writing workshop and then a privately funded college program. Today, I'm in Sing Sing, working on my bachelor's. Although my mother has been unable to send me books, she has been able to order periodicals, which are delivered with regular mail after they are searched for contraband. (Perfume folds that could hide saboxone films are cut out.) Reading so much solid writing has helped build my own skills. I began publishing articles. I became a journalist.
Novelist Kathryn Hughes on creating a self-published number 1 and moving to Headline.
You may have heard it said that everybody has a book in them. But to quote the author and journalist, Christopher Hitchens: "In most cases, that's where it should stay." Writing a novel is hard, no doubt about it. It's like filling a swimming pool with a syringe. But slogging away day after day trying to order 100,000 words into something people are actually going to read and, more importantly, enjoy, is a doddle compared to the frustrating and demoralising business of attracting a publisher. Back in 2006, when I started my first book, The Letter, I was naive enough to believe that I would have literary agents queuing round the block to sign me up. I fantasised about being at the centre of a bidding war between publishers, top Hollywood actors clamouring to play the lead in the subsequent film. I would be asked to write the screenplay, it would win an Oscar, I would be invited to Elton's post-show party... well, you do need a vivid imagination to be an author.