Gimme a break
What do Martin Amis, Don DeLillo, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elmore Leonard, Ogden Nash, Flannery O’Connor, James Patterson, Dorothy L. Sayers and Fay Weldon have in common? Not a lot, you would be forgiven for thinking. But in fact they share a personal history; they all started out as advertising copywriters. Just like me, then, and...
Abracadabra!
Neil Bartlett’s The Disappearance Boy is a dark tale of lost and found love and fading glamour behind the velvet curtains of 1950s variety theatre, in which magician’s assistant Reggie Rainbow does his best to keep his own thoughts and actions out of sight and mind by sleight of hand. Neil discusses his writing rituals...
Stay flexible
The acclaimed New Wave Caribbean novelist and writing tutor shares her top ten tips for keeping the creative juices flowing. 1. Perfectionism is anti-creative. Get used to the notion of drafting your work, trying things out and making creative decisions on a regular basis. 2. The quality of attention to detail is the measure of...
Setting sail
Your debut novel has been published for a week and it’s the day after the launch party. A landmark day. A time to take a moment, unpack your snack box and admire the view. The Sunday Times have made Close To the Wind their Children’s Book of the Week and that’s a great slot, a...
Medusa myths
When I was a child, my biology textbooks consigned hair to the erotic Little League: “A secondary sexual characteristic” was the dry definition. Now I’ve written a novel that rehabilitates hair to the sexual A-List. It started with the question “What if there were seven sisters with hair flowing to the ground?” This question is...
So long, and thanks for all the towels
On the Kindle, I carry around the books I have probably read more times in my life than any other: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its four sequels. How splendid it is to have them on an electronic book “with a screen about three inches by four”, like the Guide itself. Douglas Adams...
Straight-talking Sadie Jones
There is no doubt that Sadie Jones is a generous-spirited woman. I get lost on my way to her house in Chiswick but when I arrive, flustered, instead of being cross that I’ve kept her waiting, she sweetly asks what kind of coffee I’d like, pointing at a complicated-looking machine. Coffee made, we settle down...
Kerry Hudson: Love and need
Kerry Hudson’s award-winning debut novel Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma drew partly on her experiences of growing up on estates and in B&Bs. Her second, Thirst, is about Alena, a woman sex-trafficked from Siberia, and Dave, a security guard who catches her shoplifting. When I meet Hudson for...
Enduring war
Christmas cards, letters, cartoons, posters and the manuscripts of celebrated war poets are among the collection on display for the first time in Enduring War: Grief, Grit and Humour in the Folio Society Gallery at the British Museum. The exhibition explores the many ways those both at home and on the front line tried to...
MA vs LON?
The perennial ‘Can writing be taught?’ question rarely seems far from the book pages, but a couple of creative-writing-related stories have received particular media attention this year. One was Hanif Kureishi’s slightly mischievous comment that creative writing courses are a “waste of time” (he teaches the subject at Kingston University). The other was the publication...
To Penge and beyond
Andy Miller’s engagingly therapeutic and very funny The Year of Reading Dangerously sets out to reaffirm the pleasure of the written word by casting a critical eye over all those must-read classics you never quite got around to tackling. Now his dynamic roadshow reaches out to an appropriately pumped-up public… Thursday 29 May To Bookseller...
The tricycle man
I arrived at boarding school in England a few weeks short of my twelfth birthday. I’d spent my childhood switching friends, schools, houses, countries, continents (my father was a diplomat) and at some point all this had begun to pall. I wanted things to stay the same: the same faces every term, the same rooms...
