In response to the many successful author-based columns – ‘My Favourite Character in Fiction, ‘Me and My Editor’, ‘How I Write’ and so on – I have been asked to initiate an occasional Endpaper series which will provide advice and support for those working in one of the most neglected, and least glamorous, areas of… Continue reading On not writing at all
Read moreYou are getting a partial view. Occasionally, through the clamour of writers having their say in these pages, the voice of a publisher can be heard, speaking up nervously, politely and with proper respect for the great profession of authorhood. You don’t fall for that, do you? You know that he’s either going through the… Continue reading On being a genius, a talker or a one-book wonder
Read moreSo now we know. One great writer is arrogant and a snob. Another great writer is a mean-spirited marital bully. A third great writer has dodgy attitudes towards food and sex. The new school of confessional memoir, literature’s answer to the tabloid kiss-and-tell story, has of late been taking us behind the revered printed page… Continue reading On keeping yourself pure
Read moreHave you done the washing up? Or did you leave it on the sideboard in the comfy expectation that, by the time your return from your work (yes, reading The Author is work, actually), some civilian, some non-writer, will have dealt with it? Maybe you have an absolute treasure who relieves you of the problem… Continue reading On authors and housework
Read moreIt was a truly poignant moment of television. The author Timothy Mo, filmed by BBC Newsnight, was ringing WH Smith to book an appointment to discuss a novel to be published by the Paddleless Press. Who was the novel by? Timothy Mo, actually. Yes, he explained, he was both publisher and author. The name was… Continue reading On publishing your own work
Read moreIt is, I am depressed to discover, Harvey Porlock’s birthday. For ten years now, Harvey has looked at the week’s book pages, reporting, sometimes in a bolshy, opinionated fashion, on the efforts of reviewers, a small-time whistle-blower within the literary establishment. He has changed over the years and has become less even-handed, more crotchety and… Continue reading On being Harvey Porlock
Read moreThere was a time, not so long ago, when to live and care for an author was thought to provide its own small rewards in terms of posterity. So Mrs Tolstoy transcribed five full drafts of War and Peace, Mrs Chesterton tied her husband’s shoelaces for him, and Mrs Nabokov organised and attended every one of… Continue reading On being the wife of an author
Read more“Thank God for lovely work,” a writer-friend said the other day. She been having a tough time on the romance front and now was returning, bruised by life, to the author’s place of ultimate safety – the study. Writing as therapy: how tempting it is, and yet how dangerous. For weeks, months, you can hide… Continue reading On suffering from life block
Read more“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness,” Georges Simenon once wrote but, like his other pronouncements – those 10,000 women he was supposed to have slept with, for example – his words contain only a fraction of the truth. Writing, as we all know, is a profession which exists in the dark,… Continue reading On what you want, what you’d settle for, and what you get
Read moreThe rather brilliant little BBC series Trade Secrets has recently invited experts from various walks of life – photography, antique-restoring, building, butlering – to reveal the tricks and short cuts that make their work easier. Because the craft of writing has yet to be included in the series – a surprising omission since there are… Continue reading On the tricks of the trade
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