Emma Darwin's Blog, page 27

Reading like a reader, and the best feeling in the world

Back in the summer (remember summer? Difficult, isn't it...), when I was going to present the prizes to the winners of the Frome Festival Short Story Prize 2011 I was asked to talk about what made the winning stories win....

Work in regress?

When I asked Twitter last night what I should blog about, one suggestion was "How do you know when to give up on a work-in-progress? Or when to stop and come back? Or when to re-conceptualise the project?". It was...

Putting on the Ritz? Try putting the Ritz on

In the days when I had au pairs, they would often ask me for help with their English homework. Most of them were doing pretty advanced work, so I'd have to deal with things like, "Emma, when do you say,...

A novel is not the singular of data

Recently, I came upon a neat phrase to use on those people who refuse to hear the fact that there has been net emigration of central Europeans from Britain, because all the waiters in their local Pizza Express come from...

Dreaming the map: the efficiency of magic

You can't assume that someone who takes a day to write six words must be a finer artist and greater writer than someone who writes sixteen thousand: after all, would you say that Yeats is a greater writer than Dickens?...

The Prig's Writ, and Other Writers' Stories

In the comments on my post How Don't You Do It?, Glen says that she's been in writers' groups where: they regard any form of deliberate intentionality in the first draft stage (as opposed to the later reworking stages) to...

Jerusha Cowless, Agony Aunt: "How can I make a good, quiet and put-upon character more interesting to readers?"

Dear Jerusha: I had a one-to-one with an agent who said she felt my main character was rather dull and not pro-active enough. She was afraid that, not being like the usual feisty heroines who buck the system, my MC...

Yours to remember and mine to forget

I'm reading a fascinating book, The Art & The Ego: the art and strategy of fiction writing explored, which is a collection of essays by all sorts of writers from Robertson Davies to Marina Warner, by way of the Johns...

A Million Little Versions (or nearly)

I've asked before whether you've ever thought about the order in which you put the elements in your sentence. And my post on the joys of the long sentence is relevant too, because of course a longer sentence, in our...

16 Questions to ask a Critique (and some to ask about a critiquer)

From the first poem you show a friend or a teacher, to five-page editorial letter from an agent who might take you on if you get the novel right, to a TLS review of your twentieth book, as a writer...