Andrew Blackman
Currently viewing the tag: "Writing"
Writing fiction is not really about making stuff up. It’s more about making sense of what you already have stored somewhere in your memory or subconscious, dusting it off, ordering it and making it intelligible to the rest of the world. The hope is that the things you write about will also resonate with other [...]
Came across a good little article in the LA Times on author self-promotion. It seems that a letter from Jack Kerouac has just turned up at a literary auction, and it bears an interesting quote:
I can just see the shabby literary man carrying a “bulging briefcase” rushing from one campus to another, one [...]
Hmm, this site seems to have been on autopilot for a while now. What’s going on? Well a few things.
First, summer. It’s a fleeting thing in England, and you have to grab every sunny day you can get. I’ve been outside a lot, enjoying London. Now that I’m starting to hunker down for the [...]
This is a wonderfully lucid book. I would not hesitate to take writing advice from Dorothea Brande, for the simple reason that her own writing is so elegant and clear. As I was reading, I was reminded of George Orwell’s dictum that good writing should be like a window pane. Brande’s book, written in [...]
I read this book a couple of years ago now, before I had this blog. As I was clearing out stuff this weekend I came across my handwritten notes, stuffed into the bottom of a box where I would never have read them again. This is why I started blogging. I’m typing the notes up [...]
It was one of those moments when you realise you’re old – or at least no longer young. I am working on editing the draft of my next novel, and decided to go to a cafe – somewhere I hadn’t been before, a fresh location for a fresh perspective on the manuscript.
All was [...]
I’m a bit late to the New Year goal-setting party, but here goes. For my writing, I want to finish my second novel and get it published, and start on a third. I also want to write more short stories and submit them to magazines and contests. For my reading, I want to read a [...]
All is well, despite the silence. I’ve been putting all my energy into winning a short story contest. With a £25,000 prize and a star-studded judging panel, I’m expecting the competition to be fierce. To win, I think I’ll have to write something better than anything I’ve written before.
The deadline is next [...]
These are three essays on the notion of migration for the writer, mostly explained through other writers such as Nabokov, Conrad, Kundera and Naipaul.
In the first essay, The Spokesman & the Tribe, Jin explores the balance between the individual and the collective, and asks to what extent a writer can ‘speak for’ his [...]
I had a wonderful trip to New York. The book-related reasons to go were to sign copies at the Columbia Alumni Book Fair and to give a speech at the Jack Kerouac Literary Group, both of which went very well.
Outside of the scheduled events, it was great to spend some time [...]
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