A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken review – here’s how to really write your novel | Creative writing
Trope, POV, backstory, character arc. In the 30 years since I was a student of that benign, pipe-smoking, elbow-patched man of letters Malcolm Bradbury, the private language of creative writing workshops has taken over the world.... Read more »
Beginning I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want to write a first sentence so idiosyncratic, so indelible, so entirely your own that it makes people sit up or reach for... Read more »
It is a sector that delivers $1.3bn annually to the New South Wales economy and supports up to 22,000 jobs, yet the average writer earns just $18,200 a year from their creative... Read more »
He would go on to write The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, two of the greatest English poems. But in a letter written when he was 22, Samuel Taylor... Read more »
Leila Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women. The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of... Read more »
A novelist killed in the Ukraine war has won the Orwell prize for political writing. Victoria Amelina, who died in July 2023 from injuries sustained in a Russian bombing of a restaurant... Read more »
I’m four and I’m pretending to be dead. I’ve been lying here behind the sofa, and I’m hoping I’ll be missed, but more than that I’m hoping it will make a story.... Read more »
Two books about male friendship and masculinity have been announced as winners in the latest Carnegie awards, which highlight the best new books for children and young people. This year saw 27-year-old... Read more »
Jacqueline Wilson has said she would feel “very wary” about writing an adult novel about Tracy Beaker “because it would seem inappropriate that we would learn about her sex life”. Last year... Read more »