Author Bernardine Evaristo on her award wins, activism, and what inspires her writing
womanandhome.com – Sunday November 7, 2021
Bernardine Evaristo is a British author and academic. In 2019, she became the first black woman to win the Booker Prize for her eighth book, Girl, Woman, Other. She is a professor of creative writing at Brunel University London and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her new book, Manifesto on Never Giving Up, is an intimate and inspirational memoir about her journey as a writer. She was Chair of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction. Bernardine lives in London with her husband.
Authors share the writing habits that got them on the Giller short list
rmotoday.com – Friday November 5, 2021
Some authors get to work right after their morning coffee; others write late at night by the glow of their smartphones. Some struggle to stave off distractions; others embrace them as part of the creative process.
The Canadian Press asked the finalists for the Scotiabank Giller Prize to share the habits that help them put words on the page. Their emailed responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.
PEOPLE TO PEOPLE, Elizabeth Ann Atkins on coaching new writers through their first book
youtube.com – Sunday October 31, 2021
Elizabeth Ann Atkins of Two Sisters Writing and Publishing is known as "America's Book Coach." With dozens of titles to her own credit, she says she can help you do the same.
Want to Improve Your Writing? Get 100 Years Of Writing Experience In 20 Minutes
youtube.com – Tuesday October 26, 2021
Want to improve your writing? Get ready to take notes because in this MarieTV, seven famous authors share their best writing advice.
How the subscription newsletter service Substack is changing the writing game
theglobeandmail.com – Sunday October 24, 2021
One of the great surprises of the COVID-19 era is that some of the most talked-about journalism on the internet is being done through a subscription newsletter service. And, more surprising still, this business model is actually proving to be profitable. I’m speaking, of course, about Substack, a platform that’s gained prominence during the pandemic as a haven for heterodox journalists exiting the mainstream media.
The platform is now home to investigative reporters such as Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, and Glenn Greenwald, a founder of The Intercept; digital media heavyweights such as Vox’s Matt Yglesias; and former magazine columnists such as New York’s Andrew Sullivan. All have concerns about the direction the media is headed, and all now regularly publish pieces that it would be hard to imagine reading at their former outlets. As such, Substack has become something of a referendum on contemporary journalism and, due to the controversy surrounding many of its personalities, a contested development.
Pulp friction: Irish women’s place in genre writing should be rescued from ignominy
irishtimes.com – Sunday October 24, 2021
In 1911 a woman named Mary Helena Fortune died in Melbourne, Australia, her death largely unremarked. By then she was an alcoholic, nearly blind and boasted a career criminal for a surviving son, the exotically named Eastbourne Vaudrey Fortune – better known, unsurprisingly, as George. She subsisted on a small pension from the Australian Journal, and was so poor when she died that she was buried in a grave intended for another.
Only in the 1950s was Fortune connected to the pseudonym WW, or “Waif Wander”, under which she wrote hundreds of crime stories, including a pioneering series for the Journal called The Detective’s Album, detailing the cases of an Australian lawman named Mark Sinclair. So convincingly did Fortune inhabit these first-person accounts that readers were convinced they were the work of a serving or recently retired officer of the law. The Journal did nothing to disabuse its subscribers of this notion, probably figuring the myth would sell more copies than the truth, which was that the tales were being written by a clever, gifted woman born in Belfast in 1833, one who had arrived in Australia via Canada in 1855 with her father and infant son, leaving a bad marriage behind her.
JK Rowling: I kept writing a 'very bad novel' while I created Harry Potter
scotsman.com – Monday October 11, 2021
Rowling has disclosed that the manuscript for The Private Joke was in the luggage rack of her train from Manchester to London when she dreamt up the character.
Writing in a Sunday newspaper essay, she has admitted she kept writing the first novel while working on the first Potter novel, The Philosopher’s Stone.
Seven Benefits of a Writing Partner
publishersweekly.com – Sunday October 10, 2021
I used to think I could go it alone as a writer.
As a matter of fact, I preferred it that way. I wanted to rely on myself alone, not bother anyone, not need anyone to get involved. I was doing fine with this philosophy for years. I wrote and edited and rewrote all on my own, bumping along in a quiet, solitary manner, sending stories and poems to literary magazines, receiving rejections, jumping up and down with my beloved cat whenever an editor wrote me a note or I won a contest.
“What does this mean? Are you famous yet?” my husband would sometimes tease.
He isn’t a writer, so I forgave him. But the fact remained: I wasn’t taking any sizable steps forward in my writing career.
What It Would Take to Disrupt the Publishing Industry
publishersweekly.com – Sunday October 10, 2021
Anyone who follows publishing knows that it loves to celebrate a disruptor. Disruptor is a label thrown at anything new, and publishing is unusually easy to disrupt because it is particularly slow to change.
Back when I started She Writes Press in 2012, I was called a disruptor. I confess, I liked it. But it wasn’t exactly accurate, and whenever I spoke at conferences about what we were doing—which was growing a reputable hybrid model based on the systems of traditional publishing—I let audiences know that legacy publishers had been cutting hybrid deals for years, which was an open secret. If I was doing anything disruptive, it was encouraging the authors we published to be proud of publishing nontraditionally. As I mentioned, it doesn’t take much to be considered a disruptor in this space.
‘Bad art friend’: should fiction writers ever lift stories from other people’s lives?
theguardian.com – Wednesday October 6, 2021
Great writers have always been inspired by friends and lovers, but a viral article has revived the moral arguments around muses. In the age of the internet, does using someone else’s story feel like a violation?
Get the free newsletter | Submit a news item or article | Get Writers' News for your website
