The Myth of the Gifted Writer, and What Sylvester Stallone Shows Us About Being a Storyteller
janefriedman.com – Saturday October 17, 2026
The last person I expected to teach me something about the craft of writing was Sylvester Stallone. Like most people, I knew him from his iconic movie roles, Rocky and Rambo. What I didn’t know was before he became a star, he was a young man obsessed with learning the craft of writing and storytelling.
In his memoir, The Steps, Stallone outlines a master class in something we don’t talk enough about: writing as a learned skill, instead of some ethereal magic that comes to you.
We’re surrounded by romanticized portrayals of brilliant writers in movies and television. A writer sits at a desk and begins typing furiously, and from deep inside them a mysterious talent comes out that helps them make something breathtakingly beautiful.
I used to believe this. When I first began writing, I assumed that successful authors had something I didn’t. They had a natural ability to put words together and create compelling characters and scenes. I thought that if you had this talent, you sat down and wrote, and somehow the brilliance magically emerged.
New Publisher Listing: Bombardier Books
firstwriter.com – Friday October 16, 2026
Publishes conservative political nonfiction exploring contemporary cultural and ideological debates. Focuses on works promoting free expression and open discussion, presenting provocative commentary on modern media, public policy, and the wider political landscape.
Ernest Hemingway stuck to these 4 rules to become a better writer in 1917. They still apply today.
upworthy.com – Thursday October 15, 2026
Ernest Hemingway is widely considered one of the great American novelists. He won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 and 1954, respectively.
“His short, declarative sentences, intentional repetition, and general absence of adjectives were a departure from the style of every previous novelist,” notes teacher Jessica Leader via PBS, which premiered Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s six-hour documentary Hemingway in 2021. “Whereas authors before him conveyed meaning and mood through ornate descriptions of setting and detailed character sketches, Hemingway kept his writing terse and sparse.”
Hemingway honed his writing style during his short journalism career at The Kansas City Star, where he worked from October 1917 to April 1918. The paper’s style guide gave him rules and a framework for crafting his writing.
Hemingway’s 4 writing rules
The Kansas City Star‘s style guide, The Star Copy Style Sheet, mainly helped Hemingway report on straightforward stories about the police and emergency rooms.
“Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” Hemingway said in 1940. “I’ve never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them.”
Festival offers crime authors chance to pitch agents
dailyecho.co.uk – Wednesday October 14, 2026
A crime writing festival is offering aspiring authors the chance to pitch their work to literary agents.
Coastal Crime, taking place in Southampton, will be held on March 6, 2027, at the Leonardo Royal Hotel Southampton Grand Harbour, and will include an Industry Hub offering advice and support for writers looking to break into publishing.
The hub will feature talks and sessions with established authors, publishing professionals, and literary agents, covering topics such as writing, pitching, and navigating the publishing industry.
Alex Stone, author and festival director, said: "We know there are talented aspiring writers across Southampton, Hampshire, and the wider South Coast who have stories they want to tell but aren’t sure how to get started, or how to take the next step towards publication.
New Literary Agent Listing: Finlay Charlesworth
firstwriter.com – Wednesday October 14, 2026
Builds a list of nonfiction with an emphasis on popular culture, sport, politics, sociology, science and contemporary history, seeking authoritative, incisive and deeply researched work that offers fresh ways of seeing. Looks for writers able to convey energy, joy and insight through data-driven analysis, exposé, manifesto or polemic, and welcomes new voices including younger authors and those outside traditional publishing centres. Selectively handles upmarket and literary fiction from Millennial and Gen Z writers, especially novels with strong characterisation, a vivid sense of place and time, and controlled darkness. Not seeking memoir, mind body spirit, self-help, cookery, deep history, graphic novels, historical fiction, romance, fantasy, horror, YA or poetry.
‘A place where you can be unruly’: Editor Brian Trapp on why Northwest Review and literary magazines matter
orartswatch.org – Tuesday October 13, 2026
The esteemed literary magazine, with a legacy stretching back to 1957, has returned to its University of Oregon birthplace in a digital incarnation.
EUGENE — At a time when the publishing industry grapples with shrinking arts funding, technological affronts, influencer-authors, and questions about the impact of storytelling, Brian Trapp sees a particular urgency in bringing back the literary magazine.
Founded in 1957 at the University of Oregon, Northwest Review has spent much of its history moving among literary prominence, controversy, and an uncertain future. Its early issues included work by Ken Kesey, and the journal later drew controversy by publishing provocative texts, including an interview with Fidel Castro and poetry by Charles Bukowski. Over the years, the magazine has featured writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Barry Lopez, Joyce Carol Oates, and George Saunders, whose first published short story appeared in a 1986 issue. Under longtime editor John Witte, the journal became known for fearlessly publishing unconventional voices.
Financial pressures ended its original run in 2011, but the magazine resurfaced in Portland in 2020 under S. Tremaine Nelson, current Northwest Review translation editor, only to shutter again in 2023. After that revival ended, Northwest Review returned this year to Eugene, where University of Oregon faculty members Brian Trapp and Jason Brown are giving the journal new life as a digital magazine rooted in a university setting.
How to Submit Your Writing in the Berlin Literary Scene
the-berliner.com – Tuesday October 13, 2026
Lit. editor Ceri Savage thinks submitting to literary journals is a rejection-lined bureaucratic hellscape. Here's why she still thinks you should go for it.
You’d think writing would be the hard part, but putting your work out there can take even more commitment than tackling the blank page. Whether a single poem or an entire collection, getting published is a rocky road. I’d go so far to say it’s a bureaucratic, rejection-lined hellscape and any artist’s worst nightmare. But even then, I still think you should go for it. Not every writer wants to publish and not every poem needs to be shared (no one wants a screenshot of your unedited 4am Notes app), but what’s the point of crafting these precious inclinations of the human heart if they’re just going to sit on your laptop?
By submitting to literary journals, you don’t need to wait until you’ve written a whole book. Writing one poem is challenge enough – an outpouring followed by testing if it reads better in three stanzas or four, whether it works better in a Fibonacci sequence or as a splatter of edgy line breaks. It’s architecture. It takes time. Writing a whole collection could take years, if it even happens at all. The good news is that countless literary journals, magazines, newspapers, anthologies and competitions would be thrilled to accept your one precious poem.
There are tens of thousands of literary journals. Most of them accept not only poems but short stories, flash fiction, essays or novel excerpts. I’d begin with approachable ones – online-only or ones with small circulations – then slowly work your way up to the big guns: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic. It’s easy to get sucked into the North American scene, but you’ll find fantastic publications, big and small, all over the world, and the local ones are well worth supporting. In Berlin alone, you’ve got so many options: FU Review, berlin lit, The Berlin Literary Review, SAND Journal, first page, Sad Girl Press, DADDY, Berlin Quarterly, Anodyne Magazine, Erotic Review… there are honestly too many to name. I’m also throwing The Berliner into the mix since we started our new ‘Poem of the Month’ in the Literature section.
HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster quietly hand book copy to chatbots
martincid.com – Sunday October 11, 2026
Three of the five biggest publishers in the United States are using ChatGPT and Claude to write the text readers see on book jackets, Amazon listings and Goodreads pages, according to a WIRED investigation. More than two dozen employees at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette described chatbots drafting publicity copy, emails to literary agents, marketing videos and even cover art, without public disclosure or the consent of the authors involved.
The contrast is what stings. In public, publishing has cast itself as one of the loudest opponents of generative AI, suing over copyright and cancelling books whose authors were suspected of letting a language model do the writing. Inside the same industry, the tools have become ordinary office software, and the person who picks up a novel because of its back-cover pitch has no way of knowing who, or what, wrote that pitch.
At HarperCollins, senior leaders bought Claude licences from Anthropic and then, according to a current employee, struggled to work out what to do with them. Dozens of staff were drafted as “AI Champions” and asked to find uses in monthly brainstorming sessions. The company also pays for ChatGPT and for Jasper, a platform that promises to run marketing workflows from start to finish, and one division has gone “all in”, including AI-generated marketing videos.
'Human-authored' book labels gain ground amid AI scandals
sg.news.yahoo.com – Sunday October 11, 2026
Initiatives to label books as written by humans, and not artificial intelligence, are gaining ground following a string of scandals where authors were suspected of using the technology without admitting it.
Several labelling schemes, including from Britain, France and Germany, were being showcased at the world's biggest book industry fair in Frankfurt this week, where the challenges posed by AI were hotly debated.
Among recent cases where authors allegedly used AI, the most high-profile is that of Haitian-Canadian author Thelyson Orelien, which has rocked the French-language literary world. He has denied the claims.
On Writing: What about writers’ groups?
mvtimes.com – Saturday October 10, 2026
It’s quite possible that “The Lord of the Rings” would never have been published were it not for the feedback J.R.R. Tolkien received in his writers’ group, the Inklings. In the 1930s and ’40s, Tolkien, along with C.S. Lewis and some 17 other writers, all men, met on Thursday evenings to discuss and dissect their work. They “were quick to praise one another; they were also highly critical,” according to Diana Pavlac Glyer, who wrote about the Inklings in her book “Bandersnatch.” Inklings member Robert Havard described their critiques as “frank but friendly,” and said, “Coming from a highly literate audience, it was often profuse and detailed.”
These days, with more books being published than ever before, writers’ groups like the Inklings have become so prevalent that it almost seems like finding and joining one is as much a part of the writing process as, say, procrastinating or doing some actual writing. There are writers’ groups to satisfy just about every literary itch, and niche — groups run by a facilitator and those that are freeform; genre-specific groups, and groups that throw every genre in the blender. There are highly structured writers’ groups, where each member gets a predetermined time for reading and feedback, and the loosey-goosey who’s-got-something-to-read-tonight approach; groups that give only positive feedback, or positive feedback first, and groups that emphasize critical feedback. Some writers’ groups are made up of just a few people; others will fill an auditorium. There are even nationally organized groups that have spawned regional chapters.
But are writers’ groups necessary? And do they work? I suppose the answer to those questions depends on who you are, how you like to write, and how well you receive feedback. For me, the answers are a definitive yes and yes.
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