8 Craft Books to Inspire Your New Year’s Writing Resolutions
electricliterature.com – Thursday January 2, 2025
Many New Year’s Resolutions are health-centric—a promise to eat healthier, exercise more, or finally quit smoking. But for writers, caring for your creativity is just as central to your wellbeing.
To give you some extra motivation, we’ve rounded up books on writing that are filled with new ways of approaching the craft and practical advice from well-known authors. Whether you’re looking to start a new writing practice or finally get to work on the novel idea you’ve been chewing on for the past few months, these books will give you the inspiration you need to begin.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
With more than 70 books under his belt, Stephen King is a pop culture icon. On Writing is a memoir of his writing career, beginning with his childhood in Maine, where he would submit short stories to science fiction and horror magazines; to publishing his first novel, Carrie; to surviving a car accident that nearly killed him.
The revolution in Irish literary journals
rte.ie – Tuesday December 31, 2024
One of the most frustrating things about trying to break into the writing game is having to listen to the advice of people who have already made it.
They'll tell you to be patient. They’ll tell you that with talent, persistence and a little luck, anyone determined enough will eventually have their day. All of which is fine and may actually be true, though it trivialises for many what can often be incredibly difficult in the moment. Not all of us have the luxury to be persistent, and there are a myriad of reasons why this should be so: Financial pressures, the responsibilities of being a parent, disabilities which take up so much of our time and energy that devoting ourselves wholly to the pursuit of one thing is not only undesirable, it seems nigh on impossible.
What those writers miss, therefore—well-meaning as their advice may be—is that support structures need to be in place to facilitate that necessary persistence. Funding from public bodies is one crucial strand of this. Being able to plug into a network of like-minded artists and writers who are struggling with the same thing is another. But perhaps one that doesn’t get talked about enough is the role of literary magazines; those places we submit to when we’re finally ready to share our writing with other people, which give us the ego-boost we need that we’re on the right track.
Writing competition marks 20th anniversary in 2025
bbc.co.uk – Sunday December 29, 2024
A writing competition in Surrey will mark its 20th anniversary in 2025.
The Elmbridge Literary Competition was conceived as a one-off event in 2005, but has developed into a contest that attracts entrants from around the world.
The theme for the 2025 event is the river.
This has been chosen to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of local writer R C Sherriff, author of the play Journey's End and a keen rower.
The author's link to the area is marked by the Rowing Eight, a sculpture close to Molesey Boat Club.
Entry to the competition costs £8 for adults, but is free to under-18s, and the closing date is 24 February.
Simon Waugh, portfolio holder for leisure, culture and commercial strategy at Elmbridge Borough Council, said: "Over the last two decades, it has grown significantly, attracting an increasing number of participants.
A reminder of how good writing happens
poynter.org – Saturday December 28, 2024
Call in the metaphor squad and other writing tips from Poynter's Beat Academy
ew York Times reporter Jeanna Smialek was stalled on a story. She wanted to describe how people of her generation — millennials — were distorting the economy, and all she knew for sure was there was an image she didn’t want to use: the snake and the egg.
“The snake metaphor was gross,” Smialek said. “You don’t want to talk about food moving through a snake in a nut graph. And I’m like, that’s the energy I want to go for, but less disgusting.”
What she came up with was similar, and better. She compared her generation’s economic impact to a person “squeezing into a too-small sweater.”
“At every life stage, it has stretched a system that was often too small to accommodate it, leaving it somewhat flabby and misshapen in its wake.”
We can pause to appreciate the line, but for us at Beat Academy, the real take-home lesson is how Smialek found it.
“If you could only see the hours of time and debate that went into the sweater metaphor,” she said. “I probably made 16 people talk about metaphors with me before I finally came upon one that worked.”
On resisting the pressures of the market
thecreativeindependent.com – Tuesday December 24, 2024
Writer and literary agent Jaclyn Gilbert on resisting easy categorization, honoring the gray areas, and sustainably incorporating feedback.
You are the founder of Driftless Literary, an agenting collective committed to helping authors develop experimental or genre-bending work. What was your vision for the agency and what did it take to get it up and running?
I started Driftless in 2021, when I was in the wake of a lot of transition, spiritually, professionally, as a new parent and as a writer. In my early twenties, I went to a program called the Columbia Publishing Course in New York, and that was basically how I landed my first job in the industry. But after many years of committing to that path, I realized how unsustainable it was for me, not only financially, but creatively. In 2013, when I left publishing to get my MFA, and afterward—when I published my first novel in 2018—I came to see my path through an entirely new lens, a kind of double lens as both an editor/writer.
Moving forward, I knew I wanted to provide authors with the care and attention most agents are unable to provide around the writing process, focused as they are on bringing in sizable commissions around a future book sale. This incentivizes agents to make edits that serve the market, not based on what the work is asking for at its core, and I wanted to be able to offer this as an agent, to carve out a particular niche for this focus.
Writers' Handbook 2025 now available to buy
firstwriter.com – Saturday December 21, 2024
The 2025 edition of firstwriter.com’s annual directory for writers has just been released, and is now available to buy in paperbook, with the ebook version set to follow in the New Year.
The directory is the perfect book for anyone searching for literary agents, book publishers, or magazines. It contains over 1,500 listings, including revised and updated listings from the 2024 edition, and over 300 brand new entries.
Alex Cochran joins Greyhound Literary
thebookseller.com – Saturday December 21, 2024
Alex Cochran has joined Greyhound Literary as a literary agent, after spending 13 years at Conville & Walsh (C&W). He started out first as an assistant, then as translation rights agent and a primary agent.
Cochran’s client list covers a range of genres, from literary fiction, science fiction and fantasy, crime and thriller and book club to serious non-fiction.
Cochran said: "After many wonderful years at C&W, I’m delighted to bejoining the brilliant team at Greyhound Literary. I’ve long admired the agency Charlie and Sam have built and the breadth of talented writers they represent, and I am looking forward to working with such an impressive and dynamic group of agents."
The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction
persuasion.community – Saturday December 21, 2024
Literary fiction is dead. Or, so we’ve been told. Perhaps we can agree it lies bleeding.
It’s convenient to assume that readers are to blame for killing literary fiction, and publishers have abandoned it because book-buyers are stupid, have bad taste, and just aren’t reading anymore. But what has actually occurred is death by committee.
One hundred years ago, there were dozens of publishing houses and a robust publishing landscape. This is the idea of publishing that so many of us still have stored away in our collective memory—a competitive marketplace in which publishers needed to nurture, court, outbid, and out-promise each other in landing both emerging and established writers. This process gave us—among so many others—Flannery O’Connor, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Baldwin.
No longer. Mirroring many other American industries, publishing has followed the path of consolidation, starting when Random House bought Knopf in 1960. What followed was a fifty-year feeding frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. In 2012, when Random House and Penguin merged, we were left with today’s “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. The result is a monopsony, a market dominated by only a few buyers. In the absence of genuine competition, monopsonists, like monopolists, have a tendency to reject the laborious pursuit of quality in favor of short-term profit.
We are now at the logical end-point of that process, with the government compelled to step in and block additional mergers in order to keep even a shred of literary competitiveness alive. In 2022, a federal antitrust suit blocked Penguin Random House’s merger with Simon & Schuster. For writers, it was something like a last-minute stay of execution, but the trial laid bare the problems that high-quality fiction faces in a homogenized publishing landscape. Testifying for the government during the trial, Stephen King explained: “Let’s say if you are an agent and your specialty is baseball teams, you have something like 32 teams that you could negotiate with. But when it comes to big publishers, there are five. You know, baseball players have a saying, you can’t hit them if you can’t see them. And you can’t sell books competitively if there are only so many people in the competition.”
South West publishing group seeking submissions
wellington-today.co.uk – Thursday December 19, 2024
NEW and seasoned writers across the south west are invited to submit their work to the Somerset literary group - Axe River Books.
Until the end of January, Axe River Books is requesting submissions of literary fiction that embodies the richness of the region, from writers or manuscripts connected to the south west.
The company is accepting long-form prose fiction, or any genre with a “literary edge” from both emerging writers and seasoned storytellers. Novellas, short stories, poetry and illustrated books are not accepted for submission at this time.
The community interest company (CIC) was founded in 2022 by three literature enthusiasts to offer publishing opportunities to writers in the south west of England, with a focus on those unpublished or unrepresented by literary agents. Inspired by the Mendip Hill’s river of the same name, River Axe Books provides a platform for emerging voices and promotes original talent from the region.
New Publisher Listing: Muswell Press
firstwriter.com – Wednesday December 18, 2024
We are a small publisher and take on a maximum of 12 new books each year, both agented and non-agented, so both our time and space on the list is limited. That said, we love discovering new writers, so please bear with us, it may take up to three months to respond. We are interested in upmarket fiction, crime and thriller, memoir, biography and travel. Our queer list publishes both fiction and biography. Please consider whether your book would work on our list by browsing our recent titles on the website. We do not publish children’s books, YA, military history, cookery, lifestyle, sci fi, fantasy or poetry.
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