Someone on Facebook recently posted to ask me about how to restructure an entire book if it needs a bit of an overhaul. This is something I work with authors on at Avon, and it's also something I had to do for my own book, so I do have a few tips on the best way to approach this. Read more
Will Self is the author of 10 novels, five collections of short stories and several works of nonfiction, including The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Dorian and Walking to Hollywood. Phone is the final instalment of the trilogy that began with Umbrella and Shark and is out now in paperback (Viking, £8.99).
I do not think it is a coincidence that the novel as a form reaches maturity at the same point as the bourgeoisie as a class are ascendant. Although the novel has its forerunners and predecessors - Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, de la Fayette - it gets into its stride with affluent, middle-class white men: Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett.
Many years ago, when I had just started writing books about philosophy, I got talking to two of my newly acquired peers. I asked one what he was currently working on, which as conversational gambits go is about as original as asking a novelist where she gets her ideas from. Having heard his answer, I perhaps tactlessly noted that quite a lot of books had recently appeared on this subject. Read more
Emily Dickinson said, over a century ago, that "There is no frigate like a book to take us Lands away," and it's true. When we pick up a book, turn on the TV, or watch a movie, we are carried away down the currents of story into a world of imagination. And when we land, once more, on a shore that is both new and familiar, something strange happens. Stepping onto the shore, we're changed. Read more
I'm tired of reading about the death of the book. It's not true, in the first place, and in the second, it's a lazy signifier, a way of addressing cultural import (or risk) that's not really justified. Read more
The days of slowly introducing a reader to a novel are over. Authors now believe that their first sentence is crucial if they are going to hold their reader's attention because they are so easily distracted by modern technology such as iPads. Read more
In a well-informed article on the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society site, Danuta Kean asks if Google is doing enough to deal with the copyright infringements of file-sharing sites.
As Hilary Mantel carries off the Costa to add to her second Booker win, Sameer Rahim in the Telegraph comments: 'The richness of its language and psychological penetration cannot hide the fact that Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies can be read as posh Philippa Gregory.'
‘I always quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said in the early part of his career he was dismissed as a science fiction writer and that critics tend to put genre books, including sci-fi, in the bottom drawer of their desk... It's true. I get the New York Times every Sunday. In 37 novels, I've never had a stand-alone review. I'm always in the crime round-up.
A survey of 787 members of the Society of Authors (SoA) has found that a third of translators and a quarter of illustrators have lost work to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Translators are also more likely to use AI to support their work, with 37% of respondents saying they have done so, followed by 25% of non-fiction writers.
The author Lynne Reid Banks, known for her novel The L-Shaped Room and her children's book series The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.
I launched my podcast Making It Up nearly three years ago with the goal of interviewing writers not for any particular work of theirs, but to talk to them about their lives. I didn't want to ask them what famous author they want to have dinner with or what their top five favorite books are ... yech. Read more
Until we have a mechanism to test for artificial intelligence, writers need a tool to maintain trust in their work. So I decided to be completely open with my readers
‘I write what I would like to read – what I think other women would like to read. If what I write makes a woman in the Canadian mountains cry and she writes and tell me about it, especially if she says, ‘I read it to Tom when he came in form work and he cried too’, I feel I have succeeded.’