Gillian McAllister is often asked about the process behind her novels. She uses 'the age-old and hugely inefficient system of trial and error. The problem is, the trial is writing 100,000 words, and the error is deleting them'.
Let me just start with: I do not condemn "telling." There's a place for it in every story, and that's mainly in the interstices between scenes.
But there's a reason we must show things when we are in scene and not tell: readers attach to clear actions and emotions. And that's key to pulling the reader into your story.
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
Earlier this year, I took a week-long writing retreat at the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in Temecula, California. I had an idea for a new project and had written about 10,000 words, but I wanted some focused time to dive in and figure it out.
I'm the author of two books, but I'm used to writing on the side of other jobs. Maybe that means it's a hobby-or maybe it's what knits my whole life together.
When we tell people we wrote a novel together-The Lemon, out November 8 on Viking-they all want to know two things: 1. What did you do with all the money? And 2. How on earth do three people write a novel together? The answer to the first question is easy: We bought-late model Mazda Miatas. The answer to the second question is more complicated. Read more
Participants in November’s National Novel Writing Month challenge are cautioned not to rush their work out the door. Indeed, it’s wise not to send the draft completed on November 30 off to agents or editors on December 1, like an overeager chef serving a partially baked cake. Read more
'I did something which I haven't done before, which was really just play. I went into the British Library, looked at a whole load of books about subjects I was interested in, and just waited to see anything that jumped out at me.
Kate Thompson was horrified to discover that her book, The Sunday Times bestseller, A Mother's Promise, had been plagiarised and rewritten by AI - just days after publication. And then it happened again.
On Saturday, the Trump administration fired Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright OfficeThe US copyright office has information on its website about how to register and what advantages there are in doing so. www.copyright.gov/register/, just two days after the dismissal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, under whose auspices the U.S. Copyright Office operates. Perlmutter was appointed by Hayden in 2020.
Protection of copyright has always been a top priority for the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies, and that point was driven home again during the organization's annual meeting held via Zoom on May 8. Read more
Mark Price has said he has been advised that there are "two grounds on which a legal case could realistically be pursued" against Meta in the UK for the company's use of pirated books to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Read more
When readers first met her in The Golden Compass (first published in the U.K. in 1995 as Northern LightsHandy site which provides links to 7,500 US publishers' sites and online catalogues. www.lights.com/publisher/), Lyra Belacqua was a young orphan, hiding in a wardrobe at Oxford's Jordan College, spying on the scholars she lived among in a world with some parallels to our own. Read more
'It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story.'