On writing
As you know, blogging has waxed and waned with me, over the years: periods of frequent, even regular epistles followed by periods of drought or – depending on your view of things – grateful relief from my verbal pestering. However – as we also know – New Years are filled with New Year’s Resolutions, so
World famous in Finchley, as The Goons used to say of Neddy Seagoon. Or, as Doug Ford might say, on the other, more retarded hand: ‘Wouldn’t know her if I passed her in the street.’ Who, you might ask? Anne-Marie MacDonald, that’s who. Shows how much I know, fresh as I am off the metaphorical
I hope you won’t mind, as I cast about for bits of wood to throw on the almost-dead fire of my blogging, a re-post of mine from April 2012. It’s about writing – and I post this as I return, also, not just to my blog but my novel: The novel has waited, these two
A modern song of innocence and experience – how ideology and the CIA helped shape the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and in the process contest both communism and thinking. How Iowa Flattened Literature – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Here is a morsel – a feast – of literary-political gossip that The Guardian has done us all the favour of publishing, and that I can’t resist sharing. One dark London night a black limo glides away from Downing Street; in it, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, en route to a most extraordinary dinner encounter
This is a cross-posting from my new blog, word-watcher, where I am struggling to configure a new premium theme (too clever for me, by the looks of it!). So, while I do battle elsewhere, here’s hoping you find this interesting: When it comes to writing a big, hairy, scary report – anything from 10,000 to
For those of you who have begun to read and perhaps follow this blog, many thanks for your interest and time! To keep up your reading, and connection, please take note of the following: Over the next week or so, I will be moving over to a new blog, www.word-watcher.com, and changing the focus a
Hemingway, writes Harry Bruce in his great little book Page Fright: Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers, ‘had such trouble “getting the words right” on the last page of A Farewell to Arms that he rewrote it thirty-nine times. “The first draft of anything,” he said, “is shit.”‘ ‘Getting the words right’ – damn! That
The first part of writing, when I am writing my novel, is reading. Or rather, re-reading. Once I have overcome the inevitable, and probably necessary, procrastination, and sat myself down at the computer, and opened the file, and fiddled with the settings – full screen, or window, two page view, or one, magnification at 110%
After procrastination, comes the production. Here is a short excerpt from my novel – draft four, and hopefully the last draft but one. The excerpt comes from the second half of the story. Roy, the narrator, has come to the small fishing village of Paternoster, up the West Coast from Cape Town, following a memorial
