NaNoWriMo participants have less than 24 hours to complete their project. For our final tip, we’re sharing some of our favorite lessons from five established authors who contributed to The Guardian’s “Ten Rules For Writing Fiction” piece.
01. “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” — Elmore Leonard
02. “Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.” — Geoff Dyer
03. “Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.” — Margaret Atwood
04. “Remember you love writing. It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.” — A.L. Kennedy
05. “Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.” — Neil Gaiman
This is our twentieth NaNoWriMo Tip of the Day. To help GalleyCat readers take on the challenge of writing a draft for a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, we will be offering advice throughout the entire month.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
For the first time in ten years, Granta has revealed its list of the Best of Young British Novelists. Below, we’ve linked to free samples of all 20 novelists.
The winners were chosen from among 150 novelists by a panel of judges: John Freeman, Ellah Allfrey, Romesh Gunesekera, Stuart Kelly, A.L. Kennedy, Sigrid Rausing and Gaby Wood. Here’s more from the release:
At a celebration to be held at the British Council, on the evening of 15 April 2013, Granta will announce its once-in-a-decade selection of the twenty best British novelists aged under forty. Granta’s first generation-defining list of writers was published in 1983 and set the bar for the following decades.
Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall
The Liar’s Gospel by Naomi Alderman
The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam
The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman
The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan
The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna
Childish Loves by Benjamin Markovits
Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed
Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi
Waterline by Ross Raisin
Ours Are the Streets by Sunjeev Sahota
Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi
Kartography by Kamila Shamsie
NW by Zadie Smith
Spring by David Szalay
Politics by Adam Thirlwell
After the Fire, A Still, Small Voice by Evie Wyld
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
I spent most of this weekend reading a hefty book for review, then running to catch up on corporate work and student papers. Then, for about a half hour, I calmed down and read
The New York Times. I found
the interview everyone else has likely read by now—the one in which A.L. Kennedy talks to John Williams about
The Blue Book, and other such matters.
I found this particular exchange quite nicely juicy. I juxtapose it with a photo I took of my own classroom chalkboard, when I was prepping for the conversation my students and I were about to have about Caroline Knapp's memoir,
Drinking: A Love Story.
You can teach reading. You can teach critique. But you should not, as Kennedy points out here, tell someone, especially an author, what to think.
Q.
Have you ever learned anything specific about your craft from reading a critic’s reaction to your work?
A.
From a professional critic, no. I’ve never expected to. In the U.K., the critical culture can be fairly moribund and dominated by an oddly ill-informed set of academic assumptions. There’s less and less space or money for serious criticism. From critics — which is to say, people who look closely at my work and are true and wide-ranging readers — yes, I have. But paying too much attention to external opinion — fashions, theories, trends, friends — puts you a couple of years behind your own timeline, because critics only ever follow. That whole scene can take you away from your center and your voice, while making you self-conscious. It’s a toxic combination. And an adult writer can’t always be expecting this little fantasy undergraduate workshop to tell them what to think. If you’re the author, it’s your decision to find out what you think and what you want to say and then get on with it. If it were a group effort, your name wouldn’t be the only one on the title.
Amazon has created its own literary fiction imprint called Little A. Designer Chip Kidd created the logos for this new corner of Amazon Publishing.
The new imprint will focus on novels, memoirs and story collections. It will include books by James Franco, A.L. Kennedy and Jenny Davidson. The publisher will also open a digital-only series that will be part of the larger imprint. Check it out:
Day One is a digital-only series within Little A that is focused on short stories from debut writers and is available in North America and in the U.K. The first title, Kodi Scheer’s, haunting, fabulist “When a Camel Breaks Your Heart” was released on February 5, 2013. On March 19, Day One will release “Monster” by McSweeney’s contributor Bridget Clerkin, in which a woman struggles to keep her dysfunctional family together amid unsettling events–the family dog goes missing and an unidentified, mysterious animal corpse washes up on the beach.
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
