Either/Or/Or I am guessing you are one of three sorts of writer. Does this sound like you? You have hundreds of ideas. You have dozens of opening sentences. You have lots and lots of half-stories. You have a few stories that have even reached what you once hoped was the end, but which turned out merely […]
Lots of writing manuals (yes, this is a writing manual) begin by addressing a virgin subject – a person who has always wanted to write and now has found the time to commit.This is not you – you are not this.
I’ve written a writing manual, and I’m going to serialise it here. It’s called Writing and Shit by Toby Litt. It’ll be weekly. It’ll be free. It’ll include exercises. And you can help me a lot – if you think you can learn something from it – by commenting on what you found useful and […]
If you can’t do Step 9 immediately, go back to Step 8. If you can’t do that, go back to Step 7, and so on. 9. Get a Publisher Your typescript is ready to go. It’s just great. You can do nothing more to improve it. Your Agent (see 8) agrees. Send it out in full […]
Today, some good news – a short story of mine, ‘Impatience,’ has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. It’s the impatient version of my novel, Patience, which will come out in August 2019. The story is very similar, in both, but also – I hope – radically different. Readers who are curious about […]
I wrote this a few years ago, for the Guardian, shortly after Hanif Kureishi had dismissed Creative Writing courses as ‘a waste of time’. This, in my mind, is why they might not be: Although we give classes on the technical aspects of writing, one of the most basic things we give is more basic. […]
Normally, when people come along to a creative writing class, they are hoping to learn how to write better, not how to save the planet. A couple of years ago, I was teaching a Guardian Masterclass on ‘Storytelling Secrets’. Among those attending were three representatives of an international environmental activist network. They were young, casually stylish, energetic […]
JG Ballard didn’t write this. I wrote it. But I wrote it as JG Ballard. (I wrote it for a Birkbeck Arts Week event on Ballard’s non-fiction. My Birkbeck colleague Mark Blacklock is hoping to edit a Selected Non-Fiction, to expand on A User’s Guide to the Millennium.) In 1984, Ballard published a credo, What […]
I hope, if you followed them through, you got something out of the last 10 Lessons. I tried to make them as accessible and useful as possible. I’ve collected below some resources for you to use to take your writing, reading and re-reading further. I am the Fiction Editor of MIR Online, Birkbeck College’s online […]
Welcome back. We started, 10 Lessons ago, with what you needed to be able to write. It turned out to be not that much. But what do you need in order to be a writer? This is how I usually put it: You need the intelligence to begin a story and the stupidity to finish […]
