Are you a writer who is in the shit with a particular story or novel? Send me your question, and I’ll try to give some helpful, practical advice. Be specific but try to keep it under 100 words.
Author Archives: tobylitt
If a reader doesn’t know a word, if they are forced to look it up in an online dictionary, it will stop them dead. It will break them out of the reading trance (I’ll write about this soon). And – almost certainly – it will them feel lacking in intelligence, stupid. It’s not a good […]
As last week’s blog went down so well (over 800 reads), I’ve decided to divert into a little more about punctuation – hoping for a similar reaction. This is something I wrote a while ago about how I see the difference between colons and semi-colons. In other news, Patience, my novel, has been shortlisted for […]
SYNTAX How long the unbroken paragraphs look, or how margin-hugging the dialogue is, are things the reader flashes on every time they turn a page. They are things they clock and judge in an instant. Assuming they’re not put off by either too great a density or too much white space, they will proceed into […]
I am delighted that Patience is one of five books shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2020. To celebrate this, my publisher Galley Beggar are offering a 15% discount on purchases of Patience – if you buy with the code YIPPPEEE! Current price is £5.99. Please include the exclamation mark. (They got very excited.) […]
Density isn’t something that often gets talked about, but it is one of the first things a reader notices about a book and one of the last things – sometimes years later – they remember about it. Writers dream of readers. They picture someone reading what they have written – if the writer is lucky, […]
We’ve dealt with our spaces and places, as they relate to story-time, now we need to deal with our time. This should be a lot simpler. Imagine a big invisible clock, hovering in the sky of our flat empty space. It’s not an ordinary clock, showing the hours of the day. It’s a countdown, and […]
Let’s spend a moment examining what story-time means for one particular genre: horror. (Some generalisations follow. Not all horror novels may conform, I realise.) The story-time of a horror novel depends upon a specific form of suspense, namely dread. Horror novels are dread-ful. But we can subdivide them in terms of microgenres, in terms of […]
Last night I introduced Clare Farrell, one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion, at the second Writers Rebel event. The first event took place last October, on Trafalgar Square, where 40 writers – including Ali Smith, Robert Macfarlane and Susie Orbach – read and gave speeches. At the event, I read Blake’s ‘What is the […]
STORY TIME REDUX We’ve already begun to think about stories and time and how they fit together, how they are sometimes the same thing – story-time. Not all story-times are the same. And this is where I would like to propose a different way for you to think about your own writing, and a different […]
