All writers – all writers who intend to write more than a single book – need to work out ways of sustaining themselves through the grind.
Category Archives: Birkbeck Summer Lectures
You mean you can analyse this stuff?
“What I am going to tell you makes explicit the mechanism of something that popular writers cannot afford (publicly at least) to admit can be made explicit or even that it has a mechanism.”
What can we learn about how to be funny on the page for good reason? (In other words, to be satirists.)
Audio and video, good lord.
The Question In the final workshop of last term I was asked The Question. It was one of the Birkbeck Creative Writing MA students, Alex Petropoulos, who asked it. Come on, tell us what we really want to know – tell us The Secret. I was really on the spot. Did I know The Secret? […]
‘Defeat, and the vulnerability of admitting defeat is perhaps necessary to the tone of non-fiction.’
Some words on life-writing, time-envy, and getting the tone of your memoir right.
Let’s start, and stick pretty close to, the reading I asked you to do – Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory; the opening chapters. Why did I choose this? No, let’s evade that for a moment – Why did I choose to talk about Sentences today? Last year, my lecture was on Sensibility […]
‘KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID’: MINIMALISM IN PROSE Kiss. K.I.S.S. Does anyone know what this stands for? Yes, this is the American playwright and screenwriter David Mamet’s famous formulation, which we are to imagine him muttering to himself as he bangs away at his typewriter: “Keep it simple, stupid.” I’m not going to be talking about […]
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