‘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.
Tag Archives: amwriting
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 […]
I don’t think you’re going to like this. It’s probably going to hurt. If it doesn’t hurt, there’s a problem. As part of your coursework, you’ll have read Flannery O’Connor’s essay ‘Writing Short Stories’. She begins by saying this: ‘I have heard people say that the short story was one of the most difficult […]
CNF She told her not to not to write it and he went after her to tell her to ignore her and to write it anyway because it was either that or drown. The Hurst, 2017
Today, Galley Beggar announced they will be publishing my novel Patience in August 2019. I feel differently about this book to others I’ve written. It seems, to me, the best thing I’ve done. Not just written, done. This is largely because I was visited by Elliott, a once-in-a-lifetime narrator who is nicer, wiser and generally […]
As some of you may have been directed here by the Galley Beggar newsletter, here’s some info about the forthcoming Wrestliana and wrestling-related events. I don’t usually post this kind of thing, but it would be great if you were able to come along and say hello: 7th June 2018, 7.30pm – Wrestliana launch at Cakes […]
It’s Too Original Your novel is ahead of its time. This means that no-one is equipped to understand it, because in order to understand it’d they’d have to have read it, and no-one has yet read it because – when they try – they find they’re not equipped. A very vicious circle, this. However, your […]
Today is the launch day of New Poetries 7, the occasional Carcanet anthology of new and not-established poets. I am very happy to be one of them. Most of the poems by me included in the anthology are lyrical. But the opening few are from a sequence I wrote the day Donald Trump won the […]
Next in the continuing series of kill-your-darling sections painfully taken out of Wrestliana. The following really hurt. This was written to illustrate the split between intellectual and physical labour. (It’s meant to be very awkward.) The symbolic moment for me, and I knew it was this at the time, came during the summer of 1986. I […]
This is the original Wrestliana – my great-great-great grandfather’s history of wrestling (as the oldest and greatest sport in the world) Two shillings and sixpence is what it would have cost you in 1823. In 2018, a first edition will cost you around £800. If you can find one. It’s still available print-on-demand – […]
