by Virginia Lloyd | Feb 22, 2010 | Blog, Improve your writing
By now The Guardian’s Ten rules of writing fiction has been well distributed virally – I stumbled across it over at City of Tongues, in which James Bradley also confesses to having neglected his blog lately. Well James, not as much as I have neglected mine...
by Virginia Lloyd | Jan 26, 2010 | Blog, Improve your writing
Christopher Hitchens’s piece on Gore Vidal in the February issue of Vanity Fair, “Vidal Loco”, is a fair if sad account of the decline into irrelevance of a once-influential and provocative American voice (Vidal was occasionally referred to as a...
by Virginia Lloyd | Jan 20, 2010 | Blog, Memoir
Any writer aspiring to publication should read this sobering but, in my view, accurate analysis in The Guardian of ‘The Death of the Slush Pile’. The slush pile – that generic term for the stream of unsolicited submissions that arrive at publishing...
by Virginia Lloyd | Jan 10, 2010 | Blog, Improve your writing
Here’s a thoughtful piece from retired Washington Post literary editor Bob Thompson. In “Writing about Writers” he recounts having to interview Joan Didion about her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking – three days after her daughter...
by Virginia Lloyd | Jan 3, 2010 | Blog, Memoir
Many people I know have had something of a struggle in 2009. Here are some wonderful new year wishes from the remarkable writer Neil Gaiman that are too good not to share: May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine...
by Virginia Lloyd | Dec 21, 2009 | Blog, Improve your writing
Just came across this ode to rewriting from A L Kennedy of The Guardian. She wishes, as I do, that there were a more appetising word for what she describes as the “glorious” work involved in rewriting your prose. No one can teach you how to write, or how...