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On Writing: LK Holt
In Killings’ On Writing column, we ask writers we admire to reflect on what and how they write. Our first contributor is LK Holt – poet, publisher at John Leonard Press and editor of the magazine...
View ArticleOn Writing: Louise Swinn
For our ‘On Writing’ series, we asked Louise Swinn to reflect on writing. Her short story ‘A Clean Kind of Dirt’ appears in Issue 4 of Kill Your Darlings. Who cares why I write? I’m the most average...
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On Writing: Leah Swann
Leah Swann’s short story collection, Bearings, tells of the tumult of life, featuring characters who are yet anchored by hope. Her tales have been called ‘perfect little parcels of humanity’. But how...
View ArticleOn writing: Rosie Scott
Rosie Scott is an internationally published, award-winning novelist. Her latest novel, Faith Singer, was included in an international list of ’50 Essential Reads by living writers’ compiled by the...
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On Writing: Fiona Wright
Apparently there’s a look to it. A kind of half-smirk, with a stare that’s a bit glazed and hazy, a tilted head. To me, it sounds like the face of a fox terrier with chewtoys on its mind. But my...
View ArticleOn writing: Kate Holden
I always imagined writers worked in sunny, airy offices, green leaves waving beyond the window, a ray of golden light striking the writer’s unfurrowed brow, a teapot and a bunch of jonquils beside them...
View ArticleOn Writing: Chris Flynn
I’ve always felt deeply ambivalent about ‘the process’, mainly because most of the time it sounds like a load of horseshit to me. I never held much of a romantic attachment to this idea of the...
View ArticleOn Writing: Ruby Murray
For me, reading and writing are flip sides of the same coin. When I was seven or eight, my parents moved to the South of France to try and save their marriage, which in retrospect seems like a crazy...
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On writing: Amal Awad
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m of the Guilty Pleasure bunch – the type who pretend chick-lit is just an occasional indulgence because they’ve misplaced their Jonathan Franzen. It’s not like I’ve...
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The beginnings of a professional lunatic
I went mad in 1976. It changed my life beyond recognition. Doors closed. I lost my identity. I was so invisible in the world I walked in the shadows of others and cast none of my own. My friends...
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Blogging a novel, and the 14 years in between
Photo credit: HarshLight Fourteen years is more than enough time to turn procrastination into a profession. And from the outside maybe that’s what it looks like I’ve been doing, at least when it comes...
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Literary fashions: on writing historical fiction
Image credit: Jo Naylor In her excellent collection of essays, On Histories And Stories, AS Byatt quotes an interview with various British novelists about why they were writing historical novels....
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On reading
Image credit: Dhalmel Ever since I learned how, I have read quite a lot. The childhood habit of reading for half an hour before sleep waned a little in my early twenties (when neither reading nor...
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How my call centre job helped me get published
Image credit: The Poss I had my first novel accepted by Sleepers Publishing about three months ago, just after my twenty-seventh birthday. The age I do things doesn’t really matter to me that much, but...
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A messy kind of sense: Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts
Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts has been trailing me. It’s marked-up, Post-it noted, and dog-eared. I’ve scribbled notes about it. I’ve made a diagram. And still, there’s something gorgeously unresolved...
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On winning literary prizes
Image credit: Fumihiro Toda One of the defining characteristics of life, whether it is the life of a crocus or the life of a capitalist, is competition. The flower that blooms is the winner in a series...
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A writing guide for the time poor
Image credit: Martin Cathrae One of the questions I’m most frequently asked when people find out I am a writer is ‘how do you find the time to write?’ It’s a reasonable question. I have a demanding...
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Just a number: The literary world’s obsession with the age
I used to be obsessed about what age I would be when I had my first novel published. I’d go on the Wikipedia pages of every famous writer I could think of to check how old they were when their first...
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On writing: Amal Awad
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m of the Guilty Pleasure bunch – the type who pretend chick-lit is just an occasional indulgence because they’ve misplaced their Jonathan Franzen. It’s not like I’ve...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The beginnings of a professional lunatic
I went mad in 1976. It changed my life beyond recognition. Doors closed. I lost my identity. I was so invisible in the world I walked in the shadows of others and cast none of my own. My friends...
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