Breathing In, Singing Out: Three notions of voice in writing
James Baldwin. Image credit: Mottke Weisman In workshops and at festivals, aspiring writers have asked me: ‘How do I find my “voice”?’ The more I think about the idea of ‘voice’ in writing, the more...
View ArticleOn Being An Expert: Eliza Henry-Jones on writing fiction
When you write a book, you are suddenly perceived as an expert in whatever your book is about. Which is terrifying. And feels untrue. I’m not an expert on anything I’ve ever written. For me, writing...
View ArticleWriting about the New Yorker: A genre unto itself
In the introduction to her 1999 book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker, the famed American journalist and essayist Renata Adler opens with: ‘As I write this, The New Yorker is dead.’ Adler’s...
View ArticleBetween You & Me: The New Yorker’s Mary Norris on publishing, editing and...
Mary Norris begins her chatty grammar guide and memoir, Between You & Me, by chronicling the odd jobs she held before she began working at the New Yorker in 1978. She delivered milk – awkwardly...
View ArticleCan the Writer Speak?: On writers, politics and terrorism
Writers, it turns out, are aliens. ‘All writers are Martians,’ according to Martin Amis. ‘They come and say, You haven’t been seeing this place right; it’s not like that, it’s like this.’ Nobel...
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