The bestselling young adult author wrote her first published novel on a BlackBerry while commuting. Now she has a fan base ardent enough to complain about the way she ended one bookLauren Oliver, a bestselling young adult writer whose latest book, Vanishing Girls, was published in the US last week, did not set out to write for teenagers – not originally. In fact, when she started out she wrote more than one novel for adults that she simply couldn’t sell to publishers. Talking about that early work, she is her own toughest critic: she calls the manuscripts “long” and “plotless”. “I kept getting the same feedback,” she said, “which was the writing was very good and the characters were great, but there was no story whatsoever.”Oliver is the daughter of English professors, and she’d attended the MFA program in creative writing at New York University. But, she says, for a long time, publishers’ feedback on her early work puzzled her: “It was honestly a criticism I didn’t totally understand.” Nothing in her background, she said, had prepared her to wield the mechanics of story. It took a job in a young adult division of Penguin to teach her that, where training under editors she learned the basics of structure. And it taught her “to tell a story, not just write character description and pretty sentences and stuff”. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2015-03-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The bestselling young adult author wrote her first published novel on a BlackBerry while commuting. Now she has a fan base ardent enough to complain about the way she ended one bookLauren Oliver, a bestselling young adult writer whose latest book, Vanishing Girls, was published in the US last... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-03-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Malorie Blackman advises budding authors to pick up on news stories, but Julia Donaldson warns of pitfalls – and Alan Moore says you should read terrible books as well as good onesThe key to being a good writer? It’s being a good reader, authors including Carol Ann Duffy and Alan Moore have said... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-03-02 15:43:52 UTC ]
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Earning a living as a writer is as likely as winning the lottery. Instead of writing books and persuading others to buy them, find out what people want to write, then do it for themPhilip Pullman: professional writers set to become ‘an endangered species’ due to low wagesI left school with a... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2016-01-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The Prisoner’s Throne author Holly Black reflects on the rise of “romantasy” novels, explicit sex scenes, and BookTok. Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2024-03-18 21:31:31 UTC ]
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Books & Books recently had the pleasure of hosting three-time National Book Award finalist and best-selling author Lauren Groff, presenting her new novel, The Vaster Wilds. The New York Times calls it “a lonely novel of hunger and survival.” The brilliant Groff reads from her adventure novel... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2023-10-20 08:11:49 UTC ]
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Stephen Carver, Guinevere Glasfurd, Brian Needham and Jo McMillan respond to Joanne Harris’s article about horribly low pay in the publishing worldRegarding Joanne Harris’s article (Horribly low pay is pushing out my fellow authors – and yes, that really does matter, 7 December), I guess I’m a... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2022-12-11 17:07:25 UTC ]
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“I grew up working class and money was a factor in everything we did,” says the poet and novelist, whose new book is the memoir “Crying in the Bathroom.” “That’s why I always write about the financial realities of my characters.” Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2022-07-07 09:00:11 UTC ]
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Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, at 50, is not the average age of a debut author. But the public school teacher describes herself as a “literary debutante” with the October publication of “My Monticello.” Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-09-28 13:06:03 UTC ]
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Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Review of Books published a fairly wild essay by Miguel Esteban who, at the tender age of 14, commissioned a now-famous essay on race in science fiction from Octavia Butler. The whole piece is worth a read (the gall of teenage boys! the grace of Octavia!) but... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2021-07-26 13:40:52 UTC ]
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Lauren Child's latest story focuses on Christmas in a Clarice Bean story that is full of empathy and hope Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-07-17 02:08:43 UTC ]
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Deesha Philyaw talks about the long gestation of her collection 'The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,' a Times Book Prize finalist for first fiction. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2021-04-06 16:30:19 UTC ]
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Author A G Smith has launched Paperchains, a project that aims to publish a book of writing by prisoners, homeless people and members of the armed forces about the coronavirus lockdown. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-06-29 23:21:12 UTC ]
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PHILOSOPHER GARY COX’S How to Be Good: or How to Be Moral and Virtuous in a Wicked World was recently released by Bloomsbury Academic. In the book, Cox explores the concept of goodness, how it is achievable, and how to decide what the right thing to do is. Moral philosophy is notoriously complex... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-06-06 12:30:45 UTC ]
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Sanjana Varghese had been working as a freelance journalist in London for around a year when the coronavirus pandemic hit. As countries around the world went into lockdown, many organisations froze their commissioning budgets, while others halted business entirely. Several of the pieces... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-05-21 20:08:07 UTC ]
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In her creative and critical work, Toni Morrison sought to remap the contours of American literature and culture. Continue reading at The Conversation
[ The Conversation | 2019-08-07 06:00:28 UTC ]
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YA author Alwyn Hamilton has sold a new series to Faber Children’s in the UK and Viking at Penguin Random House in the US. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-07-23 05:23:40 UTC ]
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Head of Zeus has snapped up a "page-turning" new urban fantasy-crime trilogy by writing duo D.K. Fields. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-05-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Authors are being told to write under pseudonyms to present themselves as debut writers and feed the publishing industry’s “obsession” with new, marketable voices, Joanne Harris has said. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-04-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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An interest in ‘how women reframe stories in a feminist framework’ and more was part of the discussion in a Market Focus Indonesia panel at the London Book Fair earlier this month. Editor’s Note: As we look today at comments from women authors, particularly in the Indonesian market, we’d like to... Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2019-03-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Artificial intelligence can now write fiction and journalism. But does it measure up to George Orwell – and can it report on Brexit?Will androids write novels about electric sheep? The dream, or nightmare, of totally machine-generated prose seemed to have come one step closer with the recent... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2019-03-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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