Time to Write

Childhoods of the great authors: George Orwell (Eric Blair)

                                     copyright 2012 Jurgen Wolff

(The great writers also left behind advice for fellow writers. Find it in my newest book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," available now from Amazon, Waterstones, B & N,or your other favorite bookseller)

Video: P. G. Wodehouse talks about how he writes (the puzzle method)

The author of the "Jeeves and Wooster" novels, P. G. Wodehouse was interviewed for the BBC's Monitor program in 1958. The link below will take you to a seven minute clip from that interview. The wartime broadcasts referred to were ones he made in 1941 in Berlin. They led people to think he was a Nazi sympathiser but after the war this was investigated by MI5 and he was exonerated.

In this video he talks about his life, how he writes, and why he never lets his characters take over. 

You can watch the video here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12201.shtml (There's no sound on the first minute of shots of his home, his books, etc. The video is about 7 and a half minutes long.)

(Would would you like to have Mark Twain as your writing coach? Or how about Anton Chekhov or Jane Austen? You'll find their advice about writing in my newest book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)

 

Author Michael Morpurgo on "War Horse" and

Michael Morpurgo has been writing children's books for 25 years, but it was the stage and film versions of his book "War Horse" that rocketed public awareness of his work.

At the end of the link below you'll find a BBC interview with him, conducted by students from a school in Plymouth. He talks about using names of people he meets,  why the stage version of "War Horse" is more intense, and being Children's Laureate. 

You can see the interview here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17382092

(Would would you like to have Mark Twain as your writing coach? How about Anton Chekhov or Jane Austen? You'll find their advice about writing in my newest book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)

 

Writing 12 novels in 12 months with Crowd Funding

The novelist Matt Forbeck (“Amortals”) has set himself an impressive goal: write twelve novels in twelve months, to add to his previous sixteen. He described the venture in a post at suvudu.com.

“I had the ability, but not the money, so I found ways to hedge my bets. In a world in which ebooks are starting to dominate, length isn’t as much of an issue, so I decided to go with shorter novels, about 50,000 words each. I also chose to line up pre-orders for the books through Kickstarter, the world’s top crowdfunding platform. Since I’d be writing without an advance, that gave me the money I needed to feed my family while I worked on the projects.

I call this plan 12 for ‘12. So far, it’s been a smashing success. I broke the dozen novels down into four trilogies of books, and I’m running a Kickstarter drive for each one of them. The first two were fully funded and then some, ranking in the top twelve — there’s that number again — fiction projects ever on Kickstarter. Today (March 31), I’m finishing up the third book, meaning that I’ve completed three novels in the last three months, each on schedule.”

His Kickstarter crowdfunding goal for the first book was $3000 and he actually raised $13,276. If you’re considering trying this kind of campaign you might be interested in the incentives he offered.

 The 56 people who pledged $5 will get an ebook edition of the first in the first trilogy, the 92 who pledged $25 get a personalized and autographed ebook edition, an mp3 of a song and will be named as a Player in the credits.

The 27 who pledged $35 also get a limited edition softcover of the first novel and named as a Citizen in the credits.

 The 16 who pledged at least $50 get all that and will named as an Accomplice in the credits.

There are more levels, all the way up to one backer who pledged $1000 or more and will collaborate with the author to create a major superhero or villain (an Alpha) and will be named as an Alpha in the credits. 

There were no takers for the $2500 or $5000 levels, the latter of which would have seen the author fly to the donor anywhere in the world to deliver 50 hardcover copies of the novel for a reading and signing for the donor and friends. (To see the video and other details of this part of the crowdfunding campaign, go to http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/forbeck/12-for-12-10-bnw-novels)

The campaign for the second book raised $12,800, with the highest pledge being $500.

Obviously it helps enormously if you already have a loyal following. If you are unknown and want people to fund your book you will have to have a vey appealing story, a compelling video, some great incentives, and the time and energy to use social media to reach your target audience.

 (Who knows about how to write? How about Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen? Their advice to writers--along with the advice of more than another modern and classic authors--is in 'Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller now.)

 

 

Writing a novel...the same one four times: Jane Hamilton explains

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If you’re struggling as you write your novel and you assume “real” writers have it much easier, Jane Hamilton, author of “The Book of Ruth,” is evidence that it ain’t necessarily so. She told a symposium recently that it took four complete versions of “Map of the World” before she got it right.

She said “Sometimes I can’t do the next thing until I finish the bad thing.”

She also revealed that conditions were far from ideal when she started writing. She was sharing a computer with her husband and bringing up young children. She said, “My early novels were fuelled with pure rage.”

 Her books are about relationships, and she started her talk by quoting this wonderful passage from an essay by Willa Cather on Katherine Mansfield: “One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.”

 If we keep that in mind, we’ll never run out of stories!

 Source: Salsburypost.com http://www.salisburypost.com/Entertainment/040112-book-hamilton-qanda-qcd

(Mark Twain has advice for you about writing. So do Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anton Chekhov, and Jane Austen. You'll find it in "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other booksellers now.)

The strange worlds of the late Harry Crews, novelist

The writer Harry Crews died recently, leaving a legacy of some of the weirdest fiction (and a memoir) you’ve probably never read. Although he wrote in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Hunter S. Thompson he never achieved their level of fame.

He believed that “the writer’s job is to get naked, to hide nothing, to look away from nothing.”

If you go by his memoir, “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place,” he had lots to reveal. At the age of five he contracted polio. At seven he fell into a vat of boiling water (it was used for slaughtered pigs) and burned off most of his skin. He fought in the Korean War as a Marine and married and divorced the same woman twice. One of their sons drowned at an early age in a neighbor’s swimming pool.

Crews had tattoos before they were popular with anybody other than sailors and sideshow workers, drank too much, and got into fights—at the same time teaching at the University of Florida, where one of his students was crime novelist Michael Connelly.

A parade of freaks and outsiders populated his novels, which include “The Gospel Singer,” “Naked in Garden Hills,” and “Scar Lover.” He wrote between 4am and 9am, beginning his writing sessions with the prayer, “God, I’m not greedy. Just give me the next 500 words.”

The Georgia Review featured part of an unpublished memoir by Crews. Here’s an excerpt:

"As Mama and I walked, she had her hand clamped on my shoulder so tightly she was hurting me and my arm was starting to go numb. Each time she had to put her weight on her bad leg the viselike grip convulsively dug more deeply into the place where she held me. I had glanced at her face several times and it showed no sign of pain, only a kind of resigned indifference. But I knew the kind of hurt she had to be feeling from the way she held my shoulder and leaned into me as we walked. And in all the long years that followed that morning she never talked to me about the trip to the bus station or about the hideous ordeal that would begin for her as soon as I was gone. 

She had to have been scared, terrified even, but no more than a dozen words, if that many, had passed between us. And that has seemed passing strange to me ever since I got old enough to think about that morning and what was happening, not only the enormity of what was ahead of her, but how distraught she must have been over what had already happened. She was looking at the prospect of having her hip and thigh ripped open like the belly of a butchered hog and then having most of her body encased in hard plaster during the hottest months of the year, but besides that, her worst nightmare had already come true. 

She had always feared not being able to keep the three of us together, to earn enough money to keep me, my brother, and her under the same roof. And now we were being torn one from the other, and only God knew what the future held, whether or if we would ever get back together. The night before, after my brother had been gone to his job at the box factory for the better part of an hour, she said in a quiet, bemused voice, not so much to me, it seemed, as to herself: “I’m gone bring us all back together if I can, but . . .” She did not finish the sentence. 

Now not only was my brother back at the apartment wrapped in an exhausted sleep, but she was taking me to the bus station to make the trip alone to stay with Aunt Eva and Uncle Alton in Bacon County just north of the Okefenokee Swamp in south Georgia, and from the bus station she was going straight to the hospital to submit herself to the surgeon’s knife for the first time in her life. Her incredible courage that had been born of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives had not been enough to hold together that which she loved most in the world.”

While doing some research I made a mistake he might have enjoyed: instead of Harry Crews, I typed in Henry Crews (it was early in the morning...). I encountered quite a few Henry Crews, several recently deceased, including Henry W. Crews, who, the obit said, “had retired from Babcock and Wilcox, where he worked as a bar straightener.”

 There was also a twitter page for another Henry Crews, started in December 2010 and finished in June of 2011.  Did he die or just run out of Tweets?

 Another was a genealogy search for William H. Crews: “Family legend has it that he was killed by lightning while working out in the fields about 2 yrs after their second son, George Marion was born.”

 At about that point I realized something was wrong; the author wasn’t hugely famous but he was more famous than this search suggested. The search for Harry Crews was more productive. “A Feast of Snakes” and several other of his books are in print and available from Amazon and other booksellers. You might want to have a look.

Sources: LA Times http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-harry-crews-20120401,0,1537312.story / Georgia Review http://garev.uga.edu/crewsleavinghome.html

(Would you like to get writing advice from the greatest writers of modern and past times? People like Twain, Dickens, Chekhov as well as Vonnegut, Hemingway, and Bradbury? It's all in my book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," publshed by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other booksellers--why not make it a practice to buy at least one book a month from your local independent bookseller?)

Prize-winning novelist Andrew Miller on writing historical novels

In the interview you'll find at the end of the link you'll find a BBC interview with Andrew Miller, whose novel "Pure" won the Costa Prize this year.

He talks about how close to stick to the truth when writing historical fiction, symbolism, and why writing shouldn't be a competitive sport.

See the interview here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16612272

(How would it be to have Mark Twain as your writing coach? Or how about Anton Chekhove or Jane Austen? You'll find their advice about writing in my newest book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)

Video: Hunter Thompson & Kafka make a weird odd-couple bookseller promo

The online book sales site Good Reads donates all profits to Oxfam. They have commissioned a series of animations on great writers and good books. They started with one that promotes the odd couple of Hunter Thompson and Kafka, with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Metamorphosis, respectively. 

I wouldn't put Thompson in the same league as Kafka, nor consider him a "great" writer, but the animation certainly is one of the stranger promotional productions I've ever seen. You can watch it below (slightly unsafe for the office--one f-bomb slurred by the actor channeling Thompson). 

 

(You can order my books from Good Books --the url is www.UseGoodBooks.com; they send books all over the world postage free. You can adjust the currency in which the prices are shown, but using the selector at the top right of their page. Why not get your copy of my newest book there--it's Your Creative Writing Masterclass, published by Nicholas Brealey.)

How Moira Young writes her Young Adult novels

In the video you'll find at the end of the link, Moira Young, winner of the Costa Book Award for her book "Blood Red Road," talks about how falling off a bus led to a writing career, her approach to dialogue and description, and why she writes for young adults. 

See the video here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16604528

The video is about six minutes long. 

(Want to write your own novel or children's book? Get advice from the best writers of all time--Dickens, Twain, Austen, Hemingway, Fitzgerald). It's all in my new book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite book sellers.)

A master cartoonist's approach to his work--useful for writers, too

In the video below, top cartoonist/graphic novelist Daniel Clowes tells the New York Times about his art. It's interesting how much overlap there is with writing a traditional novel or a screenplay. The video is 4 minutes long. 

You can learn from the top writers of all time. Find their advice about writing in my newest book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass,' published by Nicholas Brealey and available now from Amazon or your other favorite book seller. Why not help your local independent book store stay alive--order it from them.