An eclection of insights into the nature of writing and being a writer.Â
What it takes to be an author
In my naivety, I thought you just had to write and publish a book to be an author, but apparently there's more to it than that, and I'm not sure I qualify on any of these stringent criteria. Â He, like many other people of his day, thought that an author must be a...
Scribbles in the sand
In Couto's superb novel, a disturbed father tries to isolate his sons from life and learning by taking them to a remote place and denying them any access to writing.  The older brother teaches the younger one in secret, always at risk of dire punishment. As a new...
Like the last of his life
Harold Bloom's comment on Hart Crane (1899-1932) is all the more poignant knowing that Crane considered some of his major work to have been a failure, suffered recurring bouts of alcoholism, and appears to have committed suicide when he jumped overboard a ship he was...
Poetry as gleaning
A telling comment by Christopher Isherwood on W.H. Auden's approach to revising his poems. It makes one wonder how many scholars have wasted hours peering deeply into some poem of 'celebrated obscurity' which was never more than an accretion of lines that had passed...
All good publishers have a department of exceptions.
Gabriel Zaid – So Many Books
The Wuthering Heights manuscript
While visiting the Bronte Parsonage, I was touched by a project led by the artist Clare Twomey, to celebrate the...
Learning to write
How do you learn to write? My belief is that if fine writing comes from you, mostly it is due to...
Something more pressing
Yes, you can find a thousand things more urgent than writing, or at least more insistent. Writing for this...
A space filled to repletion
I like visual and typographical playfulness, and here in Orlando the point about economy in language is underlined not with...
The sonnet never written
This is one of the longest and most entertaining chapters in Machado de Assis' novel Don Casmurro, a fictional memoir...
The richest of all soils
The use of 'rich soil' to represent fertile ground for writing isn't surprising but this reference to 'decayed literature' is. ...
A visit to the Brontes
When I read the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth I had a yearning to visit the Wordsworth homes in the Lake...
Letters unopened
We use the term ‘back of the envelope’ to capture the notion of jotting down an idea or plan on...
On spherical emotions and the need for adjectives
Never thought of emotions as spherical before, but grasp the need for their many-sided expression. And the fact that emotions...
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