Category «Writing»

My oat milk wants me to write

Yes, my oat milk wants me to write. All I was doing was making myself a cuppa – before settling down to a brief evening writing session – and there it was, on the side of my carton of Oatly. “Start writing,” it read. “It can be about absolutely anything, the weirder the better because …

Stopping when stuck (Mistake #119)

I don’t agree with all of Jeanette Winterson’s advice in this Guardian article from the beginning of the decade, but I do like the following: Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether. She meant it about …

Writing Your Non-Fiction Book

This ebook originally started life as How to Write a Non-Fiction Book — a series of three long articles for a writing magazine. I’ve now updated the articles, added a lot of extra material, thrown in the word ‘oomphlessness’ — I really have — and the result is a fact-packed ebook called Writing Your Non-Fiction Book. It’s …

Talent is sufficient / required (Mistake #96)

Many new writers tell me they’ve been told they have talent for writing – perhaps by former teachers who read their compositions for years, or friends who have received their letters, or colleagues who’ve found their emails entertaining, even when concerning mundane office and business matters. Some tell me they believe themselves to be talented. …

One hat, one home (Mistake #91)

Every bald man (raises hand) needs a hat, and every bald man of a certain age (raises other hand) tends to amass a substantial quantity of them. Here are some of mine, now collected on my new hatstand, bought from a shop fittings supplier, since every other hatstand available from conventional consumer stores bore insufficient …

UnAndrewCrofts-likeness (Mistake #84)

Nick Higham’s Meet the Author is always insightful – Higham is always clearly very interested in the people he interviews – and this one with king of ghostwriting Andrew Crofts is particularly pertinent to non-fiction writers. Andrew Crofts is terrific. I couldn’t tell you whether I’ve read one of his books, and that’s one of …

Only the gifted few (Mistake #71)

Some weeks ago I wrote Mistake No. 69 and received a tweet from a writer who told me bluntly he’d stopped reading at a certain point during the post, fairly early on. That point was: “But it’s not really about the writing. Most people can write.” I asked him neutrally whether the post had bored …

Impatience (Mistake #68)

I see a lot of student papers which come to me a day early. By that I mean that the writer should not have sent it to me when he sent it – but slept on it instead. The article-writing process – from the first glimmer of the idea, all the way through to submitting …

What gives you the right to write about that? (Mistake #57)

I was asked this when my book on coeliac disease (or gluten intolerance) came out, by a potential reader who had the condition. She seemed offended, almost, that someone who wasn’t a coeliac sufferer, or a nutritionist, or a gastroenterologist, or a doctor or medic of any kind, and not even, say, a caterer with …

Only talented writers sell (Mistake #50)

There are a lot of perfectly competent but otherwise fairly unremarkable writers earning a decent living from words. There are a few poor writers getting by as well. If you’re scratching your head, unconvinced, thinking that you rarely see average or poor writing in print, I have to declare a possible unfair advantage over you …