Hello Reader Do these people look as if they’re having a beastly time?
They were participants on an online writing course with the Arvon Foundation. Later this month, I’m running another Arvon course. This time it’s concentrated into a single day. You’ll discover creative ways to develop your stories – to bring people and settings to life, and play with narrative structures. As if that wasn’t enough, you also get the chance to meet the editor of my latest book, Elizabeth Neep, a fountain of wisdom and kindness who happens also to work as editorial director at DK. If you want to have a good time AND finesse your writing talents – or if you know someone else who’d like that – well, you can find out more here: ​Online Writing Day: Non-Fiction​
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📖 7 Books in 16 languages 📚 including: How To Change The World A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech.
Take a close look at these women, Audrey Heath (standing) and Alice May Spinks. For several years, while the men have been away fighting in the trenches, in France, these two have been running the office in London. Both women started work as secretaries. The war gave them a precious opportunity to do more, but with the war’s end their position became precarious: the economy was unstable, and the men came back. They could have reverted to being secretaries, if the company generated sufficient...
Hello Reader Recently in the zooms about writing a book proposal, I told the story of a woman I worked with who printed a beautiful limited edition booklet of her work in progress. It wasn’t the whole work in progress, just a sample chapter that we agreed was in terrific shape. I don’t remember the exact number of copies she produced. Ten? Twenty? Not many, anyway. Each copy had a beautiful photograph on the front cover - a photo that had been supplied by one of her friends. - Having printed...
Hello Reader Sometimes, the best way to learn something – anything – is to do it all wrong first, on purpose. It’s a bit like a vaccine: having absorbed the wrongness, we become stronger. To show what I mean, I’ve taken some fairly recent nonfiction books that have been hugely successful, and attempted to write bad pitches for them. To be perfectly clear, I invented these bad pitches myself – they’re nothing to do with the real authors of these real bestsellers. Don’t worry if you haven’t...