📖 7 Books in 16 languages 📚 including: How To Change The World A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech.
For writers, time = place | JPF Daily
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Hello Reader An author I'm working with is writing a book about - whatever. (The subject of the book is not the point of this post.) We have been discussing a period early in his career that could be very important to the book.
Periods of time, in a story, are often linked to particular places. And this author, once upon a time (see what I did there), had a job in Soho. Specifically, at a place called House of Sandwiches: It closed long ago, but the place hasn't been wiped off the face of the earth, so we went for a walk on Google Streetview to soak up the atmos. If you are writing about a particular time, you may also be writing about a particular place. And if you're writing about a place, you too might like to tootle around on Streetview. I challenge you to do it right now. Think of a place that is important to you. It might be a place you know well already. It might be a place you don't know at all (yet). Then click this link to open Streetview, and search for that place. What do you notice? If you can't work out how to go from the "map view" to Streetview, you can watch me do it here. Till next time. JPF
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John-Paul Flintoff
📖 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...