Be Like Great Uncle Ferdy – My Writing Hero
BY TONY OSWICK When I was growing up, I wanted to be just like Great Uncle Ferdy. My mum was his only living relative and, when I was a kid, we visited him every month in his flat overlooking King’s Cross Station. Great Uncle Ferdy loved telling stories about when he’d been in the war […]
Best Writing Tip: Fail Better
BY TOM BENTLEY When I first started sending article queries out in the eighties, callow youth that I was, I sent them to all the major venues: The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Paris Review. I eagerly awaited their replies and expected a gilded chair at the Algonquin Round Table. I didn’t know that […]
The Best Writing Tip I Ever Received Was Not to Write
BY RUSSELL MICKLER The best writing tip I ever received was not to write. It began with an essay, a critique of Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ from The Canterbury Tales. Mrs Lovejoy returned my paper savaged, bloodied with merciless, unkind annotations, insisting on a rewrite. Passive, she wrote. Splice. D.M. Run-on. Frag. Mechanics. (Young, I’d […]