Orwell advised cutting as many words as possible, Woolf found energy in verbs, and Baldwin aimed for ‘a sentence as clean as a bone'. What can we learn from celebrated authors about the art of writing well?
Open to unpublished, unagented children’s writers based anywhere in the world.
Entry fee £20
Prize:
First Prize: a publishing contract with Chicken House with an advance of £10,000, plus the offer of representation from literary agent representation by Lydia Silver of Darley Anderson Children's Book Agency.
‘I always quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said in the early part of his career he was dismissed as a science fiction writer and that critics tend to put genre books, including sci-fi, in the bottom drawer of their desk... It's true. I get the New York Times every Sunday. In 37 novels, I've never had a stand-alone review. I'm always in the crime round-up.
A survey of 787 members of the Society of Authors (SoA) has found that a third of translators and a quarter of illustrators have lost work to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Translators are also more likely to use AI to support their work, with 37% of respondents saying they have done so, followed by 25% of non-fiction writers.
The author Lynne Reid Banks, known for her novel The L-Shaped Room and her children's book series The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.
I launched my podcast Making It Up nearly three years ago with the goal of interviewing writers not for any particular work of theirs, but to talk to them about their lives. I didn't want to ask them what famous author they want to have dinner with or what their top five favorite books are ... yech. Read more
Until we have a mechanism to test for artificial intelligence, writers need a tool to maintain trust in their work. So I decided to be completely open with my readers
'At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance - that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. Read more