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How to become a ghostwriter

How to become a ghostwriter

So, you want to become a ghostwriter? Great idea! But how do you go about it? What skills and experience do professional ghostwriters need? What can you expect to get paid? Can anyone embark on a ghostwriting career? In this handy guide to becoming a ghostwriter, you’ll find answers to all your questions and more, …

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A history of ghostwriting

A history of ghostwriting

Ghostwriters are nothing new. Although the term itself is relatively modern, the history of ghostwriting can be traced back to when scribes first put quills to parchment.  So, what did ghostwriting look like back then? How has it changed over the centuries? And who are some of the famous ghostwriters in history? For answers to …

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What is a ghostwriter?

What is a ghostwriter?

You know that saying, “Never judge a book by its cover”? You really shouldn’t. A surprisingly high number of books aren’t written by the author whose name appears on the book jacket. They’re ghostwritten. So what exactly is a ghostwriter? Why do authors use them? And is it even legal?  If you’re new to ghostwriting …

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What is a she shed?

What is a she shed?

Move over man caves, she sheds are now all the rage. They’re springing up in backyards everywhere. Just check out the number of Pinterest boards and Facebook groups devoted to them. But what is a she shed? Why do you need one? And how can you create one of your own?  Traditionally male territory, the …

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Where Agatha Christie wrote

Where Agatha Christie wrote

Murders she wrote. Many, many of them. Outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare, she’s the bestselling novelist of all time. Next in the where writers write series: where Agatha Christie wrote her books. “A bath! The receptacle of porcelain, one turns the taps and fills it, one gets in, one gets out and ghoosh …

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Nan Shepherd and Jessie Kesson: an uncommon friendship

Nan Shepherd and Jessie Kesson: an uncommon friendship

‘For, through myrrh’s smell, past wud’s tremendous green, my frien’ just followed me, the hale wye back’ To Nan Shepherd by Jessie Kesson, 1945, North-East Review Jessie Kesson and Nan Shepherd: it was an unlikely friendship. It began by chance and lasted, despite differences in class, age and education, for over forty years, until Shepherd’s death in …

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Where writers write: Dylan Thomas’s writing shed

Where writers write: Dylan Thomas’s writing shed

Next up in the series on where writers write is Dylan Thomas’s writing shed at the Boat House in Laugharne, Camarthenshire. When Dylan Thomas first saw the Boat House, on a sunny Monday in May 1934, it was from the other side of the River Taf. He and a friend, Glyn Jones, were standing waiting …

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Where writers write: Edward Thomas’s poetry

Where writers write: Edward Thomas’s poetry

Ted Hughes considered him the father of all poets. Yet it was only in the last three years of his life Edward Thomas turned his pen from prose to poetry. He wrote his first poems in December 1914, at The Bee House, up on the hill above Steep, in Hampshire. A low, thatched building perched …

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Where writers write: Vita Sackville-West’s tower writing room

Where writers write: Vita Sackville-West’s tower writing room

It’s a long way from a shed, or even a lodge. Vita Sackville-West’s writing room was in a twin-turreted, Elizabethan tower at Sissinghurst Castle, in Kent. Sound like a fairytale? ‘It was Sleeping Beauty’s castle with a vengeance’, Sackville-West said in 1950, recalling the wet, April day twenty years earlier she first set eyes on …

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