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 …
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 …
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 …
Nan Shepherd escaped as often as she could to her ‘shanty’ in the Cairngorms. But where was it?
‘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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
First up in my series of posts on where writers write is Virginia Woolf’s writing room. ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,’ Woolf famously says in A Room of One’s Own. The money, of course, is key. A room of your own, after all, …
Where do writers write? And why? Creating a writing room of my own got me thinking. A writing room of my own I already have a writing room of my own. It sometimes doubles as a spare bedroom, but most of the time it’s a dedicated home office. During lockdown, however, I decided to move …
