My guest for this episode is someone who has spent nearly 50 years in publishing. Tony Collins has worked for a number of publishing houses, owned three magazines, published an astonishing 1,400 books, and is now a literary agent. In this conversation, we talk about the lessons he’s learned in his career. We talk about the most common error that writers make when with their work, how the author must remember they are a guest at the reader's table, and there are many other things for readers to do. We talk about the essential power of narrative, why we can’t write in the way Dickens did, the place for anecdote in non-fiction, finding the right publisher, engaging well with them, and why it's essential for your book to get the title and your hook right.
Tony speaks with decades of experience and there are some wonderful, fundamental insights here, I hope you find the conversation useful, here it is.
In this episode, released on Christmas Day 2015, we take time out from the usual teaching and interviews for a few minutes to reflect on the relentless nature of the writer's life. Maybe the best way to keep up the pace with our writing is to take a break and give something back to that creative part of our brain that we've worked so hard. The festive season is a particularly good time to indulge in some "Superfood" for our minds, and reawaken the wonder and curiosity again. ...
I recently spoke with fellow podcaster, essayist and award-winning journalist Brendan O'Meara. We talked about the challenges that writers of both fiction and non-fiction face, the issue of finding time to write, the value of having momentum, and the goal of building up a body of work to close the creative gap ...
In this episode we look at stage five of the six stage story process - the climax stage. We are going to answer the question "what is the climax?" and also look at how, as writers, we can make the most of this stage of the story. The most important lesson to take away from this episode is that the climax is not about blood and explosions - it's about characters and ideas, it's about the beliefs that characters hold dear, and will live, and die for. ...
