Writing the pitch before the query: What literary agents are really looking for

There is something oddly intimidating about writing a book pitch.

After months, sometimes years, of writing a novel, reducing it to a handful of paragraphs can feel almost impossible. You've lived with these characters, wandered through their world, untangled their motivations and rewritten countless scenes. Then someone asks, "So what's your book about?"

Suddenly, your carefully crafted story becomes "Well... it's complicated."

Why Dune is still the greatest science fiction novel ever written

There are books you admire. There are books you enjoy. Then there are the handful that stay with you for the rest of your life.

Frank Herbert's Dune belongs firmly in that last category for me. I've lost count of how many times I've read it, and every return journey to Arrakis reveals something I missed before. It isn't simply one of my favourite science fiction novels. It is one of my favourite novels, full stop. There, I said it.

Beautiful sentences, difficult people: Can we separate a writer’s style from their reputation?

There are writers we admire without reservation. Then there are the others.

The writers whose sentences remain brilliant while their reputations grow increasingly uncomfortable. The writers whose private behaviour, political beliefs or public remarks alter the atmosphere around their books.

A novel or essay once encountered innocently can become harder to read after we learn more about the person who wrote it. The words have not changed, but the reader has.

Down a literary rabbit hole with Christopher Caudwell, Spain and the forgotten writers of the 1930s

Sometimes you pick up a book in a second-hand bookshop. You have never heard of the writer, but you like the cover, and that is all it takes to send you down a literary rabbit hole.

This is what happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I picked up three detective novels from the 1930s by Christopher St John Sprigg.

At first, Sprigg appears to belong comfortably to the world of Golden Age crime fiction. He wrote ingenious mysteries with titles such as Fatality in Fleet Street, The Perfect Alibi and Death of an Airman.

A hundred years of murder: reading Agatha Christie while writing crime

One hundred years ago, Agatha Christie published a novel that would change crime fiction.

First released in June 1926, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was only Christie’s third Hercule Poirot novel. In 2013, members of the Crime Writers’ Association voted it the CWA Best Ever Novel, placing it above books by Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers and other giants of the genre.

That is quite a legacy for one murder in a small English village.

The return of the difficult woman in fiction

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me,” says Jane Eyre, and there is still something thrilling in the force of it. It is not merely a romantic declaration. It is a refusal to be made smaller, prettier or more convenient than the self demands. 

The difficult woman in fiction has many ancestors, and Jane is one of them. For a long time, women in fiction were allowed to be many things, provided they were legible.

Why we keep returning to campus novels

“A little learning is a dangerous thing,” wrote Alexander Pope, and campus novels have been proving him right ever since. Not because education itself is dangerous, although anyone who has sat through a three-hour seminar on structuralism may disagree, but because knowledge can become tangled with vanity, desire and the desperate wish to be exceptional.

Campus novels are rarely about education.

This is odd, given the setting. There are lectures, libraries, tutorials, essays, departmental politics and people quoting dead Europeans with the confidence of those who have not yet had to assemble flat-pack furniture. But the real subject of the campus novel is almost never the syllabus. It is a desire. Reinvention. Exclusion. Ambition. The intoxicating belief that a life can be remade by proximity to books, clever people and old buildings.

Is the literary internet making us better readers?

“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is a useful thing to remember in an age when reading can so easily become a performance metric. To read well is not simply to consume a book. It is to meet it, resist it, misunderstand it for a while, and perhaps find that it has been quietly rearranging the furniture in your mind.

There was once a pleasing simplicity to being a reader. You read a book. You liked it, hated it, abandoned it on page 47, pressed it upon a friend, or left it to gather dust with the quiet moral authority of something you still intended to finish.