This is a collection of musings by writers on the art of writing. Written as a tie-in with the 1993 Edinburgh Book Festival, its contributors have all taken part in the festival over its first ten years.

Contributors include Maeve Binchy, Sara Paretsky, Mary Wesley, Michael Rosen, Maya Angelou, P.D. James & Ruth Rendell and John Mortimer.

They write on different subjects, from First attempts, to Writing Equipment to Inspirations. They are all interesting, some are inspiring and some use the opportunity to talk about their favourite professional bugbear.

I especially enjoyed the chat between P.D. James and Ruth Rendell about creating detective series and Michael Rosen's piece about children's literature and the (then new) National Curriculum in British schools.

Hopefully this will go out on a bookring so that others can read and possibly take inspiration from its pages. As Penelope Lively says "books beget books" - I hope she's right.

This book is now my first bookring - yea!

I'm sure everyone knows the drill by now, but I'll say this anyway! Please journal to tell us you've received the book and again to let us know what you thought of it and when you're ready to send the book on, PM the next person on the list for their address.

Any anecdotes/experiences/words of wisdom you have about your own writing would also be most welcome :-)

Here's the list of participants:
Loopy1 - UK
Sossap - Portugal
nrrdgrrl - Netherlands
Lisa-B - Germany
bluenoser - Canada
quorcester - Massachusetts - USA
Arugh48187 - Minnesota USA
Maddymonkey - Illinois - USA
Tania-in-NC - North Carolina - USA
Starbytes - Malaysia
Samulli - Germany

and back to me Starry-Starry - UK

I'll be sending it out to Loopy1 tomorrow (10/10) - hope it helps inspire you for the nanowrimo, Loopy1!

Well this book arrived safely, thanks!
This one is not destined to wait its turn on the ray pile and then get read from start to finish, this one will get dipped into every day, a section or two every morning and evening, as I believe that would be the way to get the most out of it. I intend to finish it well before nanowrimo!

A very interesting book, thanks for sharing it round.
I found the most useful entry the one from Richard Ford, who put forward the view that you don't need to begin with short stories, and in fact for some writers it's a bad idea. The most annoying one was from Janice Galloway, who has the bad habit of SHOUTING any words she feels are IMPORTANT. I found it very DISTRACTING and ended up not reading her ENTRY in FULL. SO THERE!
I was impressed with the number of writers who prefer paper and pen to word processor.
I'm not someone who was always writing, although my rough books from school reveal some short stories and poems scribbled in them, but I've always made up stories and told them to myself - does that count? :-)
On to the next reader.

Arrived safe. Tnks for this momentum, at this time most welcomed. S'ia at the end of the road...

It's amazing to see that writers are not different from us want-to-be-writers-too. Amazing stories and tips about. Tanks Starry-Starry . Next to nrrdgrrl.

surprise surprise: coming home from a bx meeting with no less than nine books under my arm, i found number ten in the mailbox! and in a beautiful envelope too. thank you sossap!
(apologies for the lousy picture)

i've read a third of the book so far and find it verrrry inspiring. i strive to finish it by thursday. that's because tembo will be here then: i hope i can lure her into taking the book home to germany and mailing it to lisa-b for me.
not sure if i'll be able to finish it in time though.

update: due to heavy snow tembo was unable to come. but the book will certainly move within the next two weeks.

i'm not a writer. i think.
i don't make things up. i couldn't if i wanted to.
what i can do is write your story. and do a damn good job in the process.
but i'm not a writer.


i used to be a journalist; maybe i still am. it's a profession that is not as badly regarded here as it is in britain (on the continent we do rank well above second hand car sellers). early in my career i worked at the nation's largest newspaper. without a shred of education in the field.

my ambition left me deadly uncertain from the start. sure, i had not been fired yet, but what would "they" really think? was i doing okay? was i merely endured?
on coaching, the company stuck to the pool system. pool as in: a virtual swimming pool. new people were simply thrown into the deep waters. if they surfaced, they were to stay. if they drowned, they would probably -hopefully- quit spontaneously.

for twelve long years i struggled. i came up for breath every once in a while. in the meantime i kept practicing. never had i any clue about what others thought of my attempts. when i asked, i was repeatedly brushed off with the statement that my pieces were accepted and published, so why bother?

i kept trying to get better. never ever was i satisfied with my writings. at best, i found them tolerable. and i produced them with the comforting thought that a day later, no one would be able to laugh at me - then the paper would be a cat's litter, or a fish wrapping at the market.

after some ten years, having shifted desks yet again, i did some projects that required much research in the paper's electronic archives. several subjects had to do with areas i used to write about and every now and then i encountered interesting old stuff.

more than once, i ended up reading those articles entirely. having my mouth fall open when i reached the last line. because several times, it turned out i had read a piece of my own hand. and actually liked it. for the first time.


twelve years after the start only frustration was left. apparently i had drowned after all. i left the paper to try my hand at project management. i've hardly written since. and when i need to, i still need a huge amount of time to lift the burden of the writer's block.

after over twenty years in the trade, i'm still am a wannabe writer. i think. because i can't make up stories.
maybe i should not.
this book has inspired many new thoughts of trying my hand at non- or semi-fiction. i know i can do it. i've done it before. because if i set the standards myself, i'll finally know whether i did well or not. and finally deliver a satisfying piece.

Received today! Thanks for sharing the book, and your comments about it and about writing as such. I am not a wannabe writer :-) but rather interested in the process of writing.

Interestingly enough, quite a few (but not all) of the authors do not know so much about their process of writing at all, so they wrote about a lot of other things apart from writing.

All in all I found some essays very interesting, others less so. I think it might have helped had I been familiar with more than 3 or 4 of the authors included. Also I would recommend it to be read in smaller installations, and not as quickly as I did.

I am mailing it on to Canada tomorrow, re-using nrrdgrrl's nice envelope pretty much as it arrived here.

This just arrived in my mailbox. Thanks Starry-Starry for sharing this with us and thanks Lisa-B for sending safely across The Pond.
I'm hoping one of the authors will give some hints on how to get started and how to self-discipline one's self to actually sit down and work each day. :0)

I enjoyed this book very much. A couple of the pieces were a bit dry whilst others were full of tongue-in-cheek humour.
I'm sure there is a writer fighting to get out of every ardent reader. Now I'm heading into town to purchase myself a pad of paper and a pen - perhaps a green one! It's nice to know that most authors don't slave away from dawn to dusk and beyond, I like the idea of lying in bed until 9 a.m., then only writing for a few hours before taking a nice stroll in the country-side, looking for inspiration.
This poor book wasn't bound very well. Some of the first few pages have come loose, despite my taking the utmost care and treating it "with kid gloves".
With starry-starry's permission I'm skipping quorcester in the bookring order, as I haven't been able to get a reply to my PM's to her for her address. This is off to arugh48187 this afternoon.

Retrieved from my mailbox. I have a few rings in front of this one, but I am a fast reader and will get to it soon.

This book was quite interesting. I always find reading about writing is inspirational. Perhaps I have discovered a new tool to actually get me over the hump of sitting down to write; something which stymies me every time. My favorite bit was the story of the man and wife writing team. I too wish I was as disciplined as she was, but unfortunately I am more of a beat-my-head-on-the-wall type and procrastination is my worst enemy. I am going to finish my book, damnitt, even if it kills me. :)

This will be off to its next destination as soon as I get an address. Thanks for sharing and sorry for keeping it so long.

Released on Monday, August 16, 2004 at Post Office at 153rd and Garrett in Apple Valley, Minnesota Controlled Releases.

Sent on to maddymonkey who is next on the list. Happy Reading!

I've got one book queued ahead of this one. Looking forward to it.

The strength of many of these pieces gave me a bunch of new (to me) authors to look up, notably Mary Wesley, Dervla Murphy, P.D. James, Angela Lambert and Brian Moore.

Thanks for sharing. Off to Tania-in-NC today in the post.

This book looks wonderful! Thanks for sharing it with me. Shall read and send on!

Update: Jan 29th, 2005 --
This is next after my current read (escape) Room For One More by Virginia Nielsen, c. 1987.

I collect quotes as I read. These ones are fun, poetical, or even philosophical. Take what you like, and leave the rest. Note that these aren't necessarily the "best" in the book. These happen to be close to the spot where I stopped reading each night.

Writing is a dark and lonely work, and no one has to do it, and no one will even care if it doesn't get done at all, so that choosing to do it and trying to do it well is enough of an existential errand, enough of a first step, and for whatever my money and counsel's worth, enough of a last step too. p55
[comment: i'm not sure that i agree with this comment - if you're a writer to your core, you are unhappy if don't have access to pen, paper and time]

In my case inspiration never comes so one doesn't sit around waiting for it, as one might be tempted to do were it an occasional visitor. There are, however, stratagems for overcoming this lack. On retiring at 9.30pm, I never leave a blank page to be faced at 5.30am. That way lies madness, or at best despair. There must be something, however feeble, on the post-breakfast page - indeed, its very feebleness can be the stimulus that sets the literary adrenaline flowing. And if on some rare morning it isn't feeble, but vaguely hopeful, one goes off like a rocket and that will be a 'good' day..." p161

update Feb 16, 2005 -- sent along to Starbytes

Thank you, Tania!! Received it earlier today, and I can't wait to read it! I'd love an insight into some writers' thoughts! :D

Update 4th May 2005: Just started reading it, the first few pages have come loose, but I think they could be easily repaired if you know something about bookbinding. I'm going to take my time with this, a chapter at a time and so on. I'll come back periodically to journal my thoughts.

I've contacted starbytes about this book a couple of times and received reassurances that she would send it on, but she hasn't. I am so disappointed. I would really have liked to receive this one back as I've not seen another copy of it anywhere.

So I'm, belatedly, declaring this ring dead.

I sent this book to samulli last Nov/Dec, I'm not sure of the exact date. I sent it surface mail, but it has taken a longer time than normal even for surface. I'm truly sorry that it's gotten delayed or lost, I hope that it will turn up soon, but it doesn't seem likely. =( I feel really badly about this so I'll replace it with another copy to continue its travels. There isn't any new copy from amazon.com, but there are some used ones, I hope that's ok. I'm now waiting for Starry-starry to reply my PMs, so that I can start ordering the book. I'll need her address or her instructions before I can complete the order, so as soon as I hear from her, I'll order asap. Hopefully this bookring can be resurrected.

When I took this little envelope out of my mailbox today, I couldn't for the life of me guess what book this might be, because as far as I knew I was not expecting anything from anybody in Malaysia.
Even when I opened the envelope and saw the book it didn't ring a bell. It was just now, when I read through all the journal entries, that the memory of signing up for this bookring came back to me. I had long ago (to be precise, about a year ago, when I last heard from starbytes that she had allegedly sent the book off to me) given up any hope of ever getting my hands on this book - hell, I even deleted it from my list of bookrings I signed up for.
I'm ever so glad that I was wrong. :o)

Now that I finally have it here, I am quite curious to read what these writers have to say about how they write their books. Although I have only ever heard of 4 of them (Maeve Binchy, Rosamunde Pilcher, P.D.James and Ruth Rendell) and the only one I have ever read a book from is Ruth Rendell, I am interested nevertheless in what the others have to say. Who knows, maybe I will find a new interesting author among them.

The book itself is in quite bad shape, it's literally falling to pieces. I will do my best to patch it up before I send it home.

Reading this book proved every bit as interesting as I had anticipated. Even though I didn’t know most of the authors, their different approaches to writing were quite fascinating. It goes to show that there is no “right” or “wrong” way to write – if it gets you results, every way is a good one.
Of course, I liked some of the pieces more than others.
Janice Galloway, for instance, really did get on my nerves with her habit of SHOUTING OUT her opinions. It’s very annoying, because the impression to me was that she didn’t trust her readers to get the important points she wanted to make on their own, so she WROTE THEM ALL IN CAPITALS. That did come over as very partonizing to me, but then again, maybe I’m just over-sensitive to crap like that. Anyway, it succeeded in making sure that I will DEFINITELY NEVER READ ON OF HER BOOKS.
Another piece I found hugely annoying was Michael Rosen’s. Apparently he writes for children, but judging by his writing here I find it very hard to believe that he is any good at that. His text was the only one I really had to struggle to understand. I read it twice and I’m still not absolutely sure what exactly he was trying to say. Not only was it confusing, but also exceedingly boring.

Opposed to this there were people like Rumer Godden, Hunter Davies (his was actually the funniest piece in the whole book!), Dervla Murphy, Margaret Forster and some others, who actually had something worthwile to say about writing and whose books I checked out on Amazon with the result that several of them ended up on my wishlist.
Over all it was nice to see that most authors constantly battle with procrastination and that each one of them has their own little trick how to get started and how to keep writing. It just goes to show one more time that the life of a writer is not quite as easy-going a lifestyle as it may seem from an outsider’s perspective.
I am very glad I got to read this book after all the delays and everything. As soon as I have the address it will finally be on the way home to Starry-Starry.

I sent the book off yesterday.

It's arrived home - thanks Samulli and thanks to everyone who took part. I really enjoyed reading your thoughts on writing and on the authors in the book. I hope it inspired as well as entertained.

This will sit on my shelf now for a well deserved rest