A discussion about whether Hemingway actually wrote his famous six-word story. For more on Roland…
March 22, 2012
A discussion about whether Hemingway actually wrote his famous six-word story. For more on Roland Barthes’ concept of the writerly and readerly text, see his essay, From Work to Text, in the collection ‘Image, Music, Text’. Lydia Davis, ‘Collected Stories’, Hamish Hamilton. Donald Barthelme, ‘Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby’, taken from …
Reading aloud and writing aloud.
March 15, 2012
On a number of occasions recently, I’ve been asked to stand on a stage and read my work to an audience. One of the rewards (and difficulties) of doing this is that it confronts you with the tangles and slacknesses in your prose; it’s easy to sense, by the dips in an audience’s attentiveness, where …
Can you still get ribbons for that thing?
November 2, 2011
Apparently, the last typewriter manufacturer recently closed down. So no more new typewriters. Luckily, if you’re interested in getting hold of one, the typewriters which were built throughout the 20th century were built to last: mine was made in 1945 and works a treat. Show me your MacBook Air in 2075 and let’s compare notes. …
"Come and see! There’s something in the shed from before computers!"
“Come and see! There’s something in the shed from before computers!” – A writer’s 7 year old daughter, to her brother.
You have limited or no connectivity
A lot of the time, when I write, I use a manual typewriter. There are a number of reasons for this. I enjoy the definitive physicality of it, the way in which it forces you into a writing procedure which goes: think – decide – type – move on. By contrast, when writing on-screen, the …
A rich example of compressed meaning
October 7, 2011
If you scroll down to an earlier post, you’ll find me talking about George Saunders talking about sentence compression; the fine art of making words carry multiple layers of meaning. (This is what people mean when they talk about sentences being ‘taut’; it’s not just that the sentence is as short as possible, but that …
Tanita Tikaram singing Valentine Heart late one night on…
Tanita Tikaram singing Valentine Heart late one night on television many years ago.
The title of the story, ‘Wires,’ is taken from the Phillip Larkin poem of the same name.
October 4, 2011
When I was fourteen, a girl in the next town to mine was murdered, her partly-clothed body found face-down in a pond in the woods. She was a couple of years younger than me, and looked a little like one of the girls in my class at school. She would be the same age as …
Everything you need to know about writing a sentence, and I do mean EVERYTHING
September 12, 2011
Everything you need to know about writing a sentence, and I do mean EVERYTHING: This essay, by Gary Lutz, from the January 2009 issue of The Believer is a fantastically detailed analysis of what makes a sentence sing; what makes a sentence do more than simply convey information as briskly as possible. It contains close readings …
On Pulp, Sheffield, and learning a trade
This article was originally written for the Swiss newspaper NZZ, and translated into German. Here’s the original. “At the age of twenty-two, newly graduated and without a clear plan in life, I moved to Sheffield. It wasn’t a city I knew well, and there was no particular reason to move there other than that I knew …
Follow Jon on Twitter
