AP has a story about novelist Peter Quinn, who writes all of his books in longhand, on yellow legal pads.

The recipient is to Philip Reeve for A Darkling Plain, fourth story of his Hungry Cities series. The £1,500 award is his first literary prize.

Reeve, a children’s book illustrator and author who lives with his family on Dartmoor, risked becoming a full-time writer to complete Mortal Engines, first volume of the quartet. It took him six years and won him a Whitbread prize shortlisting.

Read the Guardian Unlimited article here.

Randy Ingerman has an excellent tutorial on writing, using a method he calls the “Snowflake method”.

I claim that that’s how you design a novel — you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story.  Part of this is creative work, and I can’t teach you how to do that.  Not here, anyway.  But part of the work is just managing your creativity — getting it organized into a well-structured novel.  That’s what I’d like to teach you here.

Step 1) Take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your story.  Something like this:  “A rogue physicist travels back in time to kill the apostle Paul.”  (This is the summary for my first novel, Transgression.)  The sentence will serve you forever as a ten-second selling tool.  This is the big picture, the analog of that big starting triangle in the snowflake picture.

Step 2) Take another hour and expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup,  major disasters, and ending of the book.  This is the analog of the second stage of the snowflake.  I like to structure a story as “three disasters plus an ending”.  Each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop and the ending takes the final quarter.  I don’t know if this is the ideal structure, it’s just my personal taste.

As someone who finds it hard to get words out on paper, I’ve personally found this method very helpful in organizing my thoughts.  Give it a try!

U.S. novelist Walter Mosley, who is most widely known for his crime fiction, says if you’ve got a novel in you, write it.  Mosley, 54, will next year release a 100-page book called “This Year You Write Your Novel” giving people advice on how to write a novel in a year.

Q: You produce about three or four books a year. How do you approach your writing?

A: “When I wake up, the first thing I do is to write for two to three hours. The ideas are unconscious. Every time you spend two or three hours powerfully creating you set off all the depth chargers in your conscience that you are unaware of. It has always been the case for me.”

Q: What tips do you give people?

A: “You have to write every day — for at least one-and-a-half hours but the ideal is three.  You have to write in an unrestricted fashion. Don’t procrastinate or feel guilty about the people you are writing about in the book. You have to be able to say things you really feel.”

Read the Yahoo News interview here.

There are lots of contest deadlines coming up over the next few days. Check the Poets & Writers, Inc. list of upcoming contests to see if there’s anything that fits any manuscripts you might have lying around.

There are dozens of contest here, for all levels of experience. Be sure to mark contests coming up in future months on your calendars!

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If he ever tires of running Venezuela, Hugo Chávez would make an outstanding book club president, judging by his impact on Noam Chomsky’s book sales.Since waving a copy during an address to the UN last week, the Venezuelan president has made Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance a publishing sensation.

What was one of Professor Chomsky’s lesser known works has surged to No 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list, with bookshops making bulk orders from the thousands of extra copies being printed.

If only we all could have a world leader plug our novels.

Link to the Guardian Unlimited article.

This Guardian Unlimited article explores the possibility that Shakespeare wrote many of his worst lines while suffering from hangovers.

The loyal theatricals have turned. Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe, has finally said the unsayable. Malevolently. There are “Monday morning” lines in Shakespeare’s masterpieces. They are the verse equivalent of the Friday afternoon lemons that used to roll off the production line at Dagenham.

Sir Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, suggests the bard’s bad-line days were the result of his being blotto the night before (as, often enough, was Ben Jonson. Sometimes they had to bring him home in a wheelbarrow). Or, more charitably, it may have been the pressure of deadlines - writing plays was a crazy-hurry line of work.

The proposition that not all Shakespeare is Shakespeare-great was put forward by Frank Kermode in his recent book on the bard’s language. Kermode came out and said what most audiences secretly think - a lot of Shakespeare is impossible to understand.

Link

In between his 99 roles in films and TV series including Dr Zhivago, Coronation Street, Casualty and the first Doctor Who, actor Bernard Kay, 78, found time to write for the first time since he was a Guardian stringer more than 60 years ago; and last night the result won the £5,000 creative non-fiction prize of the New Writing Ventures awards.The chief judge, novelist Ali Smith, praised Kay’s account of growing up in Bolton as wise, taut, gripping and “a perfect piece of explication”.

The awards, sponsored by the University of East Anglia and the Arts Council, are a showcase for unpublished authors.

Article from Guardian Unlimited.