Collected: October 2024
Elvis' rise to fame through the eyes of his mum, how Tove Jansson created the Moomins, what keeps us writing and how we really feel about genre
Fact into Fiction
RLF Fellow Bethan Roberts, whose books include Graceland – a novel about Elvis Presley's rise to fame, through the voice of his mother, Gladys – on writing historical fiction.
“When I was writing about Elvis’s mother, Gladys, I didn’t want to portray her as the saintly stay-at-home mother so often depicted in lazy accounts of the Presleys. But I couldn’t pretend that Gladys would have had any truck with feminist ideas. She was, like all women of her era and place, constricted by the ideal of white Southern womanhood. But I did read that Gladys was famous in her neighbourhood for her buck dancing, even though it was frowned upon by her church. And that she threw the pointed end of a ploughshare at a farm owner who tried to whip her sharecropper daddy.”
Read more here.
Tove Jansson’s Writing Process
RLF Fellow Dan Richards on how Finnish writer Tove Jansson, creator of The Moomins, wrote her books.
"The Moomins, in case you haven’t already met them, are kind, philosophical creatures with velvety fur and smooth round snouts, who live in a beautiful valley in a forest in Finland."
Finn Family Moomintroll
Read more here.
What motivates us?
Nikki Sheehan, Sheena Wilkinson, Phoebe Power, Sarah Butler and Alex Nye consider what prompts them to write.
“Where do you get your ideas from? If I had a pound for every time I’d been asked that question, I’d have...well, more money than I do now. Still, it is a mysterious business — the way many of us continue trying to write often in the face of rejection or, perhaps worse, indifference from the wider world. Why do we do it?”
My True Genre, part 3
John Keay, Horatio Clare, Ian Thomson, Charles Boyle, Laura Hird, Julian Turner, and Marina Benjamin on writing within 'their' genre.
‘“There is only one genre in fiction", writes Matt Haig in The Humans. "The genre is called book.’”
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