Collected: September 2024
As we ease into the autumn, our writing fellows discuss how to become a ghost, what's in a name, and how their surroundings affects their writing
“I’ve written about cities all my life. My twenties, when I lived in London, was one of the few fallow periods in my writing life but of course I was busy absorbing the city, in all its shape-shifting, secretive glory.”
Sarah Hilary
Choosing a name: partiality and biographical writing
RLF Fellow Sarah LeFanu on how biographers choose what names to call the subjects of their books.
“The first duty of the biographer, Lytton Strachey claimed, was brevity, ‘a becoming brevity’ he called it, ‘which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant’. The second duty of the biographer was to maintain his own ‘freedom of spirit’, it not being his business to be respectful, or indeed complimentary.”
Sarah LeFanu
The invisibility of the ghostwriter
RLF Fellow Mark McCrum on how he became a ghostwriter.
“'How did you get into ghostwriting?' people ask. It’s a good question, because there isn’t, as far as I know, a school for ghosts.”
Mark McCrum
Doug Johnstone interviews William Ryan
Duration 30.11 min
“Whenever I talk to students these days I say, ‘Don’t give up the day job!’; because it’s good for you as well, writing’s quite a lonely game, so it’s good to have something else that you’re doing that involves you interacting with other people.”
William Ryan
William Ryan speaks with Doug Johnstone about crime writing, digging into history and the key to making the middle of a story work.
The Writing Environment
Duration 17.47 min
Sarah Hilary, Jini Reddy, Marnie Riches and Peter Oswald reflect on how their relationship to their surroundings affects their writing.
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