CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

In an earlier article , we examined how Steven Carr, as a master of Irony, often tends to mesmerise the reader into a false sense of security, subverting it with an unexpected ending. This is one of the features of Irony as one of the four basic genres, the other genres being Epic (where the bulk of fiction has its home), Tragedy and Comedy - Irony ‘tricks’ the reader and usually leaves him or her feeling introverted, lost, thoughtful or even depressed. But there are other fe

Many writers do not consider themselves to be salespeople and have considerable back-off on the areas of marketing and selling their work, once done. This means that, in many cases, they put together completed books and are then totally stumped about what to do next.   The truth is, for writers, that marketing and selling is built into their product in a way which it just isn’t for something like a toaster or a piece of home insurance.   As a writer, you get to market all the

Wandering into the site of Fountains Abbey through a lesser-used entrance, one could be forgiven for thinking that Fountains Hall, the Jacobean manor house near that entrance, was one’s destination. It’s a grand place, used by storytellers as a setting, including for the final scenes to the film Omen III: The Final Conflict  in 1980, as well as the film version of The Secret Garden . It also has some untold supernatural stories: years ago, when the best route into the hall w

I live quite close to Haworth, the famous home village of the Brontë family. The way the wind howls in straight off the moors to strike the walls of my house, the first house for thirty miles of open moorland, reminds me very much of the most famous work of Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848), her only novel, Wuthering Heights . Emily was the third-eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell, and wrote under the pen name Ellis Bell.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth writing about it again, especially as I am even more sure of it now, having viewed many more submissions from writers across the world.   There is a common misconception amongst the writing community that has been fostered over a couple of centuries now because of the way traditional publishing works, and that is that the world is full of untalented writers and that only the highly expert editors who work for big publishing house

It is not the purpose of editing to reconstruct the writer’s story. The purpose of editing is to delete from the existing work those elements which have resulted in the distortion, misrepresentation or non-communication of the writer’s central ideas and images, and to restore in its entirety the proper working function of the writer’s vision of the story. Even more succinctly put, an editor’s role is to continually connect or re-connect the writer with his or her own concepti

Every writer has an ‘inner editor’.   Some writers have this internal analytical monitoring function turned on and operational all the time. Others have it switched off and barely activate it at any stage. Thus we can theorise that there are several levels of operation of this editing apparatus, none of which is ‘senior’ to any of the others - in other words, there is not necessarily a 'right' way or a 'wrong' way of doing this.   The first level is that stage in which the wr

There are four basic genres in fiction - Epic, Tragedy, Irony and Comedy - and each have their own patterns, though all are based on the Epic, or what we normally think of as a story. The Epic forms about 90% of what we consider to be fiction, and it is upon its power that the other three genres largely draw. Irony, in particular, can be savagely effective when it teases the reader with a framework which at first appears to be leading them towards the standard ‘victory’ at th