CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

Don’t worry, no violence was done by Doonican to me, or I suspect anyone else. Nevertheless, this is life-and-death tale. It’s particularly poignant for me as when I wrote this, it was the fifteenth anniversary of my father’s death and this little anecdote brings to mind the relationship that I had with him as a young child. One of Life’s greatest and saddest mysteries is the apparency that certain things can never be recovered. I hope with all my heart that it is just an a

Forty-five years ago, I was at university studying literature. As it happened, that year the Big S as the focus of attention - Shakespeare. I was fortunate or unfortunate enough, depending on how you look at it, to be part of a tutorial group composed of geniuses, all of them women apart from the elderly Dutch professor, all of them with enough intellectual power to outshine the cyclotron at CERN, and probably faster in their thinking than that device. I sat at the back all y

Having said all that I said in Part One, I began to notice patterns in the submissions which indicated that some more practical advice might benefit new writers in many cases. These are offered as tips to anyone interested in submitting their work to me in particular, but I daresay that other publishers would welcome such practical considerations. i) Many, many writers sent in submissions in all kinds of different formats, having clearly not read the submission guidelines a

Clarendon House Publications has produced dozens of anthologies at this writing and I wondered if you would be interested in some general comments about what I have found as an editor. You might be able to make use of some of these comments to improve your rate of acceptance not only with me but with others, and they should provide perhaps an entertaining look behind the scenes. The first part of this is to do with what I thought was going to happen as opposed to what actua

You’ve decided to activate your passion and become a writer. The problem is, so have several million other people. Your passion lies in an industry that’s already over-saturated with writers just like you - at least, they're like you on the surface. The internet and the advent of self-publishing models mean that the market has been flooded with options for readers. But you don’t have to give up just because you’re not the first person to want to make a success of writing.

It might be considered an odd thing, but many writers struggle not because they can’t communicate but because they have nothing significant to communicate. A rambling series of images, even when accurately and passionately described, does not necessarily constitute ‘good writing’ and will not on its own guarantee success for a writer. A brief scan over some of the most enduring pieces of literature in the world reveals that most of its authors had deeply felt ideas which ac

Imagine a world in which human beings communicated solely by telepathy, transferring thoughts directly from one person to another. Would this be a world in which writers were defunct? Because surely as a writer, what you are trying to do is to move what is in your mind and heart across to another’s mind and heart? I’m not so sure. Take this passage from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at indep

Let’s say a writer has been writing all his life. He isn’t successful. So how is it supposed to happen that a writer, just by writing more and more, will become commercially viable? It won’t. In order to be successful, writers need basic editing skills. They either have these themselves, or they seek out someone who has them. What are these basic editing skills? 1. A good editor has to know the correct fundamentals of what makes fiction work. This includes knowing

There’s obviously a place for writers just writing without paying any attention to any kind of need to communicate to readers. First drafts are all about opening up the writer’s heart. If any kinds of qualifications are put on what a writer ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ do in this early stage, then the core of the story may evade capture - the depths may be unplumbed, the centre of the whole thing might not be discovered. First drafts are exploratory, adventurous, free. 'Write un