BLOG BREAK The Art of Failure

Nick Cross presents his fortnightly selection of must-read blogs.


Kelly McCaughrain's reflections on writing "failure", particularly in relation to Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail podcast series have caused a lively dialogue on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure. Can attitudes to failure really be divided along gender lines? Read Kelly's blog post and make up your own mind.

What's it like after your novel is acquired, in that period where you come under intense pressure to make the book work for publication? Kathryn Kettle has been quiet for a while, but that's because she's been working pretty intensively, as she reveals in her blog post.

Yikes - Sarah Broadley has just done her first ever school visit as a writer. And with a particularly awkward bit of audience participation to boot! Sarah tells us all about it in her blog post.

How can I get to be like John Shelley? Is there a course available? Because John's latest post about his amazing one-inch square drawings has made me extremely envious. How does he even think up all those ideas?

A lot of people find writing synopses very difficult (not me, but then apparently I'm a freak!) Vanessa Harbour has some wise advice on the subject in her latest Writing is Hard blog post.

If writing one book is hard, then writing a series takes on even more challenging dimensions. Alex English discusses the writing exercises that are helping her to plot a forward course.

Finally, after featuring Sally Poyton's post on the lonely art of writing a few weeks ago, I was delighted to see her clever solution in her follow-up article. And not just because she now has a photobook with a picture of me in it. Oh no.

Nick.

*Feature image: Blog Break logo by Nick Cross



Nick Cross is Words & Pictures' Blog Network Editor. An Undiscovered Voices winner, he both writes and illustrates for children, and was honours winner of the SCBWI Magazine Merit Award for fiction.

Nick also blogs for Notes from the Slushpile. His most recent post sees him teaming up with his agent Heather Cashman, for an investigation of the value of comp titles.

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