NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS » On Writing

Michael Joseph’s advice to young writers

Nigel Beale — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:00:53 +0000

From Monika Dickens’s prologue to Michael Joseph, Master of Words: Michael’s guidance was not editorial, but from one author to another. When I got bogged down in beautiful formal phrases, as new writers do, he gave me a superb piece of advice, which I’ve passed on to many new young writers. "Don’t try so hard," he [...]

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Fifth Annual Write By The Lake Writers Retreat July 25-29, 2010

Nigel Beale — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:59:37 +0000

Jumpstart and Develop short stories, novels, poetry, travel and memoir writing at Rick Taylor’s annual Write by the Lake writers retreat, located on a quiet lake in Val des Monts, Quebec, thirty minutes from downtown Ottawa. I did several years ago, and highly recommend the experience! While participants work alone each day, much of the time [...]

Fifth Annual Write By The Lake Writers Retreat July 25-29, 2010 is a post from: NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Huxley on Snails and Writers

Nigel Beale — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:46:07 +0000

PDPhoto.org "Slugs go through life leaving only a fading trail of slime; the snail bequeaths to the world an elaborately convoluted shell. The writer is a snail in the midst of slugs…Snails make excellent fossils; slugs tend to disappear without leaving a trace. Literary fame is a function of fossilizability. Unlike his biological counterpart, the writer-snail [...]

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Who Cares How You Write a Great Novel…

Nigel Beale — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:57:02 +0000

I was going to write a great post berating this Wall Street Journal article as completely annoying; a self congratulatory waste-of-time. With characteristic aplomb, Bookninja George Murray saves me the trouble: The WSJ asks a bunch of bigtime authors how to write a great novel. I think we all know the answer to that. Be [...]

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Thomas Bernhard and NPRs Three Minute Fiction

Nigel Beale — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:00:02 +0000

http://www.thomasbernhard.org/ Here’s one for the contest...chosen from 104 found in The Voice Imitator (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997): My former classmate who emigrated to Australia eleven years ago and returned to his Styrian homeland two years ago emigrated to Australia again six months ago, although he knows he will return to Styria again and will continue [...]

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Enter The Walrus’s writing contest: Deadline July 31, 2009

Nigel Beale — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:15:46 +0000

Hurry, Hurry: To celebrate The Walrus’s annual summer reading issue—featuring stories by Lee Henderson, Rivka Galchen (listen to our conversation here), Stephen Marche & 2008 Giller Prize winner Joseph Boyden (ditto here) — the mag is pleased to announce The Walrus Guilty Pleasures Writing Contest! To enter, write the first paragraph of a novel in [...]

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Mitchelmore’s Fear of reading

Nigel Beale — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:45:07 +0000

Steve Mitchelmore delivers a post worthy of Beckett, about epiphany, and impossibility, during recovery from a serious bicycling accident. From which: "Akhenaten had ordered that the capital city be moved from Thebes into the desert 200 miles away. The documentary featured new archeological discoveries that revealed the disastrous consequences for his subjects. What stirred me was [...]

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Hail, Haul or Hale? Common Errors in English

Nigel Beale — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:07:09 +0000

"One old meaning of the word “hale” is “to drag,” especially by force. In modern usage it has been replaced with “haul” except in the standard phrase “hale into court.” People who can’t make sense of this form often misspell the phrase as “hail into court.” To be hailed is to be greeted enthusiastically, with [...]

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Virginia Woolf on Writing and Architecting

Nigel Beale — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:00:57 +0000

Diary entry for April 28, 1935: "All desire to practice the art of a writer has completely left me. I cannot imagine what it would be like: that is, more accurately, I cannot curve my mind to the line of a book: no, nor of an article. Its not the writing but the architecting that strains. [...]

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The only thing appealing about the L.A. Times’ Postmodern list is its cute little icons

Nigel Beale — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:58:13 +0000

Sure. As mentioned many and more times, lists are a fun and easy way to attract and rile up readership, and, if you’re lucky create a bit of caustic banter. Jacket Copy’s succeeds because it is so… irritating, in large part because so too is the term Postmodern literature. As Mr. Wikipedia, in quite a [...]

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Beautiful Sentences, Conscientiousness and Good Fortune

Nigel Beale — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:51:18 +0000

This from The Elegant Variation’s Interview with Joseph O’Neill: TEV: …It’s interesting that you have brought up Zadie Smith because I was going to ask about her next. I think that a lot of people draw the wrong kind of conclusions with a piece like the one that she wrote. I think that it sets up [...]

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3-Day Novel Contest this September

Nigel Beale — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:05:26 +0000

Last month, during ‘North America ’s largest annual interdisciplinary academic conference‘ I ran into Melissa Edwards who handed me a copy of In the Garden of Men by Ottawa’s own John Kupferschmidt. It won the 30th Annual International 3-Day Novel Contest, one which, as the Globe and Mail puts it ‘forces instinct to the fore…the [...]

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Fiction Bypasses Reality, makes you feel ‘less Freakish’

Nigel Beale — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:39:50 +0000

Philip Marchand in the Toronto Star: …[Fiction] ultimately has more impact on memory than non-fiction, because fiction is designed to have this impact. It bypasses reality directly to order the imagination, whereas history must deal as best it can with the hopeless mess. Fiction also did something else. In 10th grade English class we were assigned [...]

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Everybody Hates a Critic: 250 Word Flash Fiction Contest

Nigel Beale — Fri, 15 May 2009 19:59:57 +0000

This from Dan Wells: Terry Griggs’s new comic-noir biblio-mystery Thought You Were Dead begins with a literary critic found under a hedge with a knife in his head. Literary revenge is the culprit. The literary world, especially the Canadian literary world, can be a small, spiteful – and occasionally murderous – place. [...]

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Banville on Beckett: Non-Words or Word Storms?

Nigel Beale — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:57:16 +0000

This from John Banville on The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 in The New Republic: "…reading again this famous manifesto from the party of the Nothing, one is driven to ask, however timidly, the simple question: why? Why are grammar and style irrelevant, and what is it they are irrelevant to? Why is language "best used [...]

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