Bad news for writers: shyness can’t be cured. Good news for writers: shyness makes us more creative.
Don’t Shy Away
D.H. Lawrence on Trial
Ben Yagoda provides a step-by-step recount of the 1959 British obscenity case over Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and every noted literary name from Graham Greene to Evelyn Waugh to T. S. Eliot who weighed in: “The whole thing was very well stage-managed with a splendid cast.”
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Books vs. “Books”
Recommended reading: Alex Beam on the distinction between books and "books."
Crowd-source Everything
In addition to the fact Amazon reviewers and experts agree "in aggregate about the quality of a book," non-professional reviews on Amazon tend to be "more eclectic," "more supportive of debut authors," and less biased in favor of authors with whom they associate than media experts.
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For the Sake of Cohesion
“Setting is often the last piece of the jigsaw. I start somewhere else—with a kind of a premise, a set of relationships, a theme—and I often have a long period when I can’t figure out where the story should be put down. I find myself going location hunting. Not just for a time and place, but also for a genre, if you like.” Kazuo Ishiguro on the Hazlitt podcast. For more things Ishiguro, here is our own Lydia Kiesling’s review of Ishiguro’s latest novel, The Buried Giant.
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