Shelley Harris

Blog - Writing

Diversity and New Stories – subsidised Creative Writing Workshops for BAME writers

‘There are stories out there we aren’t hearing.’ (Kamila Shamsie) There’s been much talk recently about diversity in publishing (viz: the lack of it), and many creative initiatives to rebalance the scales, from blogger Naomi Frisby’s #ReadDiverse2016 to essay collection The Good Immigrant (ed. Nikesh Shukla), crowdfunded in three days thanks to enormous popular support (read more)

How to be a human

What can the ‘most human human’ teach us about writing and reading? On Monday’s PM programme*, the writer Brian Christian (disconcertingly hailed as ‘the most human human’ for reasons that will shortly become clear) talked about how he’d acted as a ‘human confederate’ in 2009’s Turing Test. In this annual event, a panel of scientists makes (read more)

An absolute corker of a tutored retreat

Very, very occasionally in life you get exactly what you want. Most of the time it doesn’t happen that way: someone’s eaten the last bar of Green and Blacks Salted Caramel chocolate, and the only tea available is the heinous decaff. But sometimes things work out. I used to be a teacher and got a (read more)

timey-wimey: a letter to my (former) self

Dear Shelley-from-the-past, Put down that Crème Egg and listen to me: this is important. I’m writing to you from 2015, via an ingenious time-travel mechanism, the specifics of which I can’t be bothered to concoct. I won’t tell you anything about 2015 because if I did it would irrevocably alter the history / future of human (read more)

Thirst

I’m so excited to have Kerry Hudson guesting on my blog today. The genius behind the Womentoring Project, her debut novel Tony Hogan Bought Me An Ice Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma won the Scottish First Book award and was nominated for a slew of others. Yesterday her second novel, Thirst, was published. (read more)

False beards and wicked women: what writers really need #3

What do writers really need? A mentor, that’s what. They need a seasoned professional to offer the voice of experience, whether it’s in matters technical (‘that structure may not carry the story; have you thought about this one?’) or personal (‘Yes, you can do it. Yes, you can. Here’s a bit of cake. Now go (read more)

What writers really need #2

Since my blog post on what it is that writers really need, I’ve been thinking about the things which reliably support my own work. I thought I might blog about them from time to time in the hope that, if you’re a writer too, they might support yours. I’m starting with the idea of a (read more)

Monkeys with tea: what writers really need

There’s been a lot of debate in the past couple of weeks about the usefulness of creative writing MAs, after author and MA tutor Hanif Kureishi’s claim that they are a waste of time (asked whether he’d have enrolled on one, he bracingly replied: ‘that would be madness’). The Grauniad on Saturday ran a three-page (read more)

The Second-Worst Question

What’s the second-worst question you can ask a writer? Almost all the time, it is: ‘What are you working on at the moment?’* It sounds like such a benign enquiry (so thoughtful, so engaged), such an obvious conversational gambit. But for most of a book’s life – really, up until the point that it’s ready (read more)

Quick and dirty

A quick and dirty post this, but one I’m very proud of. It’s pretty terrifying to talk about a work-in-progress, and when my publishers asked me to pitch my next novel* they very cannily did it at a cocktail party (and bought the drinks). There were lots of other Weidenfeld & Nicolson authors there pitching their own (read more)

Red Prose Day

I’ve been trying to decide how I could contribute to this year’s Red Nose Day – and I’ve come up with an idea I’m really excited about; it’s a plan which will benefit Comic Relief and help out an unpublished writer into the bargain. Here’s the deal: on Red Nose Day (Friday, March 15th), writers can (read more)

Mea Culpa

It’s been a very long time since I wrote anything on this blog – two and a half months, to be precise – so this post starts with an apology for my neglect. I’m sorry. In my defence, over the past weeks I’ve kept nearly-posting. I’ve nearly-posted about: Equal marriage (again) The different phases you go (read more)

A Day In The Life

Inspired by this lovely blog post from Carolyn Jess-Cooke, I’m presenting my own writer’s day in pictures. Here goes… It starts with coffee, and with proper respect accorded to my muse… No, not Jane Austen herself, but my trusty Jane Austen Action Figure, with poseable limbs, writing desk (out of shot), and a (read more)

Writers’ Wives

In recent weeks we’ve been treated to two spousal accounts of what it is to live with a novelist. There’s this, from Deborah Orr (wife to Booker shortlisted Will Self) and now these comments from Ian Rankin’s wife that, during the most trying period of each novel’s creation, the role of his family is “Chiefly… (read more)

whistle while you work

I wrote to a musical accompaniment this week. It rarely happens, because I seem to be very aurally distractible (as well as distractible in any number of other ways), so generally speaking my writing room remains a quiet place. Occasionally I’ll break that rule; if one of my characters is listening to a piece of music (read more)

boring

Like many authors I tweet, but I tweet less when I’m working towards a deadline, and not just because I’m avoiding distractions. The fact is, writing can be really quite boring to talk about. When it’s going well it involves sitting down at a desk and writing things and staring out of the window and (read more)

Gorn my son! (What the Olympics taught me about writing)

I’m not quite sure at which point I bought into the Olympics wholeheartedly, but it was probably somewhere around the time I turned to my husband during the opening ceremony and said: ‘Blimey! That’s the best Queen impersonator I’ve ever seen…Oh My God!’ Or maybe it was when the house rose up to reveal Tim Berners-Lee waiting inside, or (read more)

squirrel!

Before we start, I’d like to take a moment to address my agent and editor, should they happen upon this blog post: Hi, Jo and Kirsty. It’s great to see you here. I hope you’re both well. I grabbed a few spare minutes to write this blog post. Other than that all I do, really, (read more)

in which i start a twitter trend

Yesterday began badly. I woke up with a cold, and knackered to boot. Then I found two terrible reviews of Jubilee on Amazon. Normally, this would not faze me unduly; I’m a voracious reader, and passionate about my right – and everyone else’s – to love or hate any book we damn well want. I (read more)

Silly Love songs

This is a post about brilliant love songs – and also about the preponderance of bad ones. It occurred to me, as I was reading the excellent Someday Find Me by Nicci Cloke, that love is something we don’t often represent well. Maybe it’s the nature of love itself – its choppy mix of the mundane and (read more)

The Other Half of Me

As I write this, we are in the throes of a truly British summer which means, of course, that the sky is the colour of anthracite and high winds have forced the British sailing teams to take a break from their pre-Olympic racing. It’s the perfect moment to curl up with a book which will (read more)

something for the ladies

Imagine my surprise when I opened my copy of The Bookseller on Friday and discovered a new category of fiction: Intelligent Women’s Reads. I’ll just run that by you again: Intelligent Women’s Reads. Now, I’m going to be optimistic here and operate under the assumption that the adjective is being applied to the books, rather (read more)

Life! Death! Prizes!

Steve May is a very good bloke and a cracking writer. I first met him on a ‘second drafts’ course at the Lumb Bank Arvon centre, where he and his wife Caron were centre directors. All of us on that course were deep into our manuscripts, all ambitious for publication. On the first night we (read more)

let the commas breathe

I spent much of Tuesday holed up in a bunker studio in Clerkenwell, watching the enjoyable – but undeniably surreal – process of Jubilee becoming an audio book. Before W & N chose the actor to read it, they’d asked me: ‘What does Jubilee sound like? Whose voice is it narrated in?’ The real answer (read more)

good enough

Liz Fenwick has written very generously here about Jubilee, about pushing herself as a writer, and about the necessity of pressing your skills beyond the point of ‘good’, to reach ‘superb’. She’s no slouch at that, as it happens, landing a two-book deal with Orion (The Cornish House is out in May). At the end (read more)

glamorous

In a recent tweeted exchange, author Kate Mayfield and I identified the two topics guaranteed to spark interest in Twitter’s community of readers and writers . Was it, perhaps, the essential skill of redrafting? It was not. Was it the magpie process of story-making, filching from here and there to bastardise into a narrative? Nope. Was (read more)

Blog - Writing

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