The remainder of the books touches on her early life in South Africa, a time in which her ANC supporting father was one day arrested and taken away – she wouldn’t see him again for four years. Then there’s a section when, as a teenager living in a North London suburb, she reflects on her time as a rebellious would be writer living ‘in exile’. These anecdotes paint vivid pictures of both time and place, and show something of what her early life must have comprised. Ajay lit her cigarette and then he lit his cigarette and they both made O’s of smoke in the air. Their O’s were the most beautiful thing in the world. Sometimes they floated towards each other and just as they were about to touch they melted in the air. The air smelt of rice. And spices. The O’s and the rice and the spices and the space between Melissa and Ajay whose shoes were made from snake and Melissa whose eyelashes were sooty with mascara and the way her little finger was touching the cuff of Ajay’s shirt seemed to me how life could be when it was going well.” Researching a good place to stay is often the most intimidating thing about traveling to a new place. So if you can write well about this, you’ll be meeting a real pain point for many people. And speaking of shoulders – she gives a startling picture of women shouldering society's expectation that, as mothers, they can continue to travel light. Cyril Connolly wrote about the "pram in the hall" as the "enemy of good art". Orwell did not wheel a pram into his essay at all. Levy does better with her buggy. She does not know what to do with the formidable younger self who stalks the downbeat mother she has become. She suggests that her experience is commonplace: "We didn't really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain." A single line sums up the problem: "If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong."

Even if you don’t think your life is interesting, it’s still a treasure trove of source material and inspiration! Start with your earliest memory or something that seems mundane but holds a special place in your heart. Get as detailed as possible.Failure is good. Failure admits ambition. It requires courage to fail and even more courage to know that you’re going to fail. Reach beyond yourself. The true daring is the ability to go to the postbox knowing that it will contain yet another rejection letter. Don’t rip it up. Don’t burn it. Use it as wallpaper instead. Preserve it and reread it every now and then. Know that in the years to come this rejection letter will be a piece of nostalgia. It will yellow and curl and you will remember what it once felt like to throw your words against what everyone presumed would be your silence. Failure is vivifying. You know you’re better than it. Failure gets you up in the morning. Failure gets your blood circling. Failure dilates your nostrils. Failure tells you to write a bigger story and a better one. This is a book about a young writer struggling to find a voice and an older writer struggling to find a room of her own where she can raise that voice above a murmur. No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness" - Adrienne rich.

Every work of fiction is organised somehow – and the best of them are more profoundly organised than they ever let on. Our stories rely on the human instinct for architecture. Structure is, essentially, a container for content. The shape into which your story gets is a house slowly built from the foundation up. Or maybe it’s a tunnel, or a skyscraper, or a palace, or even a moving caravan, driven forward by your characters. In fact, structure can be any number of things: you just have to make sure that it doesn’t become an elaborate hole in the ground into which we bury ourselves, unable to claw out. Pro Tip: If you don’t have a good grasp on global history, sign up for a class at your local college or start reading books that cover topics relevant to current social or political issues. Again, read and study varying perspectives. In "Why I Write", Orwell entertainingly declared: "All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness." He divided reasons for soldiering on into "sheer egoism", "aesthetic enthusiasm", "historical impulse" and "political purpose". Like Orwell, Levy is entertaining and makes his categories her chapter headings. But, unlike Orwell, she is not steadily organised. She is a maker not a clearer up of mysteries. And she is fugitive. It is this that gives the book its subtle, unpredictable, surprising atmosphere. esgotante uma mulher aprender como se há de tornar um sujeito, e é bastante duro aprender como se há de tornar escritora.» Next time your bored, don’t reach for your phone! As a writer, you’ll need empty space so unexpected ideas have room to grow. Instead of distracting yourself when bored, settle into it as an opportunity to become a better writer.Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.” Some writers try to envision the structure beforehand, and they shape the story to fit it, but this is so often a trap. You should not try to stuff your story into a preconceived structure. A proper structure mirrors the content of the story it wants to tell. It will contain its characters and propel them forward at the same time. And it will generally achieve this most fully when it does not draw too much attention to itself. Structure should grow out of character and plot, which essentially means that it grows out of language. In other words, the structure is forever in the process of being shaped. You find it as you go along. Chapter by chapter. Voice by voice. Ask yourself if it feels right to tell the story in one fell swoop, or if it should be divided into sections, or if it should have multiple voices, or even multiple styles. You stumble on through the dark, trying new things all the time. Sometimes, in fact, you don’t find the structure until halfway through, or even when you’re close to being finished. That’s OK. You have to trust that it will eventually appear and that it will make sense. Language and plot The second section while perhaps simpler in a literary sense (and less reminiscent of her powerful fictional writing) is also the most powerful – an account of her time in South Africa as a young girl after her anti-Apartheid father was arrested and held in prison for four years, something which lead to the author developing a habit of speaking very quietly and then reverting to silence. As Levy said in a recent Guardian interview “It was really about being totally overwhelmed by everything, not believing that my thoughts were in any way valuable to anyone, probably very frightened thoughts, and so I just stopped speaking.”. This section explores how Levy eventually started to rediscover her voice through writing. One of the strengths for me of this section is how Levy as an adult conveys and explores her feelings as a child – in a way which to me seemed both true to the remarkable lived experience of a child but with the literary filter of an adult. What was your favorite school hot lunch? Write a detailed scene about the smells, taste, and whether you ate alone or had lots of friends. People love to learn new things, and if you have personal experience or knowledge about a topic, you’re the perfect person to write about it. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in British literature to write about Jane Austen, and you certainly don’t need to be an expert on everything about relationships to write about dating.

These ideas are organized by theme and topic for easy reference whenever you’re unsure what to write. Don’t forget to print or bookmark this article so you can refer to it when needed. Personal Experiences And Anecdotes Know when to push through and when to stop. Somedays, you just have to sit down and write. On other days, if writing is like pulling teeth, try taking a short walk or doing something different for the day. Writing prompts are something even the best writers use at times to spark creativity, find new ways of expression, and help with focusing on a topic or theme. Things I Don't Want to Know is a work of dazzling insight and deep psychological succour, from one of our most vital contemporary writers.

Sometimes we take a character from our own immediate lives and we build a new person upon that scarecrow. Or sometimes we take well-known characters in history and shape them in new ways. Either way we have a responsibility to write them into life. To hell with grammar, but only if you know the grammar first. To hell with formality, but only if you have learned what it means to be formal. To hell with plot, but you had better at some stage make something happen. To hell with structure, but only if you have thought it through so thoroughly that you can safely walk through your work with your eyes closed.

Please remember that mishandling your research is also your potential downfall. At times we can pollute our texts with too much of the obvious. It is often a good thing to have space instead so that we can fill it out with imaginative muscle. Always ask yourself: how much research is enough? Don’t corrupt your texts with facts facts facts. Texture is much more important than fact. Fail, Fail, Fail Set goals. Accomplishing even small goals like a weekly word count or writing time can give you a dopamine rush and motivate you to keep writing.There are some other striking details provided in this section of the memoir. As a child who was required to be stoical in the face of hardship, Deborah saw in her plastic Barbie doll a kind of model for the way a girl should be. “Untouched by anything horrible that happened in the world,” Barbie was calm, pretty, and plastic. Levy wished that she too could be plastic with painted-on blue eyes “that held no secrets.” If Orwell would have been alive, how would he have reacted to Deborah's take on writing? He might have quarreled with her, or he might have admired her. What Orwell might have done is not so relevant but what we will do is rather crucial as she is pointing something really poignant yet absolutely germane. You’ll have plenty to choose from to write about political events! We recommend taking a similar approach to this as you would for an opinion piece––context is everything. If you view politics only through what you see happening in front of you, you may get a skewed and imbalanced view of things.