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Lesley McDowell, author and critic: The harm that loving characters too much can do

http://lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-harm-that-loving-characters-too.html

Monday, 13 July 2015. The harm that loving characters too much can do. It's a tricky line for a writer to tread. How many of us have had novels rejected by publishers, who tell us that they "just didn't fall in love with" our characters? How many of us have had novels accepted because publishers tell us that they "just fell in love with" our characters? The piling-up of tragic events, the sentimentality ratio off the scale. How dare she do that to 'our' hero? And should I even try? I don't think so: I wa...

lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com

Lesley McDowell, author and critic: July 2015

http://lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com/2015_07_01_archive.html

Monday, 13 July 2015. The harm that loving characters too much can do. It's a tricky line for a writer to tread. How many of us have had novels rejected by publishers, who tell us that they "just didn't fall in love with" our characters? How many of us have had novels accepted because publishers tell us that they "just fell in love with" our characters? The piling-up of tragic events, the sentimentality ratio off the scale. How dare she do that to 'our' hero? And should I even try? I don't think so: I wa...

lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com

Lesley McDowell, author and critic: June 2013

http://lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com/2013_06_01_archive.html

Tuesday, 11 June 2013. On reviewing the 'greats' and daring to say they're bad. There's a literary/journalistic kind of parlour game that surfaces every now and then, where it's revealed how many publishers failed to spot the potential of subsequently hugely successful writers, or how many reviewers dissed a future literary star's debut efforts. Silly publishers! What do any of them know, eh? Http:/ www.salon.com/2013/06/10/in defense of alice munro/. In The New York Review of Books. When I wrote a piece...

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Lesley McDowell, author and critic: November 2013

http://lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com/2013_11_01_archive.html

Thursday, 28 November 2013. How subversive is detail in historical fiction? At the beginning of this week, I shared a library event with another author, J. David Simons, whose historical novel, An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful,. Is published by the same company as my own Unfashioned Creatures. No less, to mothers of ten children or more. What struck me most about this exercise, though, was that that wasn't the detail that stood out for me! How many people were affected by that? She explores the hi...

lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com

Lesley McDowell, author and critic: On reviewing self-published work

http://lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-reviewing-self-published-work.html

Tuesday, 15 July 2014. On reviewing self-published work. As a writer who makes the bulk of her living reviewing for newspapers, I'm beginning to wonder if I should change my attitude to this question, or if I'm still on the right track about it. That's if you can make it on to the increasingly smaller books sections in newspapers and magazines in the first place, of course. But a few months ago I reviewed Black Thorn. Surely inclusion should only be about literary merit, not about who publishes it? The a...

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Lesley McDowell, author and critic: No Wealth To Leave Us: Towards a matrilineal heritage in Scottish literature

http://lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com/2014/06/no-wealth-to-leave-us-towards.html

Tuesday, 10 June 2014. No Wealth To Leave Us: Towards a matrilineal heritage in Scottish literature. This is a copy of the talk I gave at Edinburgh Central Library on June 9th, 2014, as part of the 'Harpies, Fechters and Quines' festival organised by Glasgow Women's Library. The full quote for the title of my talk comes from A Room of One’s Own. Where an exasperated Virginia Woolf asks, ‘What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Looking in at shop windows? He saw her choic...

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Lesley McDowell, author and critic: July 2013

http://lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com/2013_07_01_archive.html

Saturday, 20 July 2013. On declaring a personal interest. When you're a reviewer married to a writer, was an issue that pre-occupied me more than a little this week. What are the ethics of reviewing when it comes to such things? Given how hard it is for writers to get noticed, especially debut writers, shouldn't you use all the contacts you've got, especially if said contact has a high-profile magazine column and you share a home together? It was the current issue of Private Eye. Loves this sort of thing...

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Lesley McDowell, author and critic: April 2015

http://lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com/2015_04_01_archive.html

Thursday, 30 April 2015. Do you have to be middle-class to be a writer? I suspect there are some who would like to think class has nothing to do with being a writer any more - in Tony Blair 's words, 'hey, we're all middle class now'. Except, of course, that that's rubbish. Well, I was 12. And at 12, you just want to be like everyone else. And what of 'class' in my writing life now? Academics aside, and there weren't many of them, they didn't seem to have 'day jobs'. The business of biography researc...

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Lesley McDowell, author and critic: So is my book promo helping to destroy the publishing industry?

http://lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com/2014/01/so-is-my-book-promo-helping-to-destroy.html

Friday, 24 January 2014. So is my book promo helping to destroy the publishing industry? It's my first blog post of 2014, and so far January has been extremely kind to my new novel, Unfashioned Creatures, which came out in November. Sales figures on Amazon have shown in regularly in the Kindle top 20 for literary fiction - hooray! You can even check it out here! Http:/ www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00F0L12XS/ref=s9 simh gw p351 d0 i1? It received 659 online shares - quite a feat for a literary article, I ...

lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com

Lesley McDowell, author and critic: Do you have to be middle-class to be a writer?

http://lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com/2015/04/do-you-have-to-be-middle-class-to-be.html

Thursday, 30 April 2015. Do you have to be middle-class to be a writer? I suspect there are some who would like to think class has nothing to do with being a writer any more - in Tony Blair 's words, 'hey, we're all middle class now'. Except, of course, that that's rubbish. Well, I was 12. And at 12, you just want to be like everyone else. And what of 'class' in my writing life now? Academics aside, and there weren't many of them, they didn't seem to have 'day jobs'. The business of biography researc...