’If you’ve visited a bookstore recently, chances are you’ll have seen displays filled with healing fiction titles such as Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For Is in the Library (2023, US) and Hwang Bo-reum’s Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop(2022, US)…’

Japanese and South Korean Healing Fiction

• Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.
• Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don’t yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
• Read Keats’s letters.
• Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. It’s a nice feeling, and you don’t want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.
• Learn poems by heart.
• Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.
• A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
•  If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard. (Ballard was a devoted father who brought up three children alone after his wife’s early death)
• Don’t worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed “What will survive of us is love

From the Guardian

A report in the Times today says a new prize offers £75,000 for just the first three pages of an unfinished novel.

The competition is being run by The Novelry, which runs writing courses, and the details are here. Submit your first few pages with an entry fee of £15: a shortlist will be selected and put to a public vote. The winner gets a free place on one of the Novelry’s courses to finish the novel, and apparently walks away still unpublished but with £75,000. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be £75,000 worth of credits for Novelry courses. More likely they hope the competition will fund itself, which would mean they are hoping for 5,000 entries – not madly optimistic, but it perhaps gives an idea of the odds on winning. Clearly they hope many entrants will sign up for their paid courses.

I don’t think I will be entering, but the tips provided further down the competition page are mildly interesting. They suggest a pretty conventional novel of the ‘Hero’s Journey’ type.

Roopa has prepared a special tribute issue devoted to Michael Round – accessible from our Magazine page.

We’re concerned these days about AI writing fiction and generating (or stealing) art. I thought you might be amused to see what ChatGPT thinks a typical meeting looks like…

One or two details not quite right. Why have all the men got beards?

Marching Men by Marjorie Pickthall

Under the level winter sky
I saw a thousand Christs go by.
They sang an idle song and free 
As they went up to calvary.

Careless of eye and coarse of lip,
They marched in holiest fellowship.
That heaven might heal the world,they gave
Their earth - born dreams to deck the grave.

With souls unpurged and steadfast breath
They supped the sacrament of death.
And for each one, far off, apart,
Seven swords have rent a woman's heart.

If you need a little motivation to write your novel, then maybe National Novel Writing Month is the push you need. Sign up on the website and all the tools to get you going and support you throughout the month are ready to access. http://www.nanowrimo.org  Good luck !