A Writer's Diary

Articles

On Slo-Mo

Jul 30, 2024 | awritersdiary.substack.com | Toby Litt

Here’s an exercise and an explanation. Next time you’re on a bus journey, along a crowded high street, get your phone out, point it sideways, and take exactly ten seconds of slo-mo video. Do this while the bus is moving, so you get a tracking shot. Press the camera up against the glass. Hopefully it isn’t juddering too much. Aim to catch the people on the pavement. As you’re 10 filming, 9 8 7 6, look at the street, 5 4 3, not the screen, 2 1. When you’re done, 0, watch the video back immediately.
On Vulnerability

Jul 29, 2024 | awritersdiary.substack.com | Toby Litt

The lyrics I’ve been thinking about are —You end up like a dog that’s been beat too muchTill you spend half your life just covering upFrom ‘Born in the USA’. There’s a lot to say about this song (in relation to America now), and about Bruce Springsteen generally (in relation to lots of things), but I’d like to focus on failure. Self-confirming failure. First, an aside —Last week, I did not go and see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band live at Wembley Stadium.
On the Key to Writing a Novel

Jul 26, 2024 | awritersdiary.substack.com | Toby Litt

I was twenty and had just finished university. I’d written two short stories. Maybe three. One day, I decided to write a novel. The main reason for this was because I saw myself as a poet, and I thought that in order to support themselves poets needed to write novels. Hah. I moved to Edinburgh, found a bedsit up four flights of stairs, got a narrow-lined A4 pad. But although I’d just finished an English Literature degree, I didn’t really know to go about writing anything longer than four pages.
On The Pages of the Sea

Jul 25, 2024 | awritersdiary.substack.com | Toby Litt |Anne Hawk

Today is launch day for a wonderful first novel. The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk. It’s published by Weatherglass Books, who have put out some other amazing books — Cold New Climate by Isobel Wohl is perhaps my other favourite. I think this will come to be seen as a really significant debut. It’s a great and loveable novel of childhood, separation, cruelty and curiosity. A book to keep alongside To Kill a Mockingbird and Wide Sargasso Sea and The Bluest Eye.
On Performative Vulnerability

Jul 24, 2024 | awritersdiary.substack.com | Toby Litt

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether or not I’m lying to myself. That would make a good opening sentence for a short story. Sometimes he found it hard to tell whether or not he was lying to himself. But lots of readers would say, Oh, it’s too clunkily introducing an unreliable narrator. Maybe so. Yet what about those moments when one becomes too clunkily unreliable a narrator to and of one’s own self?
On Chills

Jul 22, 2024 | awritersdiary.substack.com | Toby Litt

I get that shiver up the back of the neck only rarely. Last night at the Proms, in the last few seconds of Mahler’s 5th Symphony, with the Halle Orchestra, conducted there for the last time by Mark Elder — zing went the string of my spine. I can’t explain it. I’d been standing among the prommers for an hour and a half. The Albert Hall was very stuffy. A young woman in front of me had fainted, been held up, fainted again during the Adagietto, been led away. The playing had been wonderful.
On Creative Writing Courses

Jul 19, 2024 | awritersdiary.substack.com | Toby Litt

It’s now a decade since Hanif Kureishi dismissed Creative Writing courses as a waste of time. In the aftermath of his comments, the Guardian asked a number of writers — Rachel Cusk, Philip Hensher, Joyce Carol Oates, me — to respond. What I said then remains my best defence of Creative Writing — particularly as part of continuing education. But there’s more to say.
On the Time of Originality

Jul 18, 2024 | awritersdiary.substack.com | Toby Litt

Whilst I was in Paris, I went to the Musée Rodin. I have wanted to go for years. It was even more amazing than I had expected. Since getting back home, I have been reading again Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘The Rodin-Book’ of 1903 and 1907 — translated by William Tucker and published by Quartet Books in 1986. Along with David Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon, Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Conversation about Dante’, and Virginia Woolf’s Diaries, this is one of my sacred texts.
On Pattern in Writing

Jul 17, 2024 | awritersdiary.substack.com | Toby Litt

I have been puzzling over this for years. And I think I’ve gone as far as I can by myself. I need your help. This is a question for you. Everyone knows what a patterned fabric looks like. Patterned cloth or hide seems to be a universal human product. But is there an equivalent in writing? (In prose, not poetry.)About a decade ago, I wrote something which seemed a way to approach the question. Stripes were an obviously doable pattern in writing.
On What's Worth Looking At

Jul 16, 2024 | awritersdiary.substack.com | Toby Litt

There is too much of everything. Or rather, It’s only at rare moments — the best moments — that there is exactly the right amount of world in the world. The rest of the time, it’s just overwhelming. That’s how it feels to me. That’s how it feels today. Politically. Ecologically. Aesthetically. A few weeks ago, I asked whether or not you’d like there to be 10,000 new novels by your favourite writer. The example I gave was Lee Child, who I know is probably not your favourite writer.