Last week’s attack on Salman Rushdie underscored, for me, one of the harder realities of being a writer. You get hated by total strangers. And sometimes they go berserk. Its sad that authors get targeted, physically or otherwise. One might argue that Rushdie was a special case; but on my experience it’s a risk all … More Salman Rushdie and author danger: a cautionary tale
Something struck me the other day about writing. It’s different from most desk-job workflows. Massively so. Let me put it this way. A typical ‘office job’, certainly at the kind of planning-and-control (‘manager’) level that writers have when working, involves a complex daily schedule of appointments. Time is divided up typically into hourly brackets, each … More Time-management and writing
This week I won a national writing award for my book for schools, The New Zealand Wars. The Storylines Notable Book lists included this title in its YA non-fiction category. I’m quite pleased about that. I wrote the book intentionally for the YA market, but it’s there for all ages and is intended as a … More I won a national writing award
It is almost 93 years since Erich Maria Remarque’s memoir of the First World War appeared in the pages of the newspaper Vossische Zeitung. It emerged in book form a few months later – January 1929 – and was made into a movie the following year. An English translation was published by Putnam in March … More All quiet on the blogging front
I haven’t posted here for the past couple of weeks. Time to run my blog has been a bit sparse. Why? You’ll find out soon. Meanwhile have a guess as to what’s been going on. Have I been… Kidnapped by aliens from the planet Zorg. Founded a death metal band and got busy recording a … More Missing in action – a bit
WordPress reminded me that I’ve been blogging for ten years this week. I don’t know where the time has gone. It’s been a tumultous decade. In that time I have made some wonderful blogging friends, some of whom have been around since early in my blogging career, and who I’m still in contact with, including … More Ten years of blogging – and a big thank you to my readers
One of the things I do besides write is advise other people on it – I’ll assess manuscripts, offer ways to fix them and so on. I also edit, and have done that professionally for many years. And I know the publishing industry. I actually worked as a corporate publisher where, among other things, I … More Writing advice services
When I was a lad with the dream of being a full-time writer, I often imagined it as the kind of life you might have where avalanches of money just pour in from royalties and you’re there in your 200-room mansion, private jet parked outside, slaves servants running around doing everything, and generally having a … More A day in the life of a writer – Part 1.
One of the hardest things about writing is figuring out exactly how whatever you say will be received. It’s true of fiction and non-fiction alike. The issue works on several levels. You, as author, know what you mean, and when you’re checking the material for sense that’s what you read into it. Sometimes, basic word … More One of the hardest things about writing
I periodically find myself in conversation with people who start with ‘You’re a historian, so you must know…’ – and then ask me something about some obscure piece of trivia in an area I’ve never looked at. However, my answer’s the same every time: as Einstein said, I don’t need to keep stuff to that … More History’s all about shapes and patterns – and it’s all relative
Matthew Wright 
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