14 writers offer some extensive insights into their work and the writer’s life. Here are some of the stand-out points:
Elmore Leonard:
Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you [...]

It seems no two authors adhere to the same writing or composing methods…
Booker-prize winner Michael Ondaatje’s preferred medium is 8½-by-11-inch Muji brand lined notebooks. He completes the first three or four drafts by hand, sometimes literally cutting and pasting passages and whole chapters with scissors and tape. Some of his notebooks have pages with [...]

In other words another way of saying “just do it”.
Talent is overrated. Luck is overrated. The right agent is overrated. It helps to have all three, but they are all worthless without that thing in your hand, the manuscript, the thing in your hand that may become a book for which trees will die [...]

I’m not a science fiction writer so I doubt I’d be role-playing as if I were Luke Skywalker were I involved in a car crash. Quite possibly nor would too many actual science fiction authors either.
Miller says her first thought during a car accident during her university years wasn’t of whether she could die [...]

Pier pressure is forcing festival to double up
The Sydney Writers’ Festival 2008 guide was released today. While anyone living in Sydney is obviously aware of what is certainly a well promoted event locally, I was surprised to read just how much profile it has garnered internationally.
Now ranked one of the top five literary festivals in [...]