Writing for the past two years, I’ve learned a great deal about the craft. I’ve been lucky enough to have a mentor who has given me valuable advice like, “Read every day, write in public, read what you write aloud, practice consistently.” But the single-best piece of advice I’ve ever been given as a writer came from one of the greatest writers of our generation, Stephen King, and is something I need to constantly remind myself of.

Writing can be lonely. You can write in a quiet place all by yourself or in a crowded bar or coffee shop — and you’ll still wind up in your own head, mulling and blazing down words and then mulling some more. Wear headphones like I do so you don’t inflict your brand of loud on everyone else and you’re more likely to be left alone. No one will throw you a smile, offer a cup of coffee, a cookie break.

A wise man once told me that in order to lead a successful life, people have to get clear in three areas — clarity of vision, certainty of action, and values. At the time, I nodded in agreement, and praised how wise that wise man was, but walking home later that day, I thought to myself just how lost I really was.

And why your readers are an integral part of the writer’s process.

Being both a writer and procrastinator can be a lethal combination — a productivity killer of the highest order.

What nobody has the balls to tell you.

To get better, focus on the basics.

He wrote “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” “Bonfire of the Vanities” and “The Right Stuff,” and pioneered a novelistic journalism in the 1960s and ’70s.

He has only been in graphic storytelling for three years, but already the Czech-born writer has produced several influential series for the biggest publishers – and his latest is set to reinvent crime noir

People see my head on a book and attach a tall body to it. The image of somebody that you have accorded status to in your mind is a large one; the Greeks always made the gods quite tall. I’m short. Shorter than you think. I threw amazingly scary parties for my little sister. She was born on 30 October and her birthdays were a hot item. I’d paint my face green, turn out the lights, make everyone get under the tablecloth...

Authors like to present our lives and our work as something glamorous. We invoke our Muses, we sip tea, we show off our vintage notebooks and typewriters and pens

Novelists have a choice: stay in and write or get out and promote.

Created for Press Play/IndieWire's "Genius Directors in Three Minutes" series: It is a well known fact that Quentin Tarantino is a self-proclaimed cinephile. But the writer/director's love for cinema is most obviously expressed through his own films. In addition to showing his characters spending a great deal of time discussing cinema, Tarantino's films are jam-packed with homages and visual references to the movies that have intrigued him throughout his life.

“Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,” Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity’s greatest British and American writers — including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud...

Writer Beware’s mission is to track, expose, and raise awareness of the prevalence of fraud and other questionable activities in and around the publishing industry.

With all my novels I like to drop fictional characters into real situations -- and the NSA is always ripe territory.

J.K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, Maggie Stiefvater, Rainbow Rowell. You might like their work, but would you have a beer with them?

Including James Baldwin, Lou Reed, Nora Ephron, and David Foster Wallace.

By Sarah McCarry. (Sept. 8)

Order essays online and they will be written by a member of writing department that entails more than a hundred of professional writers. Absolutely all orders

Jim Ridley — the editor, heart and soul of the Nashville Scene, a film critic with few peers, and one of the most beloved and...

Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day. They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves. This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. Writing lectures or reviews – any kind of non-fiction – seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshall your resources, just get on with it.

The best-selling novelist shares his secrets to selling so many books. Stephen King is one of the most prolific and commercially successful authors of the past half century, with more than 70 books of horror, science fiction, and fantasy to his name. Estimates put the total sales of his books at between 300 and 350 million copies. 16 years ago, King shared everything he knows about writing in a book that instantly became a bestseller: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

FOR AMERICANS, Mark Twain is something akin to gravity, a massive and foundational force whose magnificence has worn off through familiarity.

This past Saturday, the world celebrated the birthday of a guy named William Shakespeare. He was born in Stratford-on-Avon in England on April 23, 1564, and died on or about the same date in 1616. Pretty much every reputable Shakespeare scholar and literary historian argues—based on historical evidence—that this William Shakespeare was the author, alone or in collaboration, of the plays we know today. But since at least the mid-1800s, a few of those who love Shakespeare’s plays have...

When most people think of TE Lawrence they focus on filmmaker David Lean's portrayal but a new play paints a different picture of the psychologically complex man.

In the summer of 1952, sixty-year-old J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) encountered a tape recorder for the first time, which resulted in some wonderful archival audio of the beloved author reading from The Hobbit. So enchanted was Tolkien with this novel technology that he proceeded to record himself reading much of his work over the years to come.

A writer remembers his father. By David Means.

Two seasons in and Better Call Saul is already one of the most respected dramas currently on TV. This year, it’s up for seven Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama and Outstanding Lead Actor. Earlier this summer, New York’s Matt Zoller Seitz sat down with Better Call Saul cast members Bob Odenkirk, Rhea Seehorn, and Michael McKean, and co-creator Peter Gould, for a wide-ranging conversation on the morality of each of Saul’s characters, how plot development can be confining in a prequel, and why no men's shirts on the show have white buttons.

Roald Dahl, who was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter and fighter pilot, remembered for his witty, beautifully written children’s books, the author having created some of our most beloved fictional characters. He often used incredibly unique words to describe the vivid worlds of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and Matilda.

Jennifer Frey drank herself to death. By Dave McKenna.

On 5 November, John Berger will turn 90. As I travel to Paris to meet him, I carry a bagful of books. There are recently published art historical writings, Portraits, and, to coincide with his 90th birthday, Landscapes (judiciously selected by Tom Overton for Verso), a fascinating series of encounters with the thinkers who have mattered to Berger, from Brecht and Walter Benjamin to Rosa Luxemburg. A marvellous miscellany of more recent work, Confabulations, has just been published by Penguin, and A Jar of Wild Flowers...

Stephen Taylor has found a goldmine in the risqué memoirs of this charming, adventurous Georgian aristocrat, who bravely defied convention in the pursuit of true love. By Jane Ridley.