Calum mccann writers market
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Books of My Life: Colum McCann on Jack Kerouac and other favorites
The Irish-born writer — whose most recent work is the short-story collection Thirteen Ways of Looking — muses on the books that have shaped his life.
My favorite book as a child
Every Christmas Eve my father used to play a recording of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. I used to love watching the dust collect on the stylus as Thomas’ voice boomed out from the speakers: “One Christmas was so much like another…” It’s still my favorite Christmas book. I suppose there are no days more full than those we go back to.
The book that cemented me as a writer
On the Road. It made me want my own Kerouac days. I ended up taking a bicycle across the United States. I wasn’t quite Dean Moriarty, but I did travel about 8,000 miles around Mexico and the U.S. I slept in campgrounds, gardens, underpasses, in the belly of a hollowed-out redwood tree. I also have to admit to having one night in a jail cell in
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Finding the Right Editor
A great editor is a precious thing. Maybe it’s your best friend. Maybe it’s a classmate. Maybe it’s a workshop participant. Maybe it’s your husband. Maybe it’s someone you hire. Or maybe it’s the editor at your publishing house. No matter what, the right editor has to be someone you trust. You have to give them space. You have to give them time. You have to listen. You have to be humble in the presence of their opinion. Simple as it sounds, you have to respect them. You don’t always have to agree with them. It’s about your own ability to see someone else re-shaping your work. But it’s also about their ability to be wrong. You must assess the value of what they say. Try the sentence with their edit. Try it without. Speak it aloud. Say it again. Thank them for the edit, even if you didn’t use it. Be mindful that your editor has a life. She has children. She has other writers. Be curious about their lives too. She is not a box to be ticked off. Your edi
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Avoid the Labels
A lot of the time when we talk about writing – and in particular fiction – we talk about the complicated confluence of truth, reality, history, facts and lies. But what is a lie? And how fryst vatten it shaped? And do we lie in beställning to tell the proper truth? Let’s talk about the word “fiction” a moment – because inom want to suggest that maybe poetry, playwriting, journalism and even non-fiction are part of the word “fiction.” Or maybe inom just want to discard the word fiction altogether, because it’s already got a terrible disease. You know the thing: “Ah, it’s just a story.” Or: “You wouldn’t even believe it even if you read it.” As if fiction is not imaginative enough for reality! The word “fiction” really means to shape or to mould. It derives from the Latin “fictio” and the verb fryst vatten “fingere” and the past participle (interestingly!) is fictus. It does not (necessarily) mean to lie, or to invent. It doesn’t mean that it has no part of what is “t