Open Call - Getting Your Script Ready
bbc.co.uk – Tuesday September 30, 2025
This year the dates for our Open Call are from noon on Tuesday 4th November to noon on Tuesday 2nd December. Ahead of the submission window opening we turned to Hayley McKenzie for some tips and advice on making sure that your script is in its best shape.
How should writers get ready to submit their script to BBC Writers Open Call, or any other opportunity deadline?
Making sure you have enough time to do multiple revisions before the deadline is critical – don’t send your first draft! Building that evaluation and rewrite time into your process is important if you want to send your best work. So, aim to finish a first draft of the script a few weeks before the deadline to give yourself time to really elevate the script and make it the best you possibly can.
We also encourage the writers we work with to have done a lot of development on the idea/premise, characters and story, including outlining, before writing the first draft. That helps gives the first draft of the script more clarity of intent and a strong shape, which means there is less of the heavy lifting to do in the rewriting phase.
Are fandoms becoming the hottest wellspring of material for books and movies?
russh.com – Monday September 29, 2025
For those who have always harboured a deep passion for the written word – and perhaps aspired to write themselves – the world of fan fiction is hardly new territory. Both emerging and established authors have cut their teeth in the sandboxes offered by some of the most popular fandoms.
At the 2024 RUSSH Literary Showcase presentation, Tongan-Australian author Winnie Dunn spoke of one of her first forays into writing. Stolen moments tucked away in her childhood bedroom drafting fan fiction. The admission was met with a knowing smile by the other emerging authors in the room. Some of them later even divulged to me the particular fandoms they used to experiment with.
Reading and writing fan stories was once an activity kept strictly to LiveJournal and remote internet forums. It's undeniable that what used to be a clandestine guilty pleasure, a haven for hardcore fan culture, has evolved into something accepted by the mainstream.
DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot. Part 1 of 7: The Gatekeepers
pjmedia.com – Sunday September 28, 2025
Once upon a time, an aspiring fiction writer had a fighting chance. If you wrote a good story, polished your manuscript, and braved the slush pile, you might just get picked up. The system wasn’t perfect, but it was meritocratic enough that talent sometimes slipped through the cracks and found its way into print.
That world is gone.
Today, agents and editors, the self-appointed gatekeepers of publishing, increasingly use submission guidelines not as a way to filter for quality, but as ideological purity tests. Want to query an agent? You’d better make sure your story features “marginalized voices,” that your characters are “diverse,” and that your personal identity matches the preferred checklist. Otherwise, don’t bother. Some agencies explicitly state they will not consider manuscripts by authors from “overrepresented groups.” Some agents state baldly that they will not be able to represent white males. Others signal subtly or overtly that unless your work advances the current ideological line — the one centered on race, gender, or sexuality — they are not interested.
This isn’t just rumor. It’s been noticed by people inside the industry. In 2022, Joyce Carol Oates, no right-wing firebrand but one of America’s most respected novelists, said that a literary agent friend of hers couldn’t even get editors to look at debut novels by white male authors. “They are just not interested,” she wrote, calling the situation “heartbreaking.” Best-selling thriller author James Patterson said much the same: white male writers face a harder time breaking in, a trend he called “another form of racism.”
Mainstream media rushed to shut them down. CNN ran a feature insisting the data “disagrees.” Their proof? A Penguin Random House audit showing that between 2019 and 2021, 76 percent of their authors were white (only 34 percent were men, but they downplayed that). A New York Times study that found 95 percent of novels in major houses were by white people. “Not a thing,” industry insiders declared.
But look closer. Those numbers are backward-looking, reflecting backlist contracts and long-established names. They say nothing about what Oates and Patterson were pointing out: the front door is closing. How many of those 2019–2021 books were new debuts by white men, as opposed to reprints or ongoing series from long-successful authors? CNN didn’t ask, because the answer might have proved Oates right.
Mark Manson Used the 4-Hour Rule to Write a Bestseller. Science Says It’s the Secret to Doing Great Work
inc.com – Tuesday September 23, 2025
The author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k struggled for 15 months to write his best-seller before he stumbled on the 4-hour rule. It changed everything.
Back in the 2010s Mark Manson was a well-known blogger, leveraging social media algorithms to attract eyeballs to his Millennial-focused self-help content. His success earned him a book deal. But he was far from sure his online formula would translate into the world of publishing.
Then his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k came out. It became an instant cultural phenomenon that spawned countless copycats, selling 20 million copies and counting.
“There’s no way to expect that,” Manson told an interviewer. “It’s [a] complete life change.”
So how did a guy known for slinging accessible but smart advice manage to write a book that you now see on basically everyone’s bookshelf? On LinkedIn recently, Manson revealed his struggle to write the book and the essential time management rule it taught him.
It’s a rule that’s backed by a ton of science and that applies to basically anyone who hopes to do great work.
Wattpad to Bestseller: Can Fanfiction Writers Really Go Mainstream?
theteenmagazine.com – Thursday September 18, 2025
In recent years, authors like Ali Hazelwood and Beth Reekles have moved from fanfiction to mainstream publishing. Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis began as Star Wars “Reylo” fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3) before she reworked it into a romance novel. Reekles, who wrote The Kissing Booth, first published the story on Wattpad as a teenager, and later it became a global hit and a Netflix movie.
These success stories raise important questions. Does fanfiction-style storytelling translate well into traditional publishing? Do platforms like Wattpad and AO3 help or hurt new writers? And why is fanfiction so addictive in the first place?
Fanfiction has long been a space where writers can explore beloved universes such as Harry Potter, Twilight, and Star Wars. Over time, some of these writers have reworked their stories and found publishing success. Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fanfiction before being retooled and published.
In Hazelwood’s case, her Reylo fanfic caught the attention of a literary agent on AO3, which launched her career. She then altered names, plot details, and pacing to create The Love Hypothesis.
Other writers have followed similar paths. Estelle Maskame posted Did I Mention I Love You? (DIMILY) on Wattpad as a teenager; the book attracted millions of reads before being traditionally published and selling over a million copies. Filipino author Jonaxx (Jonahmae Pacala) also built a massive Wattpad following that translated into bestselling novels.
AI could never replace my authors. But, without regulation, it will ruin publishing as we know it
theguardian.com – Thursday September 18, 2025
Basic principles need to be enshrined to protect the sacred craft of storytelling from this automated onslaught
The single biggest threat to the livelihood of authors and, by extension, to our culture, is not short attention spans. It is AI.
The UK publishing industry – worth more than £11bn, part of the £126bn that our creative industries generate for the British economy – has sat by while big tech has “swept” copyrighted material from the internet in order to train their models. Recently, the AI startup Anthropic settled a $1.5bn copyright case over this issue, but the ship has undeniably left the harbour and big tech is sailing off with the goods.
As a literary agent and CEO of one of the largest agencies in Europe, I think this is something everyone should care about – not because we fear progress, but because we want to protect it. If you take away the one thing that makes us truly human – our ability to think like humans, create stories and imagine new worlds – we will live in a diminished world.
Many great writers have written about why stories are the lifeblood of humanity and how an artist’s job is to tell us truths we may not want to hear. Having worked with writers such as John le Carré, Elif Shafak, William Boyd and David Nicholls, I know first-hand where great storytelling comes from.
Le Carré was born in 1931 and survived a childhood with a conman father and a mother who abandoned him when he was five years old. He came of age as the cold war began. Treachery and betrayal was his childhood and proved – to paraphrase Graham Greene – to be the bank balance of his writing life. During his time with the secret services, it was through writing reports – and getting feedback from senior officers – that he learned to write. His skill was derived from the personal, his upbringing and his craft.
Five Pointers for Writing a Genius (Even If You Aren’t One)
crimereads.com – Saturday September 13, 2025
"[H]ow do I write a genius level character and, more specifically, a character who is much smarter than I am?"
As a fan of the mystery genre, I grew up reading about these intellectual titans. Sherlock Holmes and his quickfire deductions, Hercule Poirot’s touting of his little grey cells.
I adored reading about these genius detectives, but I never thought too much about the process of creating them.
Yet, when I wrote my story, The Return of Moriarty, I finally had to contend with the strange question; how do I write a genius level character and, more specifically, a character who is much smarter than I am?
It seems almost paradoxical. If I can create characters who exceed my own intelligence, can I go to a party and act wittier than I am? It seems bizarre to tackle a character with faculties you don’t yourself possess and, after finishing the novel, I was surprised to find the same question being asked by aspiring writers across the community.
And yet, my journey to answer this question was fascinating, and the solutions I discovered so chock full of literary theatrics, that I thought it only right to put all my best answers in one place; a set of five tips and tricks for writing a genius, even if you aren’t one.
Charlotte Ingham on writing a slow burn romance
culturefly.co.uk – Wednesday September 10, 2025
The only thing I love more than reading a slow burn romance—one where I have to fling the book on the bed simply to scream, “Why is nobody kissing?”—is getting to write one instead. For me, the best tension comes from the almostmoments. Where the chemistry is so off-the-charts that you’re convinced something is finally, finally, about to happen, only for fate to intervene (or for the characters to be too completely, hopelessly, oblivious) and you’re left kicking your feet in simultaneous glee and frustration.
A Match Made in Hell allowed me to take this to another level, thanks to the lust trial. In order to escape Hell, Willow must complete seven tasks by resisting the seven deadly sins, but it’s particularly tricky when the person tempting her to give in to lust is the one person she’d love to give in to.
But one almost moment isn’t enough. For a slow burn to truly work, it has to be built up from lots of little almosts. As excited as I was to write that scene, I first had to lay the groundwork for that will-they-won’t-they moment, using both the earlier sin trials, along with the time they spend together in between, to allow their budding friendship to build into something more.
What Nobody Tells You About Rejections By Book Editors
medium.com – Wednesday August 27, 2025
Not long after I moved from the New York area to Alabama, I went to a bookstore event where I met a local writer who recently had failed to sell his first novel. He thought he knew why no publisher had bought it.
“New York editors don’t like books about the South,” he said.
I was incredulous, and not just because I’d met a lot of those editors while covering the publishing industry as a journalist.
Editors “don’t like books about the South”? Was the writer talking about the region that had produced William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Alice Walker?
Our conversation was taking place two hours south of Monroeville, Alabama, where Harper Lee and Truman Capote grew up. A famous resident of our town was Winston Groom, the author of Forrest Gump, a novel the bookstore displayed steps from where we stood. About 30 minutes away, the faculty of the University of South Alabama included the novelist Jesmyn Ward, who had won a National Book Award for her Salvage the Bones and would soon earn her second, making her the only woman and only black author to win that prize twice.
To my mind, all of that didn’t prove that “New York editors don’t like books about the South.” It proved — if anything — the opposite.
An Exclusive Look Inside the Essential Literary Magazine Granta
earlybirdbooks.com – Monday August 25, 2025
Granta magazine was founded in 1889 as The Granta, a student literary journal at Cambridge University. It published works by such great authors as A.A. Milne, Michael Frayn, Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
In 1979, the magazine switched from being a student publication to the literary quarterly that it is today. Each issue includes the best authors discussing one aspect of daily life. Ten years later, Granta Books was founded as an imprint devoted to the same ideals as the original magazine: to publish, in the words of founder Bill Buford, “only writing we care passionately about.”
Granta has remained devoted to promoting new and fresh names in literature and to only publishing the highest quality writing. For an intimate, small press, Granta has an outsized number of prize winners, including 31 Nobel Prize laureates, and a huge cultural impact on the literary scene.
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