Colm Tóibín explores the art of short story writing
spectator.com – Sunday April 26, 2026
When I was 20 and tentatively trying to write, every single person I knew read Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites (1975). It not only gave the short story a good name, but it also gave writing a good name. It was like a punk moment converted into fiction. People used the word “macabre,” but there was a sort of excitement about the characters, the strangeness of the stories, the shortness of some of the stories and just how much contemporary urban life was in them.
Often people suggest I investigate a writer. I was in Toronto about 20 years ago when someone told me about the extraordinary Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod. He had written two books of short stories which were republished in 2000 in one volume called Island: The Collected Stories. The 16 short stories are exceptional in the way they are constructed. They deal with the very fierce, rugged landscape of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. A lot of people living in very isolated ways, where the possibility of love or community is narrowed. It’s almost like having a book of poetry that you can keep to hand and reread.
The Rise and Fall and Rise of American Publishing
scheerpost.com – Saturday April 25, 2026
In January, I wrote for the Winter 2026 issue of LIBERTIES quarterly journal a lengthy consideration of the state of American publishing. LIBERTIES was founded five years ago by Leon Wieseltier, the former longtime literary editor of The New Republic, and my essay is reprinted by ScheerPost with permission. You can access LIBERTIES website at: https://libertiesjournal.com
I’ve been invited by Robert Scheer to write a monthly column. This inaugural essay will give you a sense of my commitment to the world of books and publishing and, more broadly, to the notion that ideas matter. I’m a former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review and have headed up several publishing companies, both in New York at Hill & Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and at Times Books, a onetime imprint of Random House, and in California where I am currently and for the past ten years the publisher of Heyday, a nonprofit independent press founded more than fifty years ago in Berkeley. I’m the author of Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays.
As for this essay, I can sum up its essence in a sentence: I think we’ve entered a golden age of independent book publishing, more diverse and robust against all expectation that the Goliaths of mainstream publishing would snuff out the small fry.
Philip Pullman: The thing every writer needs to overcome
bigthink.com – Wednesday April 22, 2026
Sometimes, great writing makes me angry.
It’s nothing to do with the ideas inside, of course. Poets and bestselling authors are good at their game. What bothers me is when those ideas are expressed with such perfect beauty that I cannot hope to match them.
There might be a degree of professional pride to this. When I gawp at an old poet like T.S. Eliot or a modern writer like Samantha Harvey, I’m just jealous. Yes, they might be better trained than I am. Yes, they likely took more time on their writing than I did on this article. But, in the main, I’m left bitterly squinting at how someone can be so damn good.
There’s more to it, though. It’s often said that the joy of great literature lies in poets and writers expressing feelings and thoughts in ways we couldn’t imagine. They name emotions we didn’t know we felt. They dig up what was deeply buried away. But this joy is a coin with two sides.
I would like to invent a word: Psychoklepsis. Psychoklepsis — literally “soul-theft” — is when someone expresses your inner life better than you ever could, and you resent it. It’s when you hear a song, read a poem, or watch a movie, and you say, “I can’t express myself better than this stranger expresses me.” Psychoklepsis feels like some magic of the page ripped open your soul and helped itself to your feelings. Ridiculous, of course, but humans can be ridiculous.
Psychoklepsis is something that many writers and artists have to deal with. Left unchecked, it curdles into paralysis — the feeling that everything worth saying has already been said, and said better. But in this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, we explore a way out.
5 Freelance Writing Side Hustles For People Who Love To Write
forbes.com – Monday April 20, 2026
Side hustles are popular amongst working Americans. SurveyMonkey found that 37% of workers have a side hustle. They’re a great way to earn extra income, especially as 43% of Americans did not experience a pay rise in the past year, and living costs continue to bite.
If you’re someone who considers themselves a bit of a wordsmith, you should explore a writing-based side hustle to supplement your income. While AI has lowered the barrier to entry for written content, the myriad of AI-generated “slop” on the internet has led to increased demand for creative, strategic, and nuanced human writers and communications professionals. Tech Radar reports that communications jobs have surged by 25.2%.
Here are several side hustles that leverage your writing expertise and can be turned into a profitable freelance writing business.
Fantasy becomes reality for next-gen speculative fiction authors riding self-publishing boom
abc.net.au – Sunday April 19, 2026
Make-believe is having a moment.
At Clunes Booktown this year, a literary festival in regional Victoria, between half and two-thirds of the authors peddling their wares were writers of so-called "speculative fiction".
That term is a somewhat clumsy umbrella term that covers everything from fantasy, science fiction, and horror, to "romantasy", alternate histories, and stories set in dystopian futures.
Australian book sales also point to a boom in these genres and sub-genres.
According to Nielson Bookdata, science fiction and fantasy sales have more than doubled between 2019 and 2023 to more than $50 million annually.
Screenplays Aren't Novels, So Stop Writing Them Like They Are
nofilmschool.com – Wednesday April 15, 2026
It is totally possible to move between writing screenplays and writing books, and many, many writers have done so. But to get good at it, you need to realize that the styles of writing are completely different, with different audiences and ultimately different uses.
If you've been a prose writer your whole life, don’t despair, and don't throw out everything you know. Your sense of rhythm and your ear for language will help you. But it serves you differently in film.
If you start your screenplay like you start your novel, there’s a chance no one will go past the first 10 pages. It applies both ways, too—if you try to write a book like a screenplay, the typical reader will be confused and wonder where all the internal stuff went.
Avery Dohrmann's recent video dives into the topic. He talks about these writing types being two entirely different sports, although they both use the same “ball.” Watch the full thing here.
Quick, Playful Writing Exercises for When You’re Feeling Stuck
electricliterature.com – Tuesday April 14, 2026
A student recently asked, looking at the bookshelf in my office, “How did all these people get from here to there? From words on a screen to bound on the shelf?” I started to give her practical advice about staying in the chair and reading the right novels, but that is only a small part of how a piece of art grows up.
We are not ever just writers—we are also sons and daughters of good parents and disappointing parents and we are partners who need to grab a quart of milk on the way home and parents who crawl into bed with the little ones late at night to admire them when they are still, even though we know we don’t have any tiredness to spare. We are students and teachers. We are readers, taking in the universes created by other minds. Our stories and poems and essays are written in and among and because of these moments. A scene is not only a moment on the page that takes place in space and time—the writing of that scene takes place in space and time too. I remember working on an especially dark section of my first novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, in which the character based on my great-grandmother escapes pogroms by fleeing with her children into the Russian wilderness where she survives on tree bark, and it so happened that this writing day took place beside a swimming pool at a Southern California hotel where my father-in-law was staying while he visited us. I spent the morning in the shade surrounded by Disneyland-bound families and I wrote about starvation. You can’t see that in the pages, but the energy of that good, easy day provided an opposite to the story from the past and its fictional counterpart. That strange pairing was part of how I powered the writing.
We do not write outside of our lives or in spite of them, but because of them. Writers make a choice to carve out significant time—some squeeze writing in while a baby sleeps on their chest or during the lunch hour. Some dictate a story while driving to work. The walls of stuck-ness are easily built. Time is always short; fear is a capable bricklayer; self-doubt and envy can construct a windowless room in seconds. While I love encouragement and good cheer (can you see me waving my pom-poms? I am!), those are not enough to free us. What I believe in, what has worked for me over and over, is a repertoire of small, playful, and unintimidating experiments. Lots of them. A small choice is huge. So often you need a little light, some air, and a handle turns in your hand, you peek through to the next thing, and you’re back, you’re in, you’re running.
Too hot to handle? Why it’s time for straight male authors to rediscover sex
theguardian.com – Sunday April 12, 2026
It’s a high-wire act and the risk of an embarrassing failure can weigh heavily – but that’s no reason to avoid writing about sex, argues Black Bag author Luke Kennard
Are straight male writers scared of writing about sex? If you read modern fiction it’s hard to conclude otherwise. Maybe we’re worried that the very presence of a sex scene in our book would feel somehow exploitative or gratuitous. Or maybe we feel our gender has simply said enough on the subject so we should shut up.
Women writing about straight relationships don’t seem as nervous. In fact, sex is often a central element of narrative, and of nuanced portrayals of masculinity; from the slow-burn tenderness and awkwardness of intimacy in Sally Rooney’s work, to the surreal celebrations of and lamentations for the erotic in Diane Williams’s extraordinary short stories.
The Bad Sex in Fiction award wrapped up in 2019. It is not missed – for me, its offence was that it conflated comically bad writing about sex with great writing about sex that happened to be bad. Still, the funniest and most excruciating winners were straight men trying and failing to write sincerely and exuberantly about sex, and landing somewhere between the ludicrously metaphorical and the shoddily pornographic or exoticising. Past winners have included James Frey (“Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming exploding white God I cum inside her …”) and Didier Decoin (“Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono …”).
Indie authors are redefining the publishing world
dailyuw.com – Saturday April 11, 2026
Throughout writing this series, I’ve realized that one of the biggest myths about the publishing industry is that there is a single “right” way to publish a book. As nice as that idea may be, there is no golden standard or easy-to-follow tutorial. Every author needs to choose the path best for them.
One of the most important decisions an author must make is whether or not they choose to traditionally publish their book with the help of a publishing house or to self-publish it.
In recent years, self-publishing (also known as independent or indie publishing) has grown exponentially. According to Bowker, the official ISBN agency for the United States, over 3.5 million books were self-published last year, a 38.7% increase from 2025. In comparison, only 640k books were traditionally published in 2025.
Question and Agent: Amanda Orozco of Transatlantic Agency
debutiful.net – Tuesday April 7, 2026
Welcome to Debutiful’s Agent Week! We gathered some of our favorite literary agents representing the most exciting debut books and asked them questions about what makes them love a submission, their agenting style, and the books they’re working on.
Amanda Orozco has been a literary agent at Transatlantic Agency since 2020, where she is drawn to stories from Asian and Latinx writers. Her clients include Shoshana von Blanckensee, m. mick powell, and Nick Medina. She seeks work where protagonists have a distinct voice and personality, where the plot is clever, quirky, gritty, or twisty.
We dug into why writers should know everything in publishing takes more time than they’d expect, representing both fiction and nonfiction, and her opinion on genre with a capital G.
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