Angela Young

LATEST ARTICLES ( 72 )

• Make Good Art, a Resolution for the New Year

  

  In January 2016, I quoted Neil Gaiman’s wonderful advice which is, essentially, whatever you’re doing, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Make New Mistakes.... Read more

  Posted on 14 January 2019 BOOKS

• Jericho Writers’ Self-Editing Your Novel Course, and the Wonders of Atlas...

  

  I’m in the final week of Jericho Writers’ Self-Editing your novel course run by Debi Alper and Emma Darwin and all I can say is if you’ve written a first (or... Read more

  Posted on 14 December 2018 BOOKS

• How Doctors Use Poetry, and a Blue-green Stone

  

  Recently I spent a night in hospital and the thing that struck me about the nursing staff, as I watched them admit new patients to the ward, was their infinite... Read more

  Posted on 14 November 2018 BOOKS

• Happiness & Rights Balanced by Meaning & Responsibility; and William Golding on...

  

  Jordan Peterson, author of 12 Rules for Life: an antidote to chaos said, in an interview with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Radio 4 recently (these words come from th... Read more

  Posted on 14 October 2018 BOOKS

• Creativity and Patience; and Walks with Mental Health Mates

  

  Being an artist means … ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms … summer [will] come. But it comes only to the... Read more

  Posted on 14 September 2018 BOOKS

• Literary Villains, Literary Summer Reads and an Idyllic Treehouse in East...

  

  Forty of the Best Villains in Literature appear in this article at The Literary Hub (where you’ll find many literary goodies). Read more

  Posted on 14 August 2018 BOOKS

• Women Writers, and Children; and Retro Peepers

  

  I’ve never had children and the reason (apart from meeting the man whose children I’d love to have had well beyond my fertile years) is that I was always... Read more

  Posted on 14 July 2018 BOOKS

• John Clare, Gardener and Writer; and Bloom & Wild

  

  In this strange spring and early summer of ours, where March’s snow, frost and ice stopped all plant growth and May’s hot days and tropical rainstorms encourage... Read more

  Posted on 14 June 2018 BOOKS

• Writers on Writing, and an Exquisitely Beautiful Tea

  

  When our writers’ group met this week one of our number described how the rise of the ‘plotting and typing’ approach to writing was driving her demented. Read more

  Posted on 14 May 2018 BOOKS

• RMS Titanic: on This Day 106 Years Ago … & Samira Addo, Portrait Artist of the...

  

  It’s 106 years ago today that the ‘unsinkable’ passenger liner, RMS Titanic, hit an iceberg and sank in just two hours and forty minutes. Read more

  Posted on 14 April 2018 BOOKS

• Social Media and the Writer; Modigliani and Akhmatova

  

  It’s wise for writers to have a social media presence these days. Publishers don’t exactly insist on it, but they like writers who have significant followings. Read more

  Posted on 14 March 2018 BOOKS

• Teaching Kids to Fall in Love with Science (a Different Kind of Love for...

  

  I was noodling around on the internet wondering what I was going to post about this month when I discovered Arvind Gupta. He won the Padma Shree on 26 January... Read more

  Posted on 14 February 2018 BOOKS

• A New Writing Resolution; and a New (to Me) Altruistic Way of Advertising

  

  I’ve made a new writing resolution: I will not allow the confusing complexity, the sheer size and the constantly changing, shifting nature of a novel’s first... Read more

  Posted on 14 January 2018 BOOKS

• Our Christmas Tree: a Work in Progress … and The Connection at St Martin’s

  

  My other half put our Christmas tree together yesterday (it has hundreds of branches, all with different colour codes, all with their own little slots in its... Read more

  Posted on 14 December 2017 BOOKS

• Atul Gawande and Being Mortal; and a Remembrance Poppy Badge

  

  Atul Gawande‘s Being Mortal – which I wrote about here in the context of his 2014 Reith Lectures – is extraordinary for its courageous and honest confrontation... Read more

  Posted on 14 November 2017 BOOKS

• Chaos & Creativity; and Beautiful Bookshops

  

  I dislike hate chaos. Very much. Who doesn’t? But it’s an essential state if you want to write fiction. Messiness of the mind is the sine qua non for writers. Read more

  Posted on 14 October 2017 BOOKS

• Rejection is a Rite of Passage for Writers, and the Raw Chocolate Company

  

  One of the things that a writer takes a while truly to believe (it’s taken me a while) is that rejection is part of the process: it’s necessary, inevitable and... Read more

  Posted on 14 September 2017 BOOKS

• A Very Small Trawl Through a Few Less Well-known News Sites

  

  This month – perhaps because it’s the silly season when news tends towards the frivolous because the House of Commons is in recess and us ordinary folk go on... Read more

  Posted on 14 August 2017 BOOKS

• Blurt It Out and Instead of a Card

  

  I’m submitting the manuscript of my third novel to literary agents. It’s a process that requires much patience, a certain amount of luck and, most importantly,... Read more

  Posted on 14 July 2017 BOOKS

• Words on Writing, and Pass on a Poem

  

  There are hundreds of thousands of words written about writing fiction: how to write, why we write, what to do when we can’t write and on and on so that,... Read more

  Posted on 14 June 2017 BOOKS