Are all writers good at spelling?

Some favourite bits on language from my book, plus news of a London event.

By upgrading to a paid subscription you can get these newsletters in a podcast form, read by ME (not the robots). Listen here or on your podcast app.

Londoners, on 24th April I’m doing an event at the great independent bookshop Everybody Reads, on the border of Chiswick and Hammersmith. It’s with Nick Bowling, also known as Nick Newman, author of the novel The Garden, a thriller that manages to be eco-dystopian, scary, touching and tender all in one. He is also a very funny man, so you can expect an entertaining chat about the writing process.

Tickets are £5, which you can then claim against the cost of my or Nick’s book on the night, if you want to. Refreshments, excitingly, are included. Details here.

---

Chapter Six of my book is called ‘What can language do?’. Weirdly, considering that it’s the medium that writers have to work with, language is not something I’ve discussed much with authors on the In Writing podcast. In fact a lot of the stuff produced by people like me, in what I suppose is the world of creative-writing self-help, focuses more on the ‘creative’ part than the ‘writing’ part. It’s easy to overlook the actual words, even though getting them right is half the job.

I was brought up, as I explain in the book, by a writer dad who takes language very seriously – and I’m like that too. I can be pedantic about grammar and punctuation, which I’m sure has annoyed a few people I’ve worked with, and I find that this small work comes a lot more naturally to me than the big work, as I mentioned last time. It was nice to be able to lean unapologetically into that nerdy side of myself while I wrote this chapter.

I read Mary Norris’s Between You & Me and learnt a thing or two about commas (she’s a former copy editor of The New Yorker), and then I requested an interview with her. The page below is from the conversation we had, and it’s the end of the chapter. She’s talking about why it’s important to pay close attention to spelling, word choice, semi-colons and so on. Then she goes on to say something quite beautiful and unexpected: