‘I have so many lovely moments when readers have recognised themselves in my personal essays and felt like I was writing about their own lives. It is in these moments that I see the true power of memoir; we are writing our own personal truths and yet these are universal truths.’

‘There is no rule that says “this is the end of draft 1 and the beginning of draft 2”. Your work can and will progress uniquely to you…You can move on whenever you feel like it. Sometimes a fresh start is exactly what a manuscript needs.’

‘Dirt Town started as a short story. I wrote about a group of small-town kids, describing all the different ways they’d made their way home from school on a Friday afternoon. After I’d written that, it occurred to me that there needed to be a reason for them to be talking about that day, in particular.’

‘Having a background in research helps me apply methods for gathering and assessing information necessary to ground my work and colour my stories with fascinating historical details.’

“Emotional honesty isn’t a tell-it-all confessional honesty. It is to do with acknowledging the complexity of human thoughts, emotions and experiences.” We spoke to Lee Kofman on mastering emotional honesty in writing.

“Books that push the boundaries of what is marketable can succeed precisely because they do so.” We spoke to author, editor and translator Tiffany Tsao on the process of getting published.

Linda Nix has twenty years of experience in the publishing industry, having worked for large and small professional and non-fiction publishers in production, editing, commissioning and marketing roles. Since going freelance in 2010, she has worked with trade publishers and authors on both fiction and non-fiction books. She is currently publisher and editor at Lacuna […]