This is the stocking-filler for the aspiring writer in your life. A dip-in dip-out collection of tips on writing, reading like a writer, and living a writer’s life.

Editor Huw Lewis-Jones has compiled advice and home truths from 64 creators, among them novelists, children’s authors, poets, biographers, and illustrators. The entries include short lists, plump lists, essays, and artwork.

You must always write under the illusion that what you write is brilliant. And you must always drop that illusion when you edit. - Carston Jensen, p.135

Much of the advice is similar, prompting me to tally up the most frequently cited tips. The winner was no surprise at all: read! Read what you love, read in your genre, read things beyond your comfort zone, read dross, read books you don’t think you’ll like, read poetry. Lucky for me, I’ve got this one covered…

Other popular tips include: finish the damn draft, walk, read your work aloud, use notebooks, get into a writing routine, and - one of my favourites, from travel writer Colin Thubron - ‘incorporate adjectives and adverbs into the verb.’

Among the contributors are Tom Gauld, Lev Grossman, Sarah Moss, Cressida Cowell, Matt Haig, Joanne Harris, and Raynor Winn - a mix of funny and serious, new and seasoned. I’ve read the whole thing twice and have novelist David Mitchell to thank for helping me through a dark day:

It’s a process, not a disaster, to realise, fifty or a hundred pages in, that you’ve taken a wrong turn nd need to begin again. p.125

Love the cover illustration by Bill Bragg. Those blues!

Swallowed by a Whale was published by British Library, 2020.