This week I have been considering the nature of a sentimental romantic – and wondering whether I qualify.
Let me put this in context. On Thursday a friend phoned me to say that he had just read a story which he had much enjoyed and thought very romantic. He had told the writer – whom he knew – of this response.
The writer said he was “intrigued”. My friend – let us call him Robert – explained his reasons. Eventually the writer decided that he was OK with the romantic label “as long as he didn’t mean sentimental.” Continue reading
Ever since I blogged about what a reader may t
I went from bed to fireside and back again, accompanied by regularly refreshed hot water bottles and The Companion Cat.
This isn’t the first time that the Libertà Hive has pondered the advice to writers to “murder your darlings.”
Well, Stephen King does a pretty good job of it in his 
I don’t know if I’m a particularly picky reader, but I do like a novel to have some sort of resolution. It doesn’t have to be a traditional happy ending – though, as a writer, I always end up with my characters looking forward hopefully. But that’s my quirk.
In a 
It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he of Ancient Mariner fame, who coined the phrase “suspension of disbelief” in 1817 in his Biographia Literaria or biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions. He did so referring to his contribution, more than twenty years earlier, to the Lyrical Ballads. Published in 1798, these are generally taken to mark the start of the romantic movement in English literature. William Wordsworth wrote most of them, of course.
