Terry Pratchett mounts a faultless defence of what he calls a ‘ghettoised’ genre: The first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning. They did not complain about the difficulties of the male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some Midwestern college cam

In Stet Diana Athill describes the literary brainwashing that led men to be taken more seriously: ‘to a large extent I had been shaped by my background to please men … you actually saw yourself as men saw you, so you knew what would happen if you became assertive and behaved in a way which men thought tiresome and ridiculous. Grotesquely, you would

1960s and 1970s cover interpretations of Jane Austen’s novels are an unfettered joy, with jackets featuring Biba-clad heroines complete with heavy eyeliner and flowing locks; a psychedelic Elizabeth Bennet; Persuasion’s Captain Wentworth as a sort of hipster-bearded Captain Birds Eye; beautifully manicured, red-nailed hands; and lines such as ‘A fr

Orwell’s greatest piece of advice for a copywriter in ‘Politics and the English Language’ is to let your idea choose the words; to ‘get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning.’ So to avoid the dreaded lack of clarity, think of som

As Jonathan Gottschall says in The Storytelling Animal, ‘We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.’

‘The le Carré covers were a conscious attempt to revive the copy style of the type-only Gollancz covers from the early 1960s, when book covers were used as marketing vehicles, often written directly in the voice of the publisher. The language is high-flown but has an appealing authenticity to it – you feel the enthusiasm of the publisher for the wo

‘There had been many years of his life when he was a tall, good-looking man, no gut, strolling about the campus at Harvard, and people did look at him then, for all those years, he would see students glance at him with deference, and also women, they looked at him.’

I try to follow the ‘minimal adjectives’ advice as much as I can when writing blurbs. When I recently had to introduce the heroine of a coming-of-age novel called The Island, I decided it would be better to say she had been thrown out of a convent for kicking the prioress, rather than describing her as ‘spirited’ or ‘rebellious’.

Every film, TV series or book can be reduced to a pitch. If you recall, the novelist Elizabeth Buchan memorably called it the ‘backbone’. It forces us to think about what really matters, the kernel of a plot or idea, and the key to this should be opposition. What’s that snap of tension; that point of conflict; that frisson of the unexpected? Which