- It took widely praised Serbian author Vesna Goldsworthy thirty years to write creatively in English.
- Goldsworthy’s favourite game as a child was a made-up game called Office, a game of filling in forms in triplicate.
- Goldsworthy’s favourite books as a child were Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Little Prince, not The Great Gatsby, on which her first novel Gorsky was based.
- Suffering from life-threatening cancer, Goldsworthy wrote Chernobyl Strawberries, a memoir for her son. It’s about growing up in the former Yugoslavia and moving to England.
- Goldsworthy tells her creative writing students who are blocked to buy a notebook – somehow the whole thing with pen works differently.
- For her novel, Gorsky, Vesna wrote 45,000 words in three weeks. This is possible by getting the rest of your family to leave the house for three weeks
- Evelyn Waugh’s surname means ox in Serbian.
- Copywriter Simon Prichard shows what business writers can learn from country music. Country songs are simple, tell a decent story and make it believable, evocative, memorable and surprising.
- Start writing with a punch. Be memorable. Learn from the best titles of Country & Western songs like, ‘You’re the reason our kids are ugly’, ‘My wife ran off with my best friend and I sure do miss him’ and ‘Did I shave my legs for this?’
- What happens when you play country music backwards? You get your wife, kids, dog and truck back.
- As Tammy Wynette once sung, “Sometimes it’s hard to be a writer…. But stand by your words.”
- Learn from oral historians. The best stories have details.
- Oral history is a conversation, it’s about the voice, it’s about the space in between the words. Not everyone is going to write a book,” explains Alan Dein, “but sometimes it’s about what is inside that can brought out.”
- The oldest reading group in England dates back to 1764 in Cumbria.
- Author, Victoria Hislop wanted to be a tennis player and used to work at Wolff Olins.
- Hislop takes two years to research her books, then she works out the deadline and the word count and divides it by days, normally writing around 1000-2000 words a day in the same seat in the same library.
- Hislop’s advice on writing well on place. Visit and take lots of photos, including photos of people’s faces. Stick them on your wall as you write.
- Tom Phillips creates poems by blocking out words in other people’s books. Read A Humument. Try it for yourself.
- Businesses with a clear purpose make better decisions in times of crisis and when planning for the future.
- Metro Bank is just brilliant. Its purpose is for people to love their bank and last year it spent just £60k on advertising. Dogs are allowed in its banks and its branches are open 7 days a week. Maybe not brilliant for advertising agencies.
- Increasingly people don’t just buy what you do; but why you do it. The estimated cost to VW thanks to “Dieselgate” is $43 billion.
- If we’d built an ark and our name was Noah BUT we could only let in animals with good names, bumblebees and hippopotamuses would be absolutely fine. Lions would not be.
- Dostoyevsky was a huge gambler. He worked so close to the deadline he had to hire a typist to type for him.
- For lessons in how to be your authentic self on social media, take a look at Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood. They’re genuine, they have opinions, they’re consistent and they don’t sell to us all the time.
- Hiraeth is the Welsh noun for homesickness for a home you cannot return to or one that never was.
- Meraki is the Greek verb to do something with soul: to put something of yourself into your work.
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By Laura Hunter, Elen Lewis, Robert Preece and Elena Bowes.