Blog
In 2016, TLC’s 20th anniversary year, we launched a blog as a space for thoughtful, non-promotional pieces on all things writing, editing and publishing. If you’d like to pitch a piece, please email Aki Schilz on .
We’d love to hear from you, and please feel free to comment on the blogs here.
Fiction vs Non-Fiction Pitches... What's the Difference?
July 02, 2021 | Blog
One of the things we most regularly get asked at TLC is, ‘What is the difference between a fiction pitch and a non-fiction pitch, when I’m sending my work to an agent or publisher?’
There are increasingly lots of creative ways to get your book into the hands of readers,
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Twenty Years a TLC Reader
June 01, 2021 | Blog
It was the summer of 2001. I’d recently finished working as a writer at Emmerdale. For several years I’d been teaching creative writing in Adult Ed, and had picked up some work as a correspondence tutor for the Open College of the Arts at Barnsley. My course leader there, Sara Maitland,
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Turning Down a Publishing Contract to Become an Indie Entrepreneur
May 01, 2021 | Blog | 2 comments
How I Learned What Made Me Tick as a Writer
I once started Haruki Murakami’s autobiography. His career as a writer started with a literary competition in Tokyo. He chiselled away at his first book every night for a month or three, sent off the manuscript and,
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TLC Online Writers' Day Write-Up 2021
April 01, 2021 | Blog
This month, we’re pleased to feature a write-up of our recent Online Writers’ Day, from friend of TLC Ciara Holly. We were grateful to Ciara for stepping in as a ‘roving reporter’ on the day and capturing the key parts of the day, so that those of you who may not have been able to attend can catch up!
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Where Words Come From
March 01, 2021 | Blog
This month’s TLC Blog is from writer, Free Read receipient, and soon-to-be published author Jon Ransom. An early draft of his forthcoming novel ‘The Whale Tattoo’ (Muswell Press, Spring 2022) first appeared in the TLC/AM Heath Free Reads Anthology in 2019. This is his first piece of non-fiction,
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What Winning TLC Pen Factor Meant to Me
February 01, 2021 | Blog
So, this is all mine? I thought, scanning my list of prizes. I had just won TLC’s Pen Factor Competition 2019. In addition to winning a full manuscript assessment and two 1:1s with experts in the publishing industry, I’d won a one-year membership to a number of valuable organisations,
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My Mentoring Journey with TLC
January 04, 2021 | Blog
A wonderful blog to kick off 2021, from TLC Mentee, and NHS worker Rose McGinty. Rose wrote this blog at the end of last year, after her experience working with TLC Mentor and Associate Editor, Anna South.
When I signed up to the TLC mentoring programme in November 2019 I’d spent two years struggling with that notorious tricky second novel and was at the point of ditching it,
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Necessary complications and genre
December 01, 2020 | Blog
As a writer with an attention span smaller than a fruit fly’s (despite the recent invidious comparisons with Donald Trump) I need strong stuff to keep me going – cups of fair-trade Rwandan coffee, plus a big bowl of fun-size confectionary to boost the sugar levels. However, the strongest incentive to keep writing is what Stephen King calls the “gotta”: the propulsive readable quality of genre fiction which is driven by a similarly propulsive urge to write and carry a project through.
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Writing 'Wanderers'
Writing my non-fiction book did not come easily. What started it all was reading Robert Macfarlane’s book The Old Ways. I read it in mid-2014, and wrote about it shortly after in my notebook, observing that most of his ‘examples are male’ – and asked the rhetorical question ‘what relationship,
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Putting It Out There
October 01, 2020 | Blog | 2 comments
This month’s TLC Blog comes from poet David Herring, who used TLC as part of an experiment in Patreon poetry earlier this year.
“We recommend a first read-through, then putting the report aside for at least a few days, before coming back to it… [giving] you time to work through the feedback on a subconscious level.”
[Extract from TLC’s ‘Next Steps’ document,
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