John Baker’s Blog

I was at the National Railway Museum yesterday to formally launch the opening of the York Literature Festival.
The festival runs from the 1st to the 15th March. Although not on the scale of Cheltenham or Edinburgh, there is a varied programme on offer, mainly involving local writers and readers, of whom there are many. Among [...]

A publisher’s reader examines her profession in The Guardian.
The reader’s report struggles to swim against this current but also has to take it into account. It’s a bit like being an admissions officer at the world’s most selective institution: even the Nobel prize for literature is no guarantee you’ll get in.
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Mr Eugenides and a whole [...]

A small, closed-to-the-public library at a prison in Münster, in west-central Germany, has received the 30,000 euro national Library of the Year award.
The popularity of the library is reflected in the numbers who visit it. Of around 530 prisoners, about 80 percent use the library. But no one can say what kind of prisoner becomes [...]

How do you weed out characters that aren’t earning their keep?
A character doesn’t earn his or her keep when they do nothing interesting with or in opposition to the leading characters in your narrative. If they are your leading characters you need to stop writing and return to the stage of thinking about your novel. [...]