Word Perfect

JOSEPH O'CONNOR is just the latest author to make Bookworm think that there might be a more effective way of learning how to be a writer than signing up for a creative writing degree.

When he was 16, O'Connor sat down at his typewriter and banged out a story that was perfect from start to finish. Admittedly, it wasn't one of his own, but John McGahern's "Sierra Leone", from his 1979 collection Getting Through.

"I suppose this was comparable to wannabe pop stars throwing shapes and pulling pouts in the bathroom mirror," he writes. "But McGahern was teaching me to read, not to write: to see the presences hidden in the crannies of a text, the realities the words are gesturing towards. Perhaps this is what pulses at the core of the desire to read: the yearning for intense relationship with words we love."

Of course it is. And if you ask Andrew O'Hagan and David Peace how they first got started, you'd find that they too began with copying out other writers' work – in O'Hagan's case Truman Capote, Solzhenitsyn and Burns; in Peace's (he still keeps up the practice) James Ellroy (who himself copied Chandler) and a whole host of others. It might sound obsessive, but unless you're obsessive about your writing you'll never be a writer anyway ...

CLICK TO ACCEPT

AFTER a decade which has seen StAnza grow from a small-scale poetry festival to one that routinely draws both audiences and performers from all parts of the world, its director Brian Johnstone handed over the reins to Eleanor Livingstone on Monday.

Actually, what he handed over was a memory stick with all the St Andrews festival's correspondence on it. And as she's already been its artistic director for the last five years, she probably knew all the details anyway. Looking back, Johnstone said, the thing that most amazed him was that the first two StAnza festivals were organised without using e-mail.

He's right. Imagine going back to organising a book festival where every author (and Johnstone has brought to Stanza poets from over 40 different countries) had to be wooed by letter, and perhaps you have the real reason why they've been mushrooming all over the place over the last ten years (Scotland has now got 40; another seven last year alone). Perhaps it's not just that we've all become alienated and in need of the authenticity of seeing an author in the flesh, as festival organisers so often claim. Maybe it's that e-mail made book festivals so much easier to stage?

BLACK AND WHITE BLUNDER

CRIME writer Reg McKay would have had a laugh at the press release his publishers Black and White sent out with the new paperback of his book McGraw: The Incredible Untold Story of Tam 'The Licensee' McGraw, who was one of Glasgow's most feared villains before his death in 2007. In it, they announced that Reg would be available for interviews about the book. Sadly, he won't: he died last October.