News & Blog by Michael White
Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
Every so often I hear an astonishing story to illustrate the fact that creative artists and ‘the suits’ may as well be different species. The other day, I happened to catch a radio programme about INXS’s 1987 album Kick. Apparently, after the band had finished recording, their manager played the tapes to the group’s US record label, Atlantic, and the execs were so underwhelmed, they offered the band...
Throughout my entire adult life I’ve been a rationalist. I’m right there in the atheist, mechanistic, logical positivist, humanist camp. But just recently, I’ve begun to wonder whether this viewpoint is actually correct. Not that I’ve suddenly become a Green, Christian, Marxist, Vegetarian, Buddhist, you understand. It’s just that I’ve begun to wonder how much the role of luck plays in everything...
I’m sometimes asked at literary festivals and in interviews on TV and radio why I changed tracks from writing non-fiction to fiction. Well, the simplest answer is that I actually always wanted to be a novelist, and I believed that by breaking into non-fiction as a science writer I could, one day, move sideways into fiction. The truth of the matter however is that publishers are very suspicious...
One of the great thrills of being a writer is receiving finished copies of your latest book. The buzz I get from this never diminishes, even after writing thirty-five books. Aligned with this is the pleasure of receiving translated editions. My record for having one of my books published in foreign languages stands at thirty-three, for my first novel, Equinox, and on my shelves I have some three hundred...
My brother once told me that he sometimes imagines me working on a book and pictures me putting on a smoking jacket and cravat before spilling a few finely tuned words onto the page each day. Sounds like fun. Machiavelli used to dress up in his finery to write, but that was after he had been exiled from the Medici court and was writing about the days when, as an ambassador, he really did dress up...
This article is part of a series. Read the previous article here > The world is about to experience a truly cataclysmic event - bigger than Diana, Jacko or the Titanic. Dan Brown’s new book is due to hit the world’s bookshops. I have a lot of time for Dan Brown. I thought THE DA VINCI CODE was a ripping read, well-crafted and entertaining - none of which can be said for the...
This article is part of a series. Read the previous article here > By its very nature, writing is a solitary profession. You have to be pretty comfortable with your own company to sit alone in a room with a computer day after day. That’s why authors Google themselves. There’s a British music magazine I subscribe to called Q. In almost every issue they tease a celebrity for...
This article is part of a series. Read the previous article here > Like all writers, I have a system for creating my books. First of course comes the idea. Then I start to think about location and characters. I then fill notebooks describing the lives of my characters. This is so I can get to know them. Only about 5% of this stuff reaches the pages of the finished book. Next, I write and...
This article is part of a series. Read the previous article here > I hate computers. But, I also love computers. It’s a very post-modern relationship. So, first: Why do I hate them? 1. They cost a fortune, but usually don’t last more than three years. 2. They have built-in redundancy and they are proud of it, even smug about it. If you don’t keep refuelling...
A question I get asked all the time is: ‘How on earth do you have the discipline to write?’ I always answer the same way: ‘You need far more discipline to do your job than I do mine.’ The fact is, most people hate their jobs. They do them because they have to. Writers are part of the very small group of people who do what they do because they love it (and, of course,...
