'Top five: Literary Pilots' for We Love This Book
‘For me, as a kid, it was never about the airplanes or the rockets. What captured my imagination were the men, not the machines.’
Benjamin Johncock selects his Top Five: Literary Pilots in a feature for We Love This Book.
Article for Bookanista: 'On Brevity'
1. Leave out as much as you can.
2. Simple words, in the right order, will surprise you with their power.
3. Don’t describe everything. We all know what stuff looks like. A forest is a forest; a table is a table – shut the hell up and get on with it.
Just a few of Benjamin Johncock’s top tips for drafting a novel, over on Bookanista. For more great advice on brevity in writing read the full article here.
Article for Writers & Artists
‘Everyone is different. What works for one writer might not work for another. The trick is to cherry-pick the advice, the techniques, the stuff that works for you. Put it in a bag that you keep under your desk.’
Benjamin Johncock discusses his writing process in this new article for Writers & Artists.
Benjamin Johncock
Benjamin Johncock is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and journalist. He was born in Canterbury in 1978 and studied ancient history and archaeology at the University of Birmingham. His debut novel, The Last Pilot, was published in the U.S. (Picador) and U.K. (Myriad) in 2015 to widespread critical acclaim. It won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, was shortlisted for the East Anglian Book of the Year, selected for Brave New Reads, and was one of The Observer’s Hidden Gems of 2016. His award-winning short stories have been published by The Fiction Desk, The Junket, Comma Press and Storgy. His journalism has appeared in the Guardian, The Spectator, and many others, and he has worked as an editor and copywriter. He’s on the editorial board of The Letters Page, a literary journal edited by Jon McGregor at the University of Nottingham, and for two years was a mentor for the National Centre for Writing’s Escalator writing programme. He is also a recipient of two Arts Council England grants. He lives in Norwich with his wife, his daughter, and his son.