Literary Birthday – 22 October – A.L. Kennedy

Happy Birthday, A.L. Kennedy, born 22 October 1965.

Five Quotes

What I would say to a young person trying to become a writer is ‘Don’t.’ It won’t make any difference because they’ll do it anyway, but they really shouldn’t.
When you write, you’re trying to make something as beautiful as possible for someone you’ll never meet.
Writing is very isolating. It takes a lot of time and, after a while, makes you quite unusual – and solitary. It doesn’t fit you very well for being around people.
I don’t think that happiness is fatal. I think you have to write from some kind of joy…
For any book I go through a research process that covers three years, so that I can know the people and have them constructed before I start working with them.

Read: A.L. Kennedy’s 10 Rules for Writing Fiction

A.L. Kennedy (Alison Louise Kennedy) is a Scottish writer of six novels, five story collections, two books of non-fiction, and a book called On Writing. She has won a host of other awards, including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day.

Source for image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A._L._Kennedy_(3).jpg Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson