Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs

From poetry to lengthy prose, creative writing can be a great way to express yourself. Of course, even the best students and writers can use a few tips, a little inspiration and a whole lot of help getting their work out there. These blogs offer all of that and more. From blogs that focus on writers still trying to make it in the publishing world to those providing updates from best selling authors, you’ll find all kinds of information geared towards improving and informing your creative writing.

General

These blogs cover a wide range of issues for students of the written word.

1. Writer Unboxed: Learn both about the creative and business sides of fiction writing from this great blog.
2. Backstory: Ever wonder where writers get their inspiration? You’ll find loads of posts that record just that and you can contribute your own stories as well.
3. Write Anything: Check out this multi-author blog to find writing challenges, inspiration and shared writing.
4. Inkygirl: Daily Diversions for Writers: This blogger not only posts about using the Internet to improve your writing but posts her own comics frequently as well.
5. Women on Writing: Get information on writing geared just towards female writers out there.
6. Cute Writing: Here you’ll find posts on writing, blogging and publishing and many articles focus on ways to make your work more efficient.
7. Write to Done: If you enjoy the blog Zen Habits, you’ll appreciate this blog by the same author. This site focuses on simple, effective ways to write more, better.
8. The Urban Muse: Freelance writer Susan Johnston provides tips and tidbits for other working writers out there.
9. Writing Forward: From grammar tips to ideas for improving your creative writing, check out the helpful posts on this site.
10. Writer’s Write: This blog is a great place to find information about writers, books and the publishing world.
11. Creative Writing Corner: Connect with your creative side through the posts on this blog.
12. Creative Writing Contests: Want to challenge your creative skills? This blog can direct you to the great number of writing competitions out there.

Aspiring Authors

These bloggers are writing on the ‘net and off, still waiting to get their best work published.

13. The Desperate Writer: This writer and cosmetologist shares her stories on this blog, both personal and creative.
14. Incurable Disease of Writing: Blogger Missy is getting her degree in creative writing and posts about her experiences on this site.
15. Emerging Writers Network: If you’re just getting started in your writing career, check out this site to learn about the ins and outs of writing and about other writers working towards success.
16. Ficticity: Check out this site to find posted stories, writing tips and even a few book reviews.
17. Authors’ Blogs: This isn’t just one blog, but a collection of numerous aspiring writers sites, so you can take your pick of reading material.
18. Plot Monkeys: These four bloggers talk about everything from their everyday lives to the books they love.
19. Maternal Spark: Moms who love to write or create on the side

Published Authors

Get some advice, inspiration and motivation from these authors doing what they love and getting paid for it.

20. The Orwell Diaries: Most writers are familiar with the work of George Orwell. Here you’ll find regular postings from his personal diaries.
21. Tom Conoby’s Writing Blog: This blogger shares his thoughts on books he reads, his own writing and much more.
22. John Baker’s Blog: This working writer shares his passions– reading and writing– on this site.
23. The Man In Black: Young mystery writer Jason Pinter shares his thoughts on just about everything on this blog.
24. Neil Gaiman’s Journal: This well-known writer has published a large number of books, several of which have been made into major motion pictures. Check out his blog for more about what he’s working on right now.
25. Wil Wheaton in Exile: Readers of this blog might recognize his name from his days on Star Trek: The Next Generation but these days this actor spends more of this time writing books and posting on his blog.
26. A Writer’s Life: Love the TV series Monk? Learn more about the writer behind the books the series is based on from this blog.
27. The Paperback Writer: With several published books under her belt, this blogger shares her writing tips as well as information about her personal life.
28. Pocket Full of Words: Novelist Holly Lisle shares her experiences as a writer on her blog.
29. Beyond the Beyond: Bruce Sterling has written numerous science fiction novels and now shares his thoughts on science and technology on his WIRED blog.
30. Contrary Brin: Scientist and author David Brin maintains this site where readers can talk about issues from his books or just about anything else.
31. Scott Berkun: This author teaches creative thinking, writes books and give public talks. Read about his writing adventures and otherwise here.

Improving Your Craft

Get some tips on becoming a better writer from these blogs.

32. Becoming a Writer Seriously: Aspiring writers can find all kinds of helpful advice and guidance on this blog.
33. WordSwimmer: Learn to understand the writing process a little better with a little help from blogger Bruce Black. There are loads of interviews with authors as well as suggestions on improving your writing.
34. Time to Write: Blogger Jurgen Wolff wants to strike a creative spark in writers of all kinds by providing tips and inspiration here.
35. Flogging the Quill: Check out this blog to learn more about the craft of creative storytelling.
36. Six Sentences: What can you write in six sentences? Share your attempt at this writing exercise on this blog.
37. Luc Reid: From tips on finding time to practice writing to information about the publishing industry, you’ll find loads of helpful posts on this blog.
38. The Writing Show: While more podcast than true blog, this site is a good place for writers to get answers to their questions and get help finding inspiration.
39. Men With Pens: Whether you’re a writer freelancing or just writing for fun, you’ll find tips on how to do it better on this blog.
40. Write a Better Novel: Make sure whatever you’re writing will get the attention it deserves when time comes to get it published. This blog provides all kinds of information on creating a better novel, no matter the subject.
41. Write Better: Here you’ll find a wide range of writing tips to get your creative writing in top shape.
42. Clear Writing with Mr. Clarity: Learn to get to the point and write clearly and concisely whether you’re writing a letter at work or working on a book.
43. Mike’s Writing Workshop: This blogger is all about posting things that can help writers get better and get inspired.
44. Kim’s Craft Blog: Learn about writing fiction, memoirs and other creative writing from this writer who teaches courses at The Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

Grammar and Editing

You may have the best ideas but that doesn’t mean much if you can’t write them well. These blogs will help you tune up your writing so it’s publish-worthy.

45. GrammarBlog: Laugh at the grammar and spelling errors of others while getting tips on improving your own skills on this blog.
46. Evil Editor: This editor might be evil, but the tips provided on this blog can really help you refine your stories.
47. Blue Pencil Editing: This blog is both a good resource for working editors and and writers in search of a little guidance.
48. Editing and Proofreading Hints and Tips: Get simple tips on improving your editing process from this blog.
49. Headsup: the blog: Here you’ll find posts about the sometimes frustrating world of editing and learn what not to do.
50. Grammarphobia: This site offers readers the chance to ask their own grammar and language questions and get answers.
51. Apostrophe Abuse: Think you know how to use the apostrophe? This blog might teach you otherwise.
52. Daily Writing Tips: Get some daily advice on how to improve the basics of your writing.
53. ProWriting Tips: This blog is home to numerous grammar and writing tips.
54. The Engine Room: JD, a copy editor, runs this blog all about language use that can help you get a handle on your usage.
55. Cheryl Norman, Grammar Cop: If you’ve got some questions about grammar that need answering, visit this blog.
56. English4Today: Get a handle on the English language through the guidance of blogger Anthony Hughes.

Getting Published

The ultimate goal for many students and professionals working on creative writing is to get work published. This blogs can help you learn about the business, get your work out there, or even publish it yourself.

57. Ask Allison: Ask your questions about breaking publishing and gets answers from this helpful blogger.
58. Guide to Literary Agents: Get some tips on where and how to find a literary agent to represent your work when the time comes.
59. Beacon Literary Services: Emerging writers and those with a little experience under their belts alike can take advantage of the publishing advice offered here.
60. Questions and Quandaries: This Writers Digest blog answers a wide variety of questions about publishing.
61. Writer Beware Blogs: While you may be desperate to get your work out there make sure you protect yourself from scams. The information in this blog can help you stay safe.
62. The Swivet: Colleen Lindsay is a literary agent and you can read her reactions to recent publications and if you meet her requirements even submit your own work.
63. The Rejecter: This blogger isn’t a literary agent but an assistant to one, the person you’ll have to go through to get your work published, and she posts all about her work on this blog.
64. Booksquare: This blog works to dissect the publishing industry so you can learn it inside and out.
65. Pubrants: Literary agent Kristen blogs about everything publishing from queries to working with writers.
66. Nathan Bransford Literary Agent: Want to know more about literary agents and the publishing world? Check out this blog.
67. Practicing Writing: This blog posts plenty on writing advice as well as the latest publishing opportunities.
68. Bob Baker’s Full-Time Author Blog: Thinking of making the leap to being a full-time writer? This blog can be a great resource on publishing your own book to set the stage.
69. Future Perfect Publishing: Explore all the possibilities for publishing that are out there through the help of this blog by Tom Masters.

Genre Focused

These creative writing blogs focus on one particular type of writing, such as mysteries, romance and fantasy.

70. Storytellers Unplugged: This multi-author blog is contributed to by writers, editors and publishers and can give you a great background on writing in a wide range of genres.
71. Gibberish: Science fiction and fantasy writer Jayme Lynn Blaschke posts about his writing and more on this site.
72. SF Signal: From books to movies, you can keep abreast of all the goings on in world of science fiction through this blog.
73. SF and Fantasy Novelists: Here you’ll find loads of information on writers working in the science fiction genre.
74. Reading, Raving and Ranting: If you’re interested in historical fiction you can read about Susan Higginbotham’s experience writing about fourteenth-century England.
75. Myth and Mystery: Novelist and contributor to the New York Times Rick Riordan is a mystery writer and you can read about his latest work on this site.
76. Type M for Murder: Learn a little bit about murder mysteries from this multi-author blog.
77. Crime Fiction Dossier: If crime fiction is your thing, you’ll learn loads from this blog by David Montgomery.
78. Jungle Red: Six mystery writers contribute to this blog that talks about writing, life, love and much more.
79. Romancing the Blog: This blog is home to numerous romance novelists who post on just about everything.

Fiction Writing

Most creative writing falls into the category of fiction, so learn more about writing great novels and stories from these blogs.

80. Advanced Fiction Writing: Written by the "mad professor" of fiction writing, this blog is geared towards inspiring you and getting you writing.
81. Writing Fiction: Here you’ll find a lively discussion about writing and publishing novels and short fiction.
82. Killer Fiction: With five published authors contributing to this blog, you’ll get loads of tips and posts on writing.
83. Ginny’s Fiction Writing Blog: Ginny Wiehardt posts about fiction writing in this About.com blog.
84. Becoming a Fiction Writer: This blogger is following her dream of becoming a fiction writer.
85. Blog Fiction: If you plan on taking to the net with your writing, this blogger can give you all kinds of tips on doing it right.
86. Fiction Writers Review: The writers who run this blog are all about reviewing books but they also discuss what works and what makes truly great fiction.
87. Angela Booth’s Writing Blog: Whether you’re writing fiction or just freelancing, you’ll find helpful writing tips on this blog.
88. Fiction Writing: The Passionate Journey: You won’t become a great writer overnight. This blog can help you start and keep going along your journey to writing success.
89. Fiction Scribe: From grammar errors to book tours, this blog talks about a wide range of issues affecting fiction writers.

Poetry

If verse is more your thing, pay these helpful blogs a visit.

90. Avoiding the Muse: Doctor, blogger and author C. Dale Young maintains this blog as well as teaching an MFA program on writing.
91. Poetry Hut Blog: Keep up to date on the latest happenings in the poetry world with this blog.
92. Poet with a Day Job: Does the title of this blog remind you of yourself? Read this blogger’s posts on writing, reading and everyday life here.
93. 1,000 Black Lines: Posts on this blog are a single line long, some of which record daily events and others that read like lines of poetry.
94. The Best American Poetry: Learn about some of the best poetry out there through this blog.
95. harriet: The Poetry Foundation maintains this blog, which posts about happenings in the poetry world and speaks directly to you, the poet.
96. Poems at the Poetry Showcase: Contribute your poetry to this blog, or read the postings of others.
97. Poets.org: The American Academy of Poets lets you know about great poetry that’s out there through their blog.
98. Poetry and Poets in Rags: This blogger is both a salesman and a poet.
99. Silliman’s Blog: Here you’ll find informative posts on contemporary poets and their work.
100. Poets Who Blog: This blog is a great resource for poets, with writing contests, posts about work and more.

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www.bestcollegesonline.com

Magazine fiction's golden age can never be repeated

Magazine fiction from the 1890s-1950 gave us some of our most-loved characters from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot. With magazines in decline, where to now? The Lady?

The umpteenth return of the Return (of Sherlock Holmes) and the popular success of Avatar are apt reminders that we're a storytelling species with a dominant narrative gene somewhere in our DNA. We simply cannot get enough of What Happened Next?

Avatar, for all its counter-cultural, eco-friendly credentials, is a product of the Hollywood machine, but Holmes and Watson come from somewhere else: the golden age of British magazine fiction that has never been – indeed, could never be – repeated.

1. Sherlock Holmes
2. Production year: 2009
3. Countries: Australia, Rest of the world, UK, USA
4. Cert (UK): 12A
5. Runtime: 128 mins
6. Directors: Guy Ritchie
7. Cast: Bronagh Gallagher, Eddie Marsan, Geraldine James, Hans Matheson, James Fox, Jude Law, Kelly Reilly, Mark Strong, Rachel McAdams, Robert Downey Jr., William Hope
8. More on this film

As Selina Hastings writes in her excellent new biography of Somerset Maugham, another classic storyteller: "In the 1890s the literary market was rapidly expanding, focused on a large, educated middle class, with dozens of new magazines and periodicals launched every year and more than 400 publishing houses in London alone." (The parallels with the 1990s and the new media boom are striking). This was the age that threw up Treasure Island, The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, The Railway Children, the Jeeves and Wooster series and finally, in the 1920s, the queen of crime herself, Agatha Christie, and her Poirot and Miss Marple series.

Every one of these has been rendered cinematically for a mass audience on several occasions. We like stories, and especially when they are accompanied by appealing, strong and identifiable characters who can be interpreted by stars.

The postwar era, roughly 1950 to 2000, was far poorer in this genre, for several reasons. The novel became postmodern; in popular mass-market fiction, perhaps only James Bond qualifies as an heir to Captain Hook, Toad of Toad Hall and Hercule Poirot, and Fleming was always more than a touch Edwardian in his instincts (in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, for instance). Popular magazines were dead or dying; film and TV had not yet begun to fill the gap (as they are beginning to do now; HBO's House, for example, bears a big, and fully acknowledged, debt to Sherlock Holmes). A hundred years or so after Conan Doyle, your ambitious genre writer is as likely to be working in film and TV as fiction or magazines.

In more recent times, the only fictional character to rival Holmes has been Harry Potter, who exhibits several quite distinct Edwardian traits (he's a strange orphan boy who is sent off to come of age in a public school). The more I write this blog, the more I wonder why no one has written on this theme before. Perhaps they have: the interconnections are certainly intriguing, and they all have to do with the growth of the print media at the turn of the 20th century.

The only really distinguished example of a writer consciously creating a strong identifiable character who can inhabit a series of books is John le Carré's George Smiley. No surprise to find BBC Radio 4 serialising all the Smiley books in the coming year. For the rest, the climate is no longer propitious to serial fiction, though I see that the rejuvenated Lady magazine, under Rachel Johnson, has begun to explore the possibilities of popular genre fiction with the launch of Jessica Ruston's serial. In the art of the story, there are only so many ways to skin a cat.

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Robert McCrum, The Guardian, Monday 25 January

Martin Amis in new row over 'euthanasia booths'

Martin Amis has never fought shy of an argument, whether it be with the critic Terry Eagleton (over Islamist extremism), his pal Christopher Hitchens (over Stalin) or fellow novelist Julian Barnes (over Amis leaving his agent – Barnes's wife).

But none of those opponents were as tough as his new target promises to be. Now 60, Amis has picked a fight with the grey power of Britain's ageing population, calling for euthanasia "booths" on street corners where they can terminate their lives with "a martini and a medal".

The author of Time's Arrow and London Fields said in an interview at the weekend that he believes Britain faces a "civil war" between young and old, as a "silver ­tsunami" of increasingly ageing people puts pressure on society.

"They'll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops," he said. "I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years' time.

"There should be a booth on every ­corner where you could get a martini and a medal," he added.

His comments were immediately condemned as "glib" and "offensive" by anti-euthanasia groups and those caring for the elderly and infirm. Supporters of assisted suicide, meanwhile, insisted that a dignified and compassionate end should be on offer to those who are dying.

Alistair Thompson, from the Care Not Killing Alliance, said Amis's views were "very worrying". "We are extremely disappointed that people are advocating death booths for the elderly and the disabled. How on earth can we pretend to be a civilised society if people are giving the oxygen of publicity to such proposals?

"What are these death booths? Are they going to be a kind of superloo where you put in a couple of quid and get a lethal cocktail?"

The Alzheimer's Society said there were 700,000 people with dementia in the UK and the figures were set to rise. "It is understandable that people in the early stages of dementia may reflect on the subject of euthanasia," said Andrew Ketteringham, of the Alzheimer's Society. "However, glib and offensive comments about 'euthanasia booths' and 'demented old people' only serve to alienate those dealing with this devastating condition and sidestep the hugely important question of how we can best support those affected to live well and maintain their dignity."

Amis, whose forthcoming novel, The Pregnant Widow, is due to be released shortly, stood by his comments, made in an interview in the Sunday Times.

He told the Guardian: "What we need to recognise is that certain lives fall into the negative, where pain hugely dwarfs those remaining pleasures that you may be left with. Geriatric science has been allowed to take over and, really, decency roars for some sort of correction." He said his comments were meant to be "satirical", rather than "glib".

His stance on euthanasia had hardened since the deaths of his stepfather, Lord Kilmarnock, the former SDP peer and writer, in March aged 81, and his friend Dame Iris Murdoch, the novelist, in 1999, aged 79, two years after her husband revealed that she was suffering from Alzheimer's.

"I increasingly feel that religion is so deep in our constitution and in our minds and that is something we should just peel off," he said. "Of course euthanasia is open to abuse, in that the typical grey death will be that of an old relative whose family gets rid of for one reason or another, and they'll say 'he asked me to do it', or 'he wanted to die', Amis said. "That's what we will have to look out for. Nonetheless, it is something we have to make some progress on."

Answering critics who said his comments were "offensive' to older people, Amis, a grandfather, said: "Well, I'm not a million miles away from that myself."

He added: "I had a friend who was desperately ill and she wanted to go to Switzerland, to Dignitas, but she was defeated by bureaucracy at this end. And, I think it is existentially more terrifying to feel that life is something you can't get out of.

"Frankly, I can't think of any reason for prolonging life once the mind goes. You are without dignity then."

In his interview, Amis said his step­father had died "very horribly". "He always thought he was going to get better. But he didn't get better and I think the denial of death is a great curse."

He said Iris Murdoch, whom he had known for a very long time , was "a friend, I loved her. She was wonderful. I remember talking to her just as it started happening, and she said, 'I've entered a dark place'. That famous quote. Awareness of loss is gone, the track is gone. You don't know the day you've spent watching Teletubbies; it just vanished."

The pro-euthanasia pressure group Dignity in Dying said: "Like all too many people in the UK, Martin Amis has witnessed the bad death of a loved one." But, it added: "Dignity in Dying's campaign for a change in the law is not about the introduction of 'euthanasia booths', nor is it in anticipation of a 'silver tsunami'. Our campaign is about allowing dying adults who have mental capacity a compassionate choice to end their suffering, subject to strict legal safeguards."

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Caroline Davies, Sunday 24 January 2010

J D Salinger dies, aged 91

Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger has died of natural causes at his home in New Hampshire.

JD Salinger, who shocked one generation and inspired another with a classic novel of teenage rebellion, has died in New Hampshire at the age of 91.

Salinger, who shied away from publicity and did not publish an original work during the last 45 years of his life, was the creator of Holden Caulfield, the delinquent, alienated anti-hero of The Catcher in the Rye, which became required reading for generations of teenagers after its publication in 1951.

But in recent years its relevance to modern youth came into question and his reputation was tarnished by two accounts, one by a former lover and the other by one of Salinger's daughters, who painted him as a controlling and unpleasant eccentric.

The Catcher in the Rye was praised by the New York Times on publication as "an unusually brilliant first novel". But while an instant hit with many teenagers who related to its tale of adolescent angst and adult hypocrisy, it was met with alarm in other quarters. Some school boards made it required reading. Others banned it amid protests from parents over swearing – including the frequent use of "goddam" and, more rarely, "fuck" – as well as the bad example they believed Holden set.

Four years after its publication Salinger expressed disappointment that the book, which he acknowledged was based on his own upbringing, had met with some hostility.

"I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of The Catcher in the Rye. Some of my best friends are children. In fact all of my best friends are children," he wrote in 20th Century Authors. "It's almost unbearable to me to realise that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach."

John Lennon's murderer, Mark Chapman, cited The Catcher in the Rye as an inspiration for the killing in 1980.

Salinger published other books, including the well received Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey, before he became an almost total recluse. His last published work – Hapworth 16, 1928 – was printed in The New Yorker in 1965.

Ten years ago it was revealed that Salinger had a secret cache of about 15 novels that had never been published. In his last interview, in 1980, he said that he only wrote for himself.

In 1986 Salinger won an injunction against the publication of a collection of his letters. During the case, which went all the way to the US supreme court, he was asked what he had been working on for the previous 20 years.

"Just a work of fiction," Salinger said in a deposition. "That's all. That's the only description I can really give it ... It's almost impossible to define. I work with characters, and as they develop I just go on from there."

Salinger was born in New York City on New Year's Day 1919. His father, of Polish Jewish origin, became wealthy importing cheese and meat. His mother posed as Jewish and he did not find out that she was not until after his bar mitzvah.

Salinger had his own troubled history in various schools until he was dispatched to Valley Forge military academy at the age of 15. There he began writing at night using a torch under his bed covers and published his first story in a fiction magazine in 1940.

He submitted a number of stories to the New Yorker that were rejected, including one called I Went to School with Adolf Hitler. But the magazine did accept a later story about a disaffected teenager called Holden Caulfield, the first time the character appeared.

In 1942 Salinger was conscripted to fight in the second world war where he took part in the Normandy landings. He married a German woman while serving with the occupation forces after the defeat of Hitler. The couple moved to America but the marriage soon fell apart. Salinger took up Zen Buddhism.

He found fame disagreeable and the year after the publication of his most famous novel he left New York city for the town of Cornish, New Hampshire. There he remarried, to Claire Douglas, had two children, and then divorced in 1967.

Periodically the spotlight shone on Salinger again.

In 1998 the writer Joyce Maynard published a memoir in which she wrote unflatteringly about an eight-month affair with Salinger in which she described his controlling personality. Two years later one of Salinger's daughters, Margaret, wrote of her father as a recluse who drank his own urine and spoke in tongues.

Salinger was thrust into public view one last time a year ago when he sued to block the publication of an unauthorised sequel to The Catcher in the Rye called 60 Years Later. The writer, John David California, imagined Holden in his 70s.

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Chris McGreal in Washington, The Guardian, Thursday 28 January

The Death of the Slush Pile?

Even in the web era, getting through the door is tougher than ever...

In 1991, a book editor at Random House pulled from the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts a novel about a murder that roils a Baltimore suburb. Written by a first-time author and mother named Mary Cahill, "Carpool" was published to fanfare. Ms. Cahill was interviewed on the "Today" show. "Carpool" was a best seller.

That was the last time Random House, the largest publisher in the U.S., remembers publishing anything found in a slush pile. Today, Random House and most of its major counterparts refuse to accept unsolicited material.

JUDITH GUEST

Associated Press

When Minnesota mom Ms. Guest sent out "Ordinary People" in 1975, it was refused by the first publisher. Another wrote, "While the book has some satiric bite, overall the level of writing does not sustain interest and we will have to decline it." It became a best seller and a movie.

Getting plucked from the slush pile was always a long shot—in large part, editors and Hollywood development executives say, because most unsolicited material has gone unsolicited for good reason. But it did happen for some: Philip Roth, Anne Frank, Judith Guest. And so to legions of would-be novelists, journalists and screenwriters—not to mention "D-girls" and "manuscripts girls" from Hollywood to New York who held the hope that finding a gem might catapult them from entry level to expense account—the slush pile represented The Dream.

Now, slush is dead, or close to extinction. Film and television producers won't read anything not certified by an agent because producers are afraid of being accused of stealing ideas and material. Most book publishers have stopped accepting book proposals that are not submitted by agents. Magazines say they can scarcely afford the manpower to cull through the piles looking for the Next Big Thing.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. The Web was supposed to be a great democratizer of media. Anyone with a Flip and Final Cut Pro could be a filmmaker; anyone with a blog a memoirist. But rather than empowering unknown artists, the Web is often considered by talent-seeking executives to be an unnavigable morass.

It used to be that you could bang out a screenplay on your typewriter, then mail it in to a studio with a self-addressed stamped envelope and a prayer. Studios already were reluctant to read because of plagiarism concerns, but they became even more skittish in 1990 when humorist Art Buchwald sued Paramount, alleging that the studio stole an idea from him and turned it into the Eddie Murphy vehicle, "Coming to America." (Mr. Buchwald received an undisclosed settlement from Paramount.)

STEPHENIE MEYER

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dpa/Corbis

Ms. Meyer sent 15 query letters about her teenage-vampire saga. She got nearly 10 rejection letters; one even arrived after she signed with an agent and received a three-book deal from Little, Brown. She doesn't need to send out query letters anymore.

"It does create an incredibly difficult Catch-22 on both sides, particularly for new writers wanting to get their work seen," says Hannah Minghella, president of production for Sony Pictures.

Fending off plagiarism lawsuits has become an increasing headache for publishers and studios. "It's become the cultural version of malpractice," says Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of public radio's "Studio 360."

Some producers make it easy: They just refuse to deal with new writers at all. Mike Clements, president of Good Humor, the production company founded by Tom Werner ("The Cosby Show"), has a personal policy against reading any sample or script that is not sent to him by an agent. "I make the occasional exception for a friend, or for my aunt," he says. "I just make them sign a release first."

Lisa Haney

Staying Out of the Slush Pile: Do's and Don'ts

• Find an agent who's hungry—a nd "monetize." "Anyone who wants to break in should read Variety and Hollywood Reporter and see which assistants have just been promoted to agents…anyone can teach a three-act structure. What I want students to get in the mind set of is 'How do we write something with the purpose of monetizing it?'" —Ryan Saul, literary agent, APA, and screenwriting instructor

• Don't be a barista waiting for someone to stumble upon your genius. "Our editors travel, they get around. They look at writer's conferences, at MFA programs. They look at magazine articles and at blogs. That's what editors do, they sniff things out from so many different sources." —Carol Schneider, Random House Publishing Group

• Find another way in Slush pile finds "are the rare exception that give people hope. If we found one writer a year that sent things in randomly, that would be a lot…agents are necessary gatekeepers but it's nice if there is an alternative entry…there are subversive ways to get your stuff read—you just have to be dedicated. A writer I know wasn't able to get treatments read so he started rendering them as comic books." —David Granger, editor in chief, Esquire

• Contests! "I'm always wary to recommend to writers that they go to competitions too much because there are fees and they can end up spending a lot of money. But the ones that do get industry attention are really fantastic opportunities to network and to make important relationships." —Hannah Minghella, president of production, Sony Animation Studios, formerly in development at Miramax

• And buck up. In 1957, Tom Wolfe interviewed James Michener, a former slush pile reader and the author of "Tales of the South Pacific." Mr. Wolfe asked him if he had worried, upon submitting the Pulitzer Prize-winning tome to publishers, about competition lurking in the slush piles. "If you've ever read a slush pile," said Mr. Michener, "you'd know I had nothing to worry about," Mr. Wolfe says. "He knew how much garbage there was out there."

As writers try to find an agent—a feat harder than ever to accomplish in the wake of agency consolidations and layoffs—the slush pile has been transferred from the floor of the editor's office to the attaché cases of representatives who can broker introductions to publishing, TV and film executives. The result is a shift in taste-making power onto such agents, managers and attorneys. Theirs are now often the first eyes to make a call on what material will land on bookshelves, television sets and movie screen.

Still, discoveries do happen at agencies, including the biggest publishing franchise since "Harry Potter"—even though it basically took a mistake to come together. In 2003, an unknown writer named Stephenie Meyer sent a letter to the Writers House agency asking if someone might be interested in reading a 130,000-word manuscript about teenage vampires. The letter should have been thrown out: an assistant whose job, in part, was to weed through the more than 100 such letters each month, didn't realize that agents mostly expected young adult fiction to weigh in at 40,000 to 60,000 words. She contacted Ms. Meyer and ultimately asked that she send her manuscript.

The manuscript was passed on to an agent, Jodi Reamer. She liked what she read, a novel called "Twilight." She signed Ms. Meyer, and sold the book to Little, Brown. The most recent sequel in the series, "Breaking Dawn," sold 1.3 million copies the day it went on sale in August 2008. The latest film grossed more than $288 million in the U.S.

At William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, Adriana Alberghetti only reads scripts sent to her by producers, managers and lawyers whose taste she knows and trusts. The agent says she receives 30 unsolicited e-mails a day from writers and people she doesn't know who are pushing unknown writers, and she hits "delete" without opening. These days, she is taking on few "baby writers," she says, adding that risks she would have taken five years ago she won't today. "I'll take very few shots on a new voice. It's tough out there right now," she says.

Book publishers say it is now too expensive to pay employees to read slush that rarely is worthy of publication. At Simon & Schuster, an automated telephone greeting instructs aspiring writers: "Simon & Schuster requires submissions to come to us via a literary agent due to the large volume of submissions we receive each day. Agents are listed in 'Literary Marketplace,' a reference work published by R.R. Bowker that can be found in most libraries." Company spokesman Adam Rothberg says the death of the publisher's slush pile accelerated after the terror attacks of 9/11 by fear of anthrax in the mail room.

A primary aim of the slush pile used to be to discover unpublished voices. But today, writing talent isn't necessarily enough. It helps to have a big-media affiliation, or be effective on TV. "We are being more selective in taking on clients because the publishers are demanding much more from the authors than ever before," says Laurence J. Kirshbaum, former CEO of Time Warner Book Group and now an agent. "From a publisher's standpoint, the marketing considerations, especially on non-fiction, now often outweigh the editorial ones."

Getting an opportunity in Hollywood as a writer once required little more than affiliation with elite institutions like the Harvard Lampoon, the humor magazine which spawned writers for "The Simpsons" and a host of others. The Web was supposed to dismantle such barriers. And to be sure, the Web has provided a path for some writers who use it well.

Scott Belsky, a 29-year-old Web entrepreneur whose sites include "The 99 Percent," wanted to write a book on how to succeed in the creative industries. To secure representation, he approached agents with data on his Web traffic, samples of reader comments posted on the site, and the number of times various posts had been blogged about, tweeted and retweeted on social-networking site Twitter. This data convinced Jim Levine at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency to take on Mr. Belsky as a client. Mr. Levine used the information to land him a book deal. "Making Ideas Happen" will be published in April by Portfolio, a division of Penguin Group.

ANNE FRANK

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Anne Frank Fonds/Getty Images

"Diary of a Young Girl" had been published in Holland and was headed to France. But Doubleday's Paris office had marked it for rejection. Judith Jones, then a "girl Friday," disobeyed her boss and alerted Doubleday's New York editors, and the English-language edition came out in 1952.

"These days, you need to deliver not just the manuscript but the audience," says Mr. Levine. "More and more, the mantra in publishing is 'Ask not what your publisher can do for you, ask what you can do for your publisher.'"

But relationships still trump everything. Consider the path of one television series, "Sons of Tucson," set to debut on Fox in March. The show, a sitcom about kids who hire a ne'er-do-well to stand in as their father after their real dad is sent to prison, was created and co-written by neophytes—a rare event.

Tommy Dewey and Greg Bratman worked hard to get their big break, but because Mr. Dewey had done some acting, he was able to sign with a manager. The manager introduced them to a producer, Harvey Myman, who helped them develop a pilot script and got them a meeting with Fox, which ordered a pilot, then the series.

"Sons of Tucson" shows that unknowns can still make it—if they make some connections. "You really do rely on other people to be the arbiters of what may and may not work," says Marcus Wiley, a Fox TV executive. "If I was an agent submitting to an executive, I'm going to be calling that executive next week for something else. So the chances of me claiming plagiarism are slim," he adds. "This keeps both sides honest."

PHILIP ROTH

Associated Press

In 1958, Mr. Roth was an unknown who had barely been published when a short story called "The Conversion of the Jews" was plucked out of a heap at the Paris Review—by Rose Styron, wife of William. The next year it was published as part of "Goodbye, Columbus."

Despite the refrain that most everything sent to the slush pile is garbage, publishing executives confess to a nagging insecurity of missing something big. "Harry Potter" was submitted to 12 publishers (by an agent), all of whom rejected it. A year later, Bloomsbury published it in the U.K.

In 2008. HarperCollins launched Authonomy.com, a Web slush pile. Writers can upload their manuscripts, readers vote for their favorites, and HarperCollins editors read the five highest-rated manuscripts each month. About 10,000 manuscripts have been loaded so far and HarperCollins has bought four.

The first, "The Reaper," came out in July and sold moderately well. Last November, the publisher released another Authonomy offering, a young adult book called "Fairytale of New York," which has sold over 100,000 copies and is a best seller in Britain. HarperCollins also launched a similar platform for teen writers called "InkPop."

One slush stalwart—the Paris Review— has college interns and graduate students in the magazine's Tribeca loft-office read the 1,000 unsolicited works submitted each month. Each short story is read by at least two people. If one likes it and the other doesn't, it is read by a third. Any submission that receives two "Ps" for "pass" as opposed to "R" for "reject" is read by an editor.

"We take the democratic ideal represented by the slush pile seriously," says managing editor Caitlin Roper.

The literary journal publishes one piece from the slush pile each year. That leaves each unsolicited submission a .008% chance of rising to the top of the pile.

--

Write to Katherine Rosman at katherine.rosman@wsj.com

EL Doctorow: 'I don't have a style, but the books do'

EL Doctorow: 'I found myself writing this line: I’m Homer, the blind brother – I had the voice; I was off.'

The author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel and Homer and Langley talks to Sarah Crown.

On a quiet Harlem backstreet at the end of a row of stately brownstones is a grassed-over sliver of land, home to a handful of plane trees, a couple of flowertubs and a garden bench or two. A sign on the railings gives its name as the Collyer Brothers Park. It stands on the lot of what was once the home of Homer and Langley ­Collyer, well-born, educated, affluent brothers who slowly but surely turned their backs on polite society, shuttering their windows and giving themselves over to a shadow-life of squirrelling. After their deaths in 1947 (Langley under a landslide of rubbish; Homer, blind and paralysed, from starvation), their house was broken open: the 130 tons of junk discovered within saw them posthumously ordained as America's most notorious pack-rats.

It's a term of which EL Doctorow ­disapproves. His latest novel, Homer and Langley, takes the brothers' legend and moulds it, shifting their house into the heart of Manhattan and allotting them an extra 30 years' life; he prefers, he says, to think of them as "aggregators. Sort of like Google". The verminous association is symptomatic, he believes, of the way in which the brothers' characters have been traduced over the years; something that's still going on to this day. It was the spectacle of their reputation being hauled over the coals once more that led to their story, which had simmered in his head for years, offering itself as a subject. "My books start almost before I realise it," he says, leaning forward in the study chair of his unfussy mid-town apartment. "Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now'. I've known about the brothers for years, of course; I wasn't the only teenager of the time whose mother looked into his room and said 'My God, it's the Collyers'!' But a few years back, I saw a piece in the New York Times saying locals were objecting to having the park named after them. I thought, they're still disturbing people, 50 years after they're dead! They've become folklore. This is something to think about."

Doctorow didn't undertake any research for the book, preferring to fish back through his memories of the Collyers' story and expand on them, drawing the mythic elements out. "I didn't want to know, terribly, what the clinical details were," he says. "I found myself writing this line: 'I'm Homer, the blind brother'" – the novel's plangent opening sentence. "I had the voice; I was off. And I learned as I went along. I realised at a certain point that I was writing a kind of road novel, with these two guys talking to each other as characters on the road do, not just for the length of a trip, but for the whole of their lives."

The analogy is a potent one. In the novel, Doctorow sets the Collyers off down two parallel paths. One waltzes them through the American century, where they meet representatives of its tribes (immigrants and refugees; veterans, jazz musicians and mafia hoods; hippies and bureaucrats) and take part in its seminal moments – selling off copper guttering for the war effort, painting bas-relief portraits of the moon landing. The other passes through their house, which comes to embody a continent-in-miniature on which the brothers enact a symbolic colonisation. Airy and open at first, it slowly silts up with the detritus of US consumerism ("artifacts", as Homer puts it, "from our American life") and, in the form of the newspapers which Langley collects daily, the nation's stories.

But the analogy has a wider application. The pliancy of the road novel, its easy subjectivity and whimsical, intuitive relationships with the events it encounters, stands as a metaphor for Doctorow's own flexible association with real-world history. Perhaps surprisingly, given the New York ­setting of so many of his novels, he says he lacks a geographical pole. "New York isn't a setting to me: it's life, it's volatile, it changes from generation to generation. It didn't confer a literary identity on me the way, say, the Mississippi did Faulkner. With Ragtime" – his novel of the jazz era – "I stumbled on the idea that a period of time was as good a constructive principle as a sense of place." But while figures from his country's past rise up as landmarks in his novels, they're portrayed either provisionally or downright fancifully. Abraham Lincoln in his civil-war epic The March, Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz in Billy Bathgate (which snagged him the National Book Critics Circle award and the PEN/Faulkner award), Harry Houdini in Ragtime – all make their appearances entirely in the service of the story. He's been criticised for this free-and-easy treatment of historical figures by, among others, John Updike, who said of Ragtime that it "smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets". But Doctorow is unapologetic. Indeed, it's hard to see how he could repent of an approach which led directly to the intoxicating unreliability of his best-known work, The Book of Daniel. His barely fictionalised account of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, in Doctorow's version), told in a furious crackle by their son, Daniel, located him in the pantheon of great arbiters of 20th-century American life alongside the likes of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow (although he has yet to achieve the same recognition). The novel caused the cultural critic Fredric Jameson to label him "the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past", and saw Barack Obama name him as his favourite author, after Shakespeare. This technical fluidity extends from the quirks of his characters into the pattern of his prose; he is master of the run-on sentence. "They're one of my sins. I like commas. I detest semi-colons – I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page. If you're doing it right," he says, "the reader will know who's talking."

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in the Bronx in 1931. His parents, children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, nailed their new world colours to the mast by naming him after his father's favourite American author, Edgar ­Allan Poe. "It wasn't until just before my mother died that I asked her about it," he grins. "I said 'Did you and dad realise you named me after an alcoholic, drug-addicted, delusional paranoiac with strong necrophiliac tendencies?' She said 'Edgar, that's not funny.'" His decision to publish under his initials wasn't a rejection of the name, but was rather his own attempt to follow in the footsteps of the authors he admired. "DH Lawrence, WH Auden, TS Eliot," he offers. "Erm . . . W Shakespeare. F Dostoevsky . . . "

Although his first years were played out against the backdrop of the US's great depression, Doctorow recalls his childhood as "a good time. There was no money, but the house was filled with music and books." His father owned a music shop on Sixth Avenue (it cameos in Homer and Langley, when Langley finds there "a virtual musicologist, with recordings of swing orchestras and crooners and songstresses that no other store had"). And the young Doctorow haunted the public library and read indisciminately, "everything from comic books to Dostoevsky. I remember seeing The Idiot on the library shelf and thinking, that's for me." Education came via the Bronx High School of Science, "theoretically for children who were gifted at science and math. I fled down the hall to the literary magazine, who were my first publishers: a piece of Kafka-inspired animalogical self-defamation called 'The Beetle'. They later put it on their website, which I thought was a cruel thing to do."

From there, he went to Kenyon College in Ohio. "People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction." It turned out to have been a smart choice; Doctorow studied under the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, and became heavily involved in the theatre, where he stepped out alongside Paul Newman, a senior during Doctorow's freshman year. "I began to get some decent roles after he left." It was during his English drama MA at Columbia that he met his wife, Helen. "My thesis was supposed to be a play, but I never wrote it; I was drafted into the army." On his return, he rattled through a series of jobs before landing work as a reader for a motion picture company. It was, he believes, a useful apprenticeship. "And there were moments of real excitement: the company had optioned Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King while he was writing it, and I got to read about 150 pages before it was published. I urged them to buy it, but of course they didn't."

Doctorow's stint on the fringes of the film industry coincided with the western's stranglehold on Hollywood, a circumstance which inadvertently inspired his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times. "It was making me ill, reading one lousy western after another," he remembers. "So I wrote a parody in a fit of rage, showed it to the story editor, and he said: 'This is good, you want to make a novel out of this.' I crossed out the title, wrote 'Chapter One', and went from there." The novel, published when he was 28, edged from satire into serious enterprise while he was writing it. "I got interested in the idea of making something real from a disreputable genre. But it didn't teach me much about writing, or myself."

His second novel, Big As Life, a now-out-of-print foray into science fiction which he calls "the worst thing I've ever done", came out while he was simultaneously pursuing a hopscotch career through publishing. "I bounced from being a reader to working for New American Library – in those days a worthy mass-market publisher – and from there to the Dial Press, where I was made editor-in-chief." His roster included Norman Mailer and James Baldwin; while Baldwin was a highwire act, turning in manuscripts then absconding to Paris to avoid his copy editors, Mailer was a dream to edit, "not the bombastic public figure at all. He listened, he was courteous." It wasn't until later that they had their inevitable fight. "Mailer was president of International PEN, and during Reagan's presidency, he secretly invited the secretary of state, George Schultz, to a conference. I found out, and knocked out an op-ed piece protesting the move, which seemed to me to be an insult." They didn't speak again until Mailer got in touch to say he admired Billy Bathgate. At that point, Doctorow chuckles, "there was a rapprochement".

He was proud of his work at Dial, but when he began The Book of Daniel, something had to give. "It was a book that demanded my complete attention. When I was about a third of the way through, I had lunch with the literary agent Don Congden and mentioned that I was unhappy. He knew of a visiting post at the University of California, Irvine, and asked if I would be ­interested. So my wife and I sat down and consulted the I Ching. It was the 60s! It said: 'You will cross a great water'. And Helen said: 'That's the ­Mississippi. Let's go.'"

The idea for the novel came to Doctorow in the late 60s, when Viet­nam and the civil rights movement had the country in uproar. "Out of the ­campuses came something called the new left, and I began to wonder how it compared with the old left of the 30s. It occured to me that I could tell the story of this country's life over a 30-year period by dealing with its dissidents. And I realised that the Rosenbergs could be the fulcrum. Everything snapped together."

The pieces were in place, but the story wouldn't quite come – until a moment of genesis as mythic, in its way, as the one Doctorow was trying to conjure. "I was writing in the third person, and it wasn't working. I had this terrible moment when I threw 150 pages across the room and said 'If I can make this story dull, I don't have any business writing.' So I put a new sheet in the typewriter and began to write almost in mockery of my own ambition. It turned out to be page one. Having Daniel tell the story was a way of being intimate with everything that happened without understanding it. That was my position as the writer."

Though Doctorow fans may ­champion the generosity of his semi-autobiographical novel World's Fair, or Ragtime's wordy antics, The Book of Daniel is now widely held up as his greatest work. Yet since it emerged that Julius Rosenberg, in all probability, did spy for the USSR, Doctorow has been asked over and over: would he write the same book again? Of course, he says. ­"People who haven't read it assume it's a simple-minded defence of the Rosenbergs. It's not. The book doesn't draw conclusions about their guilt: it wasn't about them, it was about what happened to them. It was about the state of this country's mind." Is the book's anger Daniel's, or his? He ponders the question. "Suffering isn't a moral ­endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry. That's why I did it. But that's the ­constant question: how much of the book is you?"

It's a question anyone reading Doctorow eventually finds themselves asking. Travel through his novels and you begin to see that certain landscapes are repeated, and a repertory company of stock characters – the charming, impractical father; the senile grandmother; the mother who is capable, handsome, disenchanted – emerges. "That never occured to me," Doctorow laughs. "I guess there is that rough archetype of the parental relationship, but I was steeped in the belief that the author's life is a distraction: the test of a book's quality is not if it reflects my life, but if it reflects yours." World's Fair, his sweetest, straightest story of a young boy, Edgar, growing up in the Bronx "began autobiographically, but even when you use material from your own life explicitly, you still have to make the composition."

Though characters resurface, stylistically Doctorow is a nomad, leaping from the formal prose of his 19th-century New York novel The Waterworks, to the jazz ­cadences of Ragtime, to Homer Collyer's wry, melancholy reflections. "I don't have a style, but the books do. Each demands its own method of presentation, and I like that. My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer. A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to."

--

Sarah Crown, The Guardian, Saturday 23 January 2010

Image of the Week #1

"Sex" definition prompts dictionary ban in US schools

A parent's complaint over a 'sexually graphic' definition has seen dictionaries removed from southern Californian schools.

Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms in southern California schools after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for "oral sex".

Merriam Webster's 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the "sexually graphic" entry is "just not age appropriate", according to the area's local paper.

The dictionary's online definition of the term is "oral stimulation of the genitals". "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

While some parents have praised the move – "[it's] a prestigious dictionary that's used in the Riverside County spelling bee, but I also imagine there are words in there of concern," said Randy Freeman – others have raised concerns. "It is not such a bad thing for a kid to have the wherewithal to go and look up a word he may have even heard on the playground," father Jason Rogers told local press. "You have to draw the line somewhere. What are they going to do next, pull encyclopaedias because they list parts of the human anatomy like the penis and vagina?"

A panel is now reviewing whether the Menifee ban will be made permanent. The Merriam Webster dictionary joins an illustrious set of books that have been banned or challenged in the US, including Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, which last year was suspended from and then reinstated to the curriculum at a Michigan school after complaints from parents about its coverage of graphic sex and violence, and titles by Khaled Hosseini and Philip Pullman, included in the American Library Association's list of books that inspired most complaints last year.

--

Alison Flood, The Guardian, Monday 25 January

Britain tastes better when it's swaddled in Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate

Charlie Brooker: The thought of the Americans meddling with the Cadbury formula is too much for many of us to bear

I'm not especially patriotic – I find the union flag a tad garish, and the white cliffs of Dover a touch bland – but the news that the US company Kraft had bought Cadbury came as a bitter blow. It's a very British thing, Cadbury. We've all got a great deal of fondness for it. It's one of the few home comforts you miss while you're abroad, like the BBC or Marmite or self-deprecatory humour.

Considering how much imagination the Americans have, and how much they like food, it's surprising we're so much better at making chocolate than them. And we are better. I can still vividly ­recall trying Hershey's chocolate for the first time. The name held a certain glitzy allure: after all, I'd heard it mentioned in countless Hollywood movies. Like Oreo cookies and M&Ms, it was one of those brands you faintly revered even though – at the time – it wasn't available­ in British shops. So when I eventually got my hands on an authentic Hershey bar, it was quite an event. I stared at the iconic packaging for about five minutes, as though it were a prop from the set of Ghostbusters, before unwrapping it with care, breaking a bit off and preparing to savour what would surely be the most powerfully glamorous chocolate ­experience imaginable.

But the moment the product itself hit my tongue I was plunged mouthwards into an entire universe of yuk. In terms of flavour, it tasted precisely like I'd swallowed a matchbox full of caster sugar five minutes earlier, then somehow regurgitated it into my own mouth. And the texture was crumbly, dusty – slightly old even, as though this was a chocolate bar that had been found in the pocket of a civil war soldier and preserved specifically for my disenchantment. It was so ­horrible, I charitably assumed there was something wrong with it. I was eating it in England (someone had brought it back from the States), so perhaps it had gone off somehow in transit. But no. Subsequent encounters proved I'd got it right the first time. Hershey's tastes downright bad.

But then American mass-market snack food is downright bad in general. They can't do crisps either. In addition to 900 varieties of Walkers, we Brits produce Frazzles and Chipsticks and Monster Munch and all manner of wacky corn shapes, in flavours ranging from pickled onion to polar bear. ­Virtually all American crisps – or "chips", as they doggedly insist on calling them – are prosaic constructions tasting vaguely of watered-down bright orange cheese. We do bright orange cheese too, in the form of Wotsits, but we only did it once because we nailed it first time. They've got Cheetos in every shade of orange you could wish for (Spicy Orange! Smokey Orange!), but they're all a bit weak; no match for the confident chemical oomph of a Wotsit.

A new range of uniquely British chocolate snacks

Anyway, the thought of the ­Americans – so good at so many things, so bad at snack foods – meddling with the Cadbury formula is too much for many of us to bear. Hence the protest signs outside the factory in Bournville. We've been told the flavour won't change – but that isn't enough. Kraft needs to go one better, and reassure us that our national identify will remain intact by launching a whole new range of Cadbury's snacks that simply couldn't exist – or sell – anywhere else in the world. Chocolate bars with a uniquely British flavour. Here are some suggestions:

Cadbury's Full English Breakfast. Walkers have had a stab at a "full ­English breakfast" flavoured crisp, but the result was disappointing, to say the least, because it relied on various ­flavoured powders. Cadbury's Full English Breakfast bar would contain the real thing: fried egg, bacon, chips and beans, mashed and compacted into a Crunchie-sized slab, covered with a layer of ketchup, then swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate. It'd look and weigh about the same as a Double Decker. And yes, it sounds disgusting – but you'd have to try it once, wouldn't you?

Cadbury's Real Ale Eggs. Creme Eggs are all well and good, but there's ­something vaguely continental about them. How about promoting the real ale industry with a chocolate egg ­containing 2fl oz of Bishop's Finger? If that fails to catch on, how about a range of special "Binge Drinker's Eggs" – available only in "Happy Hour" packs of six – filled with sugary blue ­alcopop swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate.

Cadbury's Tardis Bars. Nothing fancy: these are just Tardis-shaped slabs of chocolate – part of a range that includes Caramel Cybermen and Toffee Daleks. But the proceeds go straight to the BBC, to help keep it afloat after Cameron gets in and sets about dismantling it to impress Rupert Murdoch. Other BBC-themed snacks could include Holby City Liquorice Bandages, Panorama Mint Crisp Curls, and a disturbing 100% edible lifesize replica of Terry Wogan's head, replete with crunchy shortbread teeth, praline eyeballs and a brain made of nougat. Swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate.

As you may have noticed, the above suggestions work on the assumption that everything tastes nice when it's swaddled in Dairy Milk chocolate. Which it does. A bloated, over-ripe corpse dredged from a polluted canal would taste nice if it was ­encased in a Dairy Milk shell. If it was coated in Hershey's, you'd find yourself glumly picking the chocolate off to get at the sludgey grey flesh ­beneath. And that's a FACT.

--

Charlie Brookner, The Guardian, 7 January 2010

Related

7 Jan 2010

Cadbury explores 'friendly' merger with Hershey

17 Nov 2009

Family behind Ferrero Rocher linked to deal with Cadbury

8 Nov 2009

Why Cadbury's Fruit & Nut isn't the same in the land of stars and stripes

30 Sep 2009

Kraft Foods must make firm offer for Cadbury within 40 days, says Takeover Panel

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• LSEscientist

  25 Jan 2010, 12:12AM

  Cadbury's instead of chocolate now tastes only of a toxic takeover.

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• LabourStoleMyCash

  25 Jan 2010, 12:12AM

  This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted.

• PoorButNotAChav

  25 Jan 2010, 12:13AM

  Charlie, have you sent Cadbury your address and the times when you will be in to receive the delivery from them?

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• Scarey2001

  25 Jan 2010, 12:17AM

  I completely agree with the Hershey's description. I had some once and instantly described it to coleagues as 'coffee grounds floating in bile'.

  Revolting guff.

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• huphupSpiral

  25 Jan 2010, 12:20AM

  teehee.
  that was indeed, as usual, very funny Charlie :)

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• Gummibarchen

  25 Jan 2010, 12:21AM

  ok, no I wasn't first *grumble*

  But charlie is absolutely right about american chocolate. Now, don't even get me started on American cheese (can we have that for next week's article?)

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• Kibblecross

  25 Jan 2010, 12:25AM

  Crappy British chocolate is "one of the few home comforts you miss while you're abroad"? God spare us. Not if you've lived in Belgium or a dozen other places where they have food that's judged on its taste not on the familiarity of some brand name. Nostalgie de la boue? Just because there are things the Americans do even worse than us doesn't give us the right to feel good about being not as rubbish as the most arrogant nation in the world.

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• northy666

  25 Jan 2010, 12:26AM

  I had to make do with Hershey's when I was working in South Korea for a year. I think I ate more dogs than I did bars of chocolate that year.

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• myfellowprisoners

  25 Jan 2010, 12:31AM

  Mmmmm. Dairy Milk. According to them poncy 'chocolatiers', it ain't real chocolate. But crack isn't proper cocaine either.....

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• Darryl

  25 Jan 2010, 12:35AM

  Hersheys DOES taste rubbish. I assume it's because they haven't changed the recipe since the war. A sort of compounded pound of chocolate grease stirred in with a gallon of sugar. Vile. Hershey kisses are the worst of them all.

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• Zadokk

  25 Jan 2010, 12:36AM

  It's funny, Charlie, I always thought our chocolate was sweeter than theirs but admittedly I haven't sampled much in the way of American 'candy' so perhaps my sample size was too small. But one things is for sure is that it was a horrible experience. Like you I used to get excited when relatives or friends brought chocolate back from America... until you taste it. It's the sort of thing that sits lurching at the back of your cupboard, which you only eat when there's no other chocolate in the house and you would go out to get some proper stuff if it wasn't raining. Hell I'd probably go out if it was raining to avoid having to eat it.

  If the Americans have any sense (not holding my breath) they won't change a thing about Cadbury's; if they do then they should know that the fickle British public won't stand for it and they'll buy something else.

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• 1Argie

  25 Jan 2010, 12:36AM

  Yuck. That turned my stomach. Time for a mint tea and bed...

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• NeoPunk

  25 Jan 2010, 12:38AM

  I concur on Hershey's and Cheetos, the former tasted like cardboard and the latter tasted like corn, just corn with cheese dust on.

  Mountain Dew however is brilliant, probably due to all the chemicals in it that are banned here.

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• jaymonte

  25 Jan 2010, 12:51AM

  Cadbury's Dairy Milk (20% solids) 49g, 55p, widely available no stars
  Not real chocolate. It's sugary and thick, without a prominent taste of cocoa. It's just sugar and fat.

  Guardian article by chocolatier Paul A Young
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/13/the-best-chocolate-bars

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• tommydog

  25 Jan 2010, 12:52AM

  Perhaps if Cadbury's had a chocolate flavoured like one of the better Scotches they could have remained independent.

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• CaptainAsparagus

  25 Jan 2010, 12:55AM

  Dairy Milk = Sickly, Flavourless Cack

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• RomeAnthem

  25 Jan 2010, 1:02AM

  Nestle totally ruined the Kit Kat (remember when it came in a foil wrapper and had nice chocolate on it?). Kraft have totally ruined the Terry's chocolate orange. Don't get me started on the pale imitation of Opal Fruits that Starburst are either.

  It's only a matter of time before some foreign idiot ruin the taste of Cadburys as well.

  Unfortunately it is not just foreign companies that ruin old favourites but supposedly British companies as well.

  What Walkers have done to their crisps is an abomination. The new ish oil they cook them in has totally ruined the taste and texture of the crisps. I do not believe for one second that it is any "healthier" either.

  What they have done to brands they have brought is even worse. Frazzles are now terrible. Quavers used to have a very pleasant understated cheese flavour, now it is ridiculously ovepowering. Smiths crisps are nothing like they used to be.

  The only expception to this are Monster Munch which are now brilliant again.

  Can these companies please go back to the old much better recipes please?

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• BlackChat

  25 Jan 2010, 1:05AM

  Very good, Mr Brooker, but you don't go far enough. We need a concerted campaign to Keep Kraft out of Kadbury's (for I fear the loss of that initial C, Kharlie, is only a matter of time..) and we need it fast. Not only might a loss of taste - in every sense of that word - ensue, but let's not forget the whole Quaker work ethos and the delightful 'village' of Bournville. I had a bunch of great aunts and uncles who worked all their lives at Cadbury's and lived in Bournville. It's very special.

  @Kibblecross - I fear you miss the point a little, though I understand what you are trying to say. Of course there are many brands of chocolate around the world that might taste better than Cadbury's, but for its price, availability and wonderful history, I think it is worth trying to preserve the company that makes it.

  Hershey's tastes like it has been left in a shop window for 5 years. Nasty stuff. And don't get me started on Kraft cheese... total Krap.

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• RossMcRoss

  25 Jan 2010, 1:05AM

  Hmmm, every since the "My inbox overflowed with blood-curdling death threats" following the 'assassination'...er...request incident, you've been uncharacteristically nice as pie about the United States....

  "the thought of the ­Americans ? so good at so many things"

  Yes. Invasions. Human rights. Health care. Wal Mart. Rush Limbaugh. Enormous cars. The 'Holidays'. Economic catastrophe. 'Freedom'. Guns. Executing people. Fox News.

  Come on Charlie...what happened to you man, you used to be cool...

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• bedfont

  25 Jan 2010, 1:11AM

  "Kraft had bought Cadbury came as a bitter blow."

  It can't leave a bitter taste with so little you know actual cocoa in it?

  No doubt they'll replace all the milk with vegetable extracts. What does a glass and a half mean in reality BTW?

  Really aside from the old history of Cadbury as a decent company there is no reason to be upset here. Except if like Man United it's being bought with junk bonds.

  Comparing the merits of Cadburys Nestle (what they sell here) and Hersheys is like talking about the best team in the football conference for a chocolate lover.

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• MainlyConfounded

  25 Jan 2010, 1:11AM

  It's not even universal - New Zealand has had a Cadbury's factory since the 19th century, and even Kiwi Cadbury's is cack. Even foreign Cadbury's can't do Cadbury's. People have their rellies in the old country bring Dairy Milk with them when they visit (as well as gravy granules).

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• Jehenna

  25 Jan 2010, 1:18AM

  I totally agree about Hersheys - cannot understand what the fuss is about.
  (Reese's Pieces now... that's awesome.)

  I quite like Australian Cadbury's chocolate and of course the UK Cadbury's.

  But having lived in France for a few years with more than ample access to all the delights of mass produced 'swiss' chocolate and hand made stuff, including suchards, which are to die for, I would still buy Cadbury's every time I made it back to the UK for a sanity break.
  (and cheddar, could never get decent cheddar in France)

  Sometimes you don't want an amazing taste sensation that's going to blow your socks off and cause you to start having cravings akin to heroin addiction. You just want some chocolate. And Cadbury makes nice chocolate, which is consistently good.

  Marabou (Swedish) is nice chocolate too, but I really hope Cadbury chocolate stays the same.

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• phild1

  25 Jan 2010, 1:24AM

  Dissapearing coco forests slash and die as mr eno said...

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• HolidayPirate

  25 Jan 2010, 1:24AM

  Indeed, Mountain Dew was something the Americans got right and we never seemed to take to enough. As for Hersheys, well, it DOES taste like sick (which you can remotely taste in M+M's, by the by), but then, maybe American sick tastes different? Like copper coins or styrofoam or something.

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• theunknowing

  25 Jan 2010, 1:25AM

  i'm from the seattle and i've had your cadgberry candy before. you brits are whackos. that stuff tastes like solidified liquid proteins with a heap of sugar poured in and colored brown. shit, you guys should visit america where they grow the real stuff. heck! go to an american cocoa farm and watch them make the stuff. cadgberry is a vile candy that only the primitive brit tongue could describe as a chocolate bar. heck! you guys are whackos. can't you visit a county like paris or another european state like switzerburg. they make real chocolate. is britain really part of Europa. you guys seriously lag behind in the culture stakes!!

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• BarringtonWomble

  25 Jan 2010, 1:25AM

  You said eating crisps was like a cat doing a fart in your mouth, Charlie.

  You're a bit of a drama queen.

  CHARLEY SEZ I MUST NOT EAT THESE BISCUITS IT'S LIKE ARMAGEDDON ON THE TASTEBUDS WITH A DOG POO

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• JoeBrownridge

  25 Jan 2010, 1:26AM

  yep, as said above, herseys tastes like sick. it literally does.#

  and as said above, again, mountain dew is the only thing we should import from America.

  now i'm going to go and eat my 230G bar of Cadburies :)

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• MarkAnthony

  25 Jan 2010, 1:28AM

  have gregs stop giving you free stuff charlie?
  but your bang on ... Nothing compares to cadbury chocolate...
  those damn brussel twats said it wasn't chocolate because it didn't have enough soild coca powder... and we said no ... cadbury's is brillant and your wrong johnny so fuck off
  its one of our proudest accomplishments ...
  chocolate so good it makes you proud to be british

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• BTM1

  25 Jan 2010, 1:28AM

  Love dairy milk but it's true it tastes terrible elsewhere. Down under and on the sub-continent it's just rank. The most dis-heartening change to British snack food is cheese and onion in blue packets and salt and vinegar in green. Still just wrong 15 or 20 years later.

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• MarkAnthony

  25 Jan 2010, 1:31AM

  theunknowing we know where you live you yankie b'stard
  don't make us come over there cos if we come back you'll be fightin brits not the krauts we left in charge

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• ThomPaine

  25 Jan 2010, 1:32AM

  Hear, hear re: Hershey's chocolate being disappointing.

  Many years ago, almost the first thing I did on setting foot in America was to buy a big bar (having emerged from the Subway at the New York Port Authority building, as I recall).

  I had seen adverts of it in comics and magazines all my life, so imagined it must be the manna of the Gods themselves.

  But instead it turned out to be crumbly, brittle shite that tastes of chalk. (Actually milk power, which is what it mostly is, apart from sugar).

  Mrs Paine, an American, can't stand Hershey's-anything, or most American sweets. It's Sour Patch Kids for her, or nothing.

  Still, they have dark chocolate Mars Bars.

  And constitutional democracy with a division of Church and State, the sweetest thing of all.

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• phild1

  25 Jan 2010, 1:38AM

  This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted.

• RossMcRoss

  25 Jan 2010, 1:39AM

  And constitutional democracy with a division of Church and State, the sweetest thing of all.

  You're kidding, right?

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• lewkeo

  25 Jan 2010, 1:50AM

  Holidaypirate i'm a Brit living in the states, I have American children and i've had the misfortune to taste their Yank vomit(don't ask how). i can confirm that.

  A - American puke tastes just like our Great British vomit.

  B- Hersheys tastes like sugar plastic with a Puke/vomit finish.

  They love Hershey's over here my Rush Limbaugh loving in laws get all touchy cos my kids only like Brit chocs like Crunchie,diary milk ,Aero, flake etc which they score from our local rather twee, Brit themed shop(Barbours and Marmite etc). The owner of the store says all the tweenie hipsters in town spend their candy allowance on Brit chocs.

  Hersheys is shite imagine being a young, half starved Euro waif during WW2 and being throw a bar of chocolate from a passing, bullishly handsome American GI , only to sink your teeth in to the confection of liberation and taste vomit!

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• annon101

  25 Jan 2010, 1:56AM

  Does anyone think it's a tad grim that Philip Morris (aka Altria) has bought Cadburys?

  Do we care that one of the world's largest cancer providers now owns some more of what made blighty famous?

  Well done Britain.

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• JohnnyLilburne

  25 Jan 2010, 1:58AM

  @MainlyConfounded

  It's not even universal - New Zealand has had a Cadbury's factory since the 19th century, and even Kiwi Cadbury's is cack

  Have you ever tasted Kiwi Marmite? It's cack on steroids and seems to have more sugar than a bar of chocolate.

  It's not easy to get real Marmite here in Aus. I make a twice yearly very-long-drive to a shop that specialises in UK food imports to stock up. Apparently they aren't allowed to retail it because of the licensing agreement with the people that make Marmite in NZ.

  The actually purchase process is hilarious. You have to wait until there are no other customers around and then ask in a suitably conspiratorial whisper if they have any proper Marmite. The assistant glances around and if it's all clear she goes to the stockroom and comes back with the jar in a brown paper bag. It's like some tacky Hollywood representation of a drug deal or a gangster film about prohibition.

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• littlesecrets

  25 Jan 2010, 1:58AM

  Im heading out to buy as much "real" Cadbury's chocolate as possible before they start Americanising (or is that Americanizing...ho ho) it and keep it forever in a my chocolate castle only whipping it out to impress the ladies.

  "Daddy, what's a Euro?"

  "I dunno"

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• Thetwelfthdoctor

  25 Jan 2010, 1:59AM

  My Mum is a spy so she gets about and, on one of her jaunts that wasn?t behind the Iron Curtain, she went to New York and, fittingly, brought me back a single Hershey Bar. Brooker ain?t wrong: I couldn?t even finish it. So, to appear cosmopolitan, I took it into work and passed it around beloved co-workers offering them the chance to taste genuine foreign ?chocolate?. Even then I couldn?t give it away.

  I imagine that, as it got chucked, good old British bacteria, who still have standards, will have tuned their flagellums up at it as well. I suspect that to this day, like all of Disney?s Flubber merchandise produced for the 1963 film Son of Flubber (made from rubber and mineral oil and eventually all recalled because it was harmful ? who?d have thought, Disney?) it?s now terminally clogging up the planet and seeping through concrete from the hole it was buried in. Undying.

  So America has that muck and all of Europe seems intent on us reclassifying our beloved chocolate as a cocoa-deficient processed milk product. Talk about under siege.

  On a separate note I was in a Co-op shop in the centre of Manchester the other day and saw the shop sign ?potato chips? on a stand of crisps. I fear we?ve entered the final days? and someone needs to take a stand now.

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• decisivemoment

  25 Jan 2010, 2:01AM

  Charlie, you're right about Hershey's. They use a higher cocoa content than the British and yet still they manage to screw it up. But you've obviously not delved deeply enough into American crisps/potato chips. Have you had Pringle's? Have you had Kettle Chips? Have you gone into the snack food section of a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's in the US and partaken? All kinds of good stuff.

  But with the image of vomit flavored Hershey bars stuck in my head, I'm now off out to Walgreens to buy some Lindt milk chocolate with hazelnuts and clear both the palate and the mind. No chances taken here, folks.

  PS. The best, absolute number one British milk chocolate is Galaxy Minstrels. No contest. Completely addictive.

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• HelwynBallard

  25 Jan 2010, 2:04AM

  american artificial junk food is so rubbish because their real junk food is so cheap and plentiful. You can't walk down the street without being blasted with ads for double steak/bacon/cheese/butter/ham/chicken burgers for about $1.50. Who needs wotsits when you've got prime hormone-reared beef and 19 million kinds of cheese?

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• videonasty

  25 Jan 2010, 2:10AM

  The full english bar could genuinely be nice. Battered mars bars are a little known delicacy and are ameezin.

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• Thetwelfthdoctor

  25 Jan 2010, 2:15AM

  > But then American mass-market snack food is downright bad in general.

  It goes further than that. We had coach-loads of American school kids come over a few years ago (with medicine-drug chests that would have matched Olympic athletes) and they complained that the beef in McDonald?s burgers tasted funny. Now, as a vegetarian, I?m certainly not one to stick up for those spreading-like-cancer plastic restaurants, but it turned out the difference was that Yank cows are so pumped full of steroids that it affects the taste and all the heifers must resemble Sylvester Stallone.

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• RobTaylor

  25 Jan 2010, 2:22AM

  Mr Brooker,

  For all your skills of rhetoric, you have the palette of a singed arsehole.

  Certainly, British chocolate is superior to any American product. However, it does not compare with such delights as Valrhona, Amedei or Cluziel.

  The enjoyment of Cadburys by so many Brits is purely a matter of nostalgia: what seems great in childhood memories will be great when tried as an adult (even if not). Hence the reason adults fondly remember such atrocities as Cadburys, Thundercats, Pong, Space Invaders and much of the 80's music and fashion scene.

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• dpkeane

  25 Jan 2010, 2:22AM

  Walkers are owned by an American company, so you shouldn't worry to much. I'm not sure why one would be so proud of producing "better" junk food.

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• fghj

  25 Jan 2010, 2:25AM

  Cadbury's is crap. Who cares if they change the taste? They could hardly make it much worse.

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• WinstonWolf

  25 Jan 2010, 2:28AM

  I haven't had anything by Cadbury's for ages, and especially not since I heard they added raw sewage to their "Dairy Milk".

  Now Milka - that's excellent chocolate.

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• suedeblade

  25 Jan 2010, 2:46AM

  Don't worry, Kraft will soon be peddling a "chocolate style" Cadbury's product made from "genuine" lard byproducts, just like Kraft cheese.

  "In 2002, the FDA warned Kraft that Velveeta was being sold with packaging that described it as a "pasteurized processed cheese food," which the FDA claimed was false ("cheese food" must contain at least 51% cheese). Velveeta is now sold as a "cheese product," using a term for items that contain less than 51% cheese."

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• AngloHybrid

  25 Jan 2010, 2:49AM

  Ahh, but of course, Ghirardelli chocolate, made in California, is far superior to anything Cadbury's make.
  Sorry, but it's true.

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• clutterbot

  25 Jan 2010, 2:51AM

  I lived in Canada for a year. So desperate did I become for british chocolate (which I thought I didn't even like that much) I would spend the equivalent of over a quid to get a specially imported Twirl (not quite as mad as the £2 I spent on a tin of ambrosia creamed rice with my eyes almost filling with tears of joy). I didn't realise it, but whenever I live overseas the first things I crave when back in the land of WHSmiths are a) a Twirl b) a cheese sandwich-any old crap plastic cheese one will be better than most cheese abroad.

  Nearly all north american chocolates seem to have a lot of caramel and peanut in them. However, I did come around to Reeses cups which I became addicted to. These are now sold in the UK so I now have no reason to ever leave the land of proper trash food.

  I agree cadburys is not high quality chocolate. I like fancy chocolate, but thats not the point of cadburys. The point is, you are hungry, you are at a train station, a cadburys twirl is the only thing that will take away the pain of your train being delayed by an hour. Hersheys would make you chuck yourself in front of a train.

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• suedeblade

  25 Jan 2010, 2:53AM

  "Ghirardelli Chocolate Company is a United States division of Swiss candymaker Lindt & Sprüngli" Calif. no more!