Toby Litt

@tobylitt.bsky.social

3509 Followers 3223 Following

Writer. Mentor. Activist. I teach Creative Writing at Southampton University. https://awritersdiary.substack.com/

Picture of writer Toby Litt advertising MK LitFest session Demystifying Dialogue on Sat 25 April at Milton Keynes Central Library from 11am. Tickets from www.mklitfest.org
Flashback Time - card. With words 'How Good is Your Memory of Dialogue' and 'A Complete Guide to Point of View Part 2' - on it.
A piece of card with these words on: Don't touch the guests/ Don't pick your nose/ Don't say "fag"
In this 2025 F.T. Prince Memorial lecture, Dr Mary Jean Chan will explore the ways in which strict(er) poetic forms such as the sestina, the villanelle, the sonnet, the tanka and the specular poem enable one's articulation of grief and loss.
Cover of Annie Ernaux's The Years showing a moody photo of the author.
Pianist Alfred Brendel going grrr, lifting his hands up as claws.
Bridport prizes entry today. Prizes listed.
LibGen search for works by Toby Litt used by Meta to train AI, including the title White Teeth.
Basic words only book cover for Possessions: The Books Against Ravenglass, book one, by Toby Litt
1990 is the year I most envy my past self for experiencing. Text on a plain green background. From Toby Litt's Substack A Writer's Diary.
Characters from Dead Boy Detectives in pencil sketch by Mark Buckingham. Charles, Edwin, Crys.
In the following excerpt from the Wikipedia entry, describing Carr’s philosophy of addiction, I have replaced smokers with writers and smoking a cigarette with rewriting a sentence — Carr teaches that writers do not receive a boost from rewriting a sentence, and that rewriting only relieves the withdrawal symptoms from the previous sentence, which in turn creates more withdrawal symptoms
A vast crowd of semicolon haters faces a single small figure, who says, 'Yes, you all are Wrong'.
Tile reading: When everyone is settled, and has pen and paper or laptop, I read out the first sentence beginning. This is what they have to start with. These words must go on the page, and then they continue from there — 1. Late that long August…
King’s Lynn One feels terribly sorry for old things - cathedrals and such - and for sentences in which people refer to themselves as ‘one’ and which end ‘and such’, and such.
The cover of Olympic Surgeon, a Mills & Boon Doctor Nurse romance. He holds her masterfully.
Newspaper cuttings of a teddy boy driving a bus in Coventry, name of Rockin' Ron West.
QR code in green for A Writer's Diary link.
A sliding scale of excitment in narrative. Your suggestions for tweaking it. 1. SLEEPING SAFELY AND PEACEFULLY 2. AWAKE AND LYING DOWN 3. GOING TO SLEEP 4. STANDING 5. WAKING 6. WALKING/JOGGING/WORKING 7. RUNNING 8. RUNNING AWAY FROM SOMEONE 9. RUNNING AWAY FROM SOMEONE ARMED 10. RUNNING AWAY UNDER FIRE FROM SOMEONE ARMED 11. RUNNING AWAY UNDER FIRE FROM SOMEONE ARMED WHILST WOUNDED 12. RUNNING AWAY UNDER FIRE FROM SOMEONE ARMED WHILST WOUNDED AND PROTECTING AN INNOCENT 13. RUNNING AWAY FROM SOME-THING EVIL WHILST WOUNDED AND PROTECTING AN INNOCENT
It’s not a reprehensible thing to believe that you’re going to have a particular emotional effect upon a reader, and to work to augment that effect. - quote on top of photo of a woman with artificial tears
By putting yourself under the sway of a writer, by continuing to immerse yourself in their story, you are submerging yourself in their saltwater ocean — which may be warm or freezing, and which is likely to have very strong currents, and which may contain mermaids or sharks.
‘Oh my God,’ think most start-up writers, ‘I need to find my voice. I need to find my voice as fast as I can. Until I find my unique, original, unmistakable voice, nothing I write will be worth anything.’ Most writers don’t find a voice, I would argue. They find Obstacles.