Thou Shalt Not Bore

Available for over a year

In the Sins of Literature Robert McCrum casts a seasoned eye over the literary mores of our age. Sarah Waters, Martin Amis, Will Self, Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster, Deborah Moggach and Howard Jacobson talk about their literary sins and commandments. Thou Shalt Not Bore looks at how to avoid writing a boring book or, as Elmore Leonard put it, how to avoid writing the bits that readers skip. Try to make your characters believable, your plot snappy and your sentences taught and bright or sinuous and fecund. And if that doesn't work you can always insert a juicy sex scene... In this episode some of our finest novelists tell us how they write, give lessons in style, tell of whose work they love and argue over what makes a book good.