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Fail better | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

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I want you to think of a young man called Clive. Clive is on a familiar literary mission: he wants to write the perfect novel. Clive has a lot going for him: he's intelligent and well read; he's made a study of contemporary fiction and can see clearly where his peers have gone wrong; he has read a good deal of rigorous literary theory - those elegant blueprints for novels not yet built - and is now ready to build his own unparalleled house of words. Maybe Clive even teaches novels, takes them apart and puts them back together. If writing is a craft, he has all the skills, every tool. Clive is ready. He clears out the spare room in his flat, invests in an ergonomic chair, and sits down in front of the blank possibility of the Microsoft Word program. Hovering above his desktop he sees the perfect outline of his platonic novel - all he need do is drag it from the ether into the real. He's excited. He begins. Clive doesn't wallow in such thoughts for long. His book gets an agent, his agent

Fail better | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books 83 captures 17 Jan 2007 - 17 Jun 2026 Dec JAN Feb 17 2006 2007 2008 success fail About this capture COLLECTED BY Organization: Alexa Crawls Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. Collection: 36_crawl this data is currently not publicly accessible. TIMESTAMPS The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20070117014454/http://books.guardian.co.uk:80/review/story/0%2C%2C1988887%2C00.html Skip to main c

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