How to Be a Writer

Marcus Berkmann has been a freelance writer since 1988, working for newspapers and magazines and occasionally writing a book, like this one. He reckons to have written literally millions of words in that time, several of them in the right order. This, his 13th or possibly 14th book, is about those years of writing: the triumphs (few), the heartbreaks (many), the sackings (more than you would expect), the biscuits (many, many more than you would expect). In it he somehow makes the act of staring