HeyJaredCutting Up Books
Understand how your favourite novels are constructed and meet some of the amazing writers working today.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 2
- Latest publication
- Aug 10, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 27, 2026
Latest issues
A Place for Prologues? (opens the original)
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I am hugely, hugely lucky to do a little bit of work with Conscious Writers’ Collective, run by the incredible Maya C Popa. In a recent class, one of the writers brought with her a prologue she had written for a memoir she’s working on. I won’t give any details here as it is not my place, but it led to a long discussion about what prologues are essentially for, particularly in modern publishing. One of the writers – working on a fantasy novel – was using a prologue to set the scene and establis
Blank Canvas by Grace Murray (opens the original)
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“In my final year of college, I started to tell everyone that my father had died, very suddenly: Nightfall. The bedroom. Heart Attack. The words - he is dead - slid out quickly, rising from my throat, into the air. It was just a sentence, and it only took a few seconds, a brief dash in the conversation. It was easy. And it might have all been fine - I might have got away unscathed, with a little sympathy, a few hugs, and nothing else - had I not decided to tell Katarina first.”Opening lines from
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