ALAN SILLITOE, 1928-2010.. I've never read his fiction, though I've admired the bracing films made of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, but by chance I recently picked up his autobiography, Life Without Armour, which is so far very good. Though not quite the Angry Young Man they painted him as, Sillitoe had indeed been working-class and done mucky jobs -- "my job was to hump hundredweight sacks of alum and flour to a vat and empty them in, stirring to an even broth with the requisite amount of hot water to make the paste. Overall and boots got caked with the stuff, and I would go home stinking like a pig" -- before he found success as a writer.

I'm more eager to finish the book now, and get to his others. He seems to have been very serious about his craft, and describes some of his writing education, including attentive reading-aloud at home:

The cadences of style became apparent enough to help improve my prose, a revelation which could no doubt have come sooner with a nineteenth-century education in the Latin and Greek classics.

Reading my work aloud was a good way of ensuring that it had the fluidity and clarity of good English...

Clear English could be enriched by idiomatic or personal quirks as long as they fitted in with the narrative and echoed my inner voice, the way things sounded to me even before I had a pen in my hand...

During this long winter it became obvious that I had not been working hard enough on style: every word, every phrase, every sentence -- in every story and on every page of a novel -- had to be broken up and had to be knitted together again so that no loopholes in the prose remained.

I am reminded, writing that out, that work is a constant refrain in the book; when Sillitoe was young, he said, he took care not to get a girl pregnant because "those who did not take such precautions asked for all they got, and a bit more. As Arthur Shelton's father said, 'When you get married, a penny bun costs tuppence!'"

Sillitoe picked his Desert Island Discs last year. Some nice considerations here and here.

UPDATE: If the writerly stuff interests you, you may like the Writers Guild East tweet updates on today's New York City Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting seminar -- though it has more to do with careerism than craft.