Famous writers on the art of saying no

In Competition No. 3168 you were invited to compose a response on the part of a well-known writer to an inappropriate suggestion about the future direction of their work.

This Austen-inspired challenge produced a terrific entry, so high fives to you all. Dorothy Pope’s Philip Larkin, giving short shrift to the suggestion that he venture into writing for children, stood out, as did Janine Beacham, Nick McKinnon, Nick Syrett and Basil Ransome-Davies. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

You kindly preface your admonition (and I have no doubt that, despite your placations, I am indeed roundly admonished) with such charming encomia that it seems churlish for me here to attempt to counter your intimation that my work offers no great benison of humour. I concede at once that I have not that ebullition of spirits which made Dickens such a master of the ‘knockabout’: comedy so broad was never an arrow in my quiver. I had hoped however — ah, the poignancy of pluperfect hopes! — that I might convey to the reader my own silent amusement, the delicious inward pleasure of observing the overflowing comedic possibilities of elaborated irony. To name examples would be as fatuously otiose as explaining a joke. But I might merely ask that you re-peruse my books in the light of this declared ambition. Your suppliant, madam, Henry James. W.J. Webster/Henry James

Mrs Christie, At tethers end comes your letter. Congratulatory in tone, in spite of expectation. You aver that my work hits the mark. I take the contrary view, in work as life. Nevertheless. You envision my prospering in the thriller line. Cite my spareness with prose, the manipulation of suspense in Godot, the potentiality for whodunnit in Malone Dies. How these elements, deployed in pursuance of some puzzler of a plot, may yield a bestseller yet.