Category: How To and Tips
A lesson learned
A lesson learned Picture me at a writers’ conference, a good two years before I published INCEPTIO, the first of the Roma Nova thrillers, in 2013. Full of enthusiasm, going to every class, talk, workshop and seminar followed by long nights in the bar discussing structure, characters, pitfalls, agents, heroes, failures and successes, I was […]
Why I Went on the World’s Longest Book Tour
We live in a world of content overload, constant contact, and ironically, an increasing sense of disconnection. As more and more human interactions are conducted online, we lose the opportunity for the simple “hello” and “how are you” that used to add something intangible to our days. At the same time, deeper, more substantive engagement […]
Whose Point of View is it Anyway?
When I started writing my debut novel, The Other Mrs Walker (Mantle, 2016) I kept getting transported back to 1944. Not literally, of course (though that would have helped with research) but through the eyes of one of my characters.Then another. Then another after that. Sometimes this would happen within the same page. Sometimes within […]
The Cinderella Complex – Waiting For Mr. Write
How many of us have secretly hoped that we will be ‘discovered’ by some hot new literary agent or plucked from writer obscurity by a medium to large publishing house who will alter the course of our writing careers F-O-R-E-V-E-R? Go on, admit it. We’ve all day-dreamed about being the writing world’s equivalent to Kate […]
How To Create Tension
It’s all a bit tense… You might think of tension in a novel as being obvious ‘edge of your seat action’: the FBI agent running down the rabid serial killer, the guy dangling by his fingernails off a window ledge. In fact, all great novels are powered by tension of some kind or another. It […]
Call Yourself A Writer – Right Away!
When is it the right time to call yourself a writer? Anyone can call themselves a writer, but let’s say you’re serious in that you try to write regularly, and possibly submit work. You’re probably unpublished. So now’s the time to practice telling people when they ask what you do, that you’re a writer. Or […]
Four Essential Writing Tips
I finished a draft of my forth novel today, fifth if you count the one that’s been abandoned in a computer folder somewhere, a botched attempt at a book that will never be. This draft has much work ahead of it still. It’s a skeleton of the book it will one day become, and yet […]
Seven Secret Ingredients of Classics
There are some books that always feature in Top Ten lists, including mine. I never tire of reading Wuthering Heights, for example, or Jane Eyre, or Rebecca and at least once every few years I pick up one of the books I adored when I was younger, Little Women or Ballet Shoes or Black Beauty. […]
New Author’s Survival Guide
There it is in your inbox, the passport to the magical country that has haunted your dreams and obsessed your waking hours: Author Land. After so many false starts and rejections (only a fraction admitted to), the email has landed and the contract is coming – one of the gods of publishing (small, large, doesn’t […]
Revisions, Revisons
In a loft in a house outside a village on a wind-scoured peninsula in southwest Ireland, I sit curled in a wingback chair. A cup of tea steams on the table beside me. A milky June haze swells through the skylight. It is silent, but for the prattling rain and the desultory arguments between geese […]
Recent Comments