Tag: writing tips
10 Ways To Kick Start Your Writing
Joanne Harris, @Joannechocolat, is one of our favorite authors on twitter. If you do not follow her yet, you should! 1. If you’re at a creative loose end, read. If you’re not at a loose end, read. Basically, read. #TenWaysToKickstartYourWriting — Joanne Harris (@Joannechocolat) November 28, 2015 2. Leave your reading comfort zone. Read […]
Plot-driven or Character-driven?
I love reading books about writing. It is my number one displacement activity when I should be working on my novel. However, it bugs me how some how-to books split plot and character. Some books even divide genres into plot-driven and character-driven and say that the plot-driven novels are more likely to be ‘commercial fiction’ […]
Lessons Learned From Writing a Memoir or Two
“Who would read a book about your life?” That question came from a former friend, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who in 1995 aimed to convince me writing a memoir was pure folly and would likely ruin my career as a serious journalist. After selling nearly 100,000 copies in seven languages of I Closed My Eyes […]
Let It Go
Years ago, at a party in Brighton I was introduced to a writer whose book had just been nominated for the Booker Prize. I had just started telling people I was writing my first novel. He was gracious, charming. ‘What’s your process?’ he said. Process? My mind went blank. Writers have processes? If I have […]
I Published My Book! Now What?
Once upon a time my writing life centered on writing, getting a short story published, writing another story, and so on. It went this way for decades. People asked me from time to time why I didn’t get a collection together, and publish an actual book. Finally, I did. All The Roads That Lead From […]
Is Marketing Harder Than Writing?
I used to think writing a book was the hard part. I was wrong. Getting your book read is the hard part. I’d tinkered with short stories and penned a few poems over the years, and there was no denying my love of the written word but the thought of writing an actual book – […]
5 Steps to Original Character Creation
If you’ve done any fiction writing any your life, you’ve probably received some writing advice. And you were probably to do this: Avoid clichés in your writing! But what’s hilarious about that advice is that the advice itself is a cliché. (Whoa, so meta.) In fact, writing advice itself is full of great clichés. Let’s all […]
How to Use Memories to Enhance Your Writing
There is no such thing as a dearth of writing material. We sit with fingers poised over the keyboard and are met with a ghastly silence that threatens to be our undoing. All we need to do is to call up the past. One’s own past might seem mundane, but get out your microscope. Look […]
What Bugs Me As A Reader
I finished a novel last night and I hated it! It began well, great characters with potential. Then, halfway through, the main character is shot dead. The family moves away and the husband heads off somewhere foreign to start a new life, leaving his two little kids with an aunt who never featured before. The […]
How to Avoid Writing Burnout
Writing is hard work. We all know that, right? We take an idea, move it along, push it this way, that way, leave it alone, return to it, and sometimes scratch altogether. Once we’ve got something substantial, we tear it all apart and put it back together again. We offer our pages to the world, […]
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