It is a writer’s job to draw readers into the fictional story so completely that they forget the real world. Our goal is to render them powerless, so despite the late hour, mountain of laundry, or workday ahead, they cannot give up the journey unfolding within the paper-crisp pages before …
These days, if you want to be a writer, you’re told you need to have an author platform. But what do those mysterious words mean? They mean having some kind of presence on the internet. And to be honest, if all you want to do is write books, the internet …
The Urban Setting Thesaurus – A Writer’s Guide to City Spaces (Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi) This book is the latest offering from the ladies behind the Emotion Thesaurus, one of my most-read how-to write books. The Urban Setting Thesaurus starts with a discussion of how to use setting to …
This post talks about how I use the spreadsheet I created when writing my first draft to assist in the process of editing my second draft. The spreadsheet below is an example of the types of information I put on the spreadsheet to help me. Firstly, I inserted a new …
Recently, I’ve been chatting with some of my writer friends about how we keep track of our word counts during the drafting and editing process. Some people use Scrivener, which as far as I understand, is specialist writing software which allows you to write, track and compile your novel. I don’t use …
This is the next post reviewing books in the BBCs Big Read challenge that I participated in many years ago. For details of the overall challenge, see this post. 94. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho Paulo Coelho’s masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns …
I’m terrible at coming up with titles, so I’m sure the same applies to some of my fellow writers. So I thought I’d share the process I went through to help me choose a title for the novel I’m writing. The first thing I did was to research current titles …