When I’m doing rough writing, or first drafts, I find that writing in sprints is a helpful technique. If I keep track of sprints, it motivates me to finish my project. I don’t necessarily think that writing faster will mean you write better, but it’s certainly a good way of …
I’ve recently started up a new group of writers on Twitter, via my writing workshop site, Scribophile. We have a group Twitter account with the username @scribotweeters, and we are going to start playing weekly games which everyone can join in. The image for the first game is at the …
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 …
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 …