“Nothing will work unless you do.” Maya Angelou To be clear, I don’t exactly believe in such a thing as ‘writer’s block’. There’s no invisible wall that surrounds our minds and creativity, or invisible handcuffs that prevent us from getting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard)… But even I am guilty of using ‘the […]
Read More Overcoming ‘The Block’“Beware of advice – even this.” ~ Carl Sandburg How many writers out there have read through (or at least skimmed) dozens of books about the art of writing; looking for guidelines, rules and loads of other bits of advice on how to write the best book in the whole entire world, before finally putting […]
Read More Writing a Novel: The Rules**SPOILER ALERT** … For anyone who hasn’t watched it… Seriously though, it’s been like 18 years… I had just finished my 100th marathon of Lord of the Rings, and as per usual, I was frustrated that Frodo caved in at the last second and decided not to throw the ring into the fire. So, I […]
Read More The Ultimate Hero: A Debate About ‘Lord of the Rings’A couple of months after joining Twitter and the #WritingCommunity, I came across #VSS365 (Very Short Story 365 days a year). Every day, a host provides a single word to act as a prompt for a tweet length story, a poem, a piece of dialogue etc. When I first started participating, I was anxious that […]
Read More Has A Daily Dose Of #VSS365 Improved My Writing?I’ll start off by explaining what the three P’s mean for any new writers out there who might be coming across these terms for the first time. “PLANNER”: this is pretty self-explanatory. It’s someone who outlines their plot, characters and world. Planners often believe that having a detailed outline will make the process of writing […]
Read More Planner, Pantser… Maybe a PlansterWhen I decided it was time to start working on my novel, it was suggested to me that starting a blog about my progress could be beneficial. I thought, In what way can a blog really help me with writing a piece of fiction? Turns out it can… And it did. And it still is. […]
Read More Why Blogging Helped A Budding WriterBefore starting my first novel, I’d not given much thought to how many drafts I would need to work through to complete my story. I thought I would just write it once, edit it and that’s that. … This could be one of the reasons it seemed like such a daunting task for so many […]
Read More Drafts: How many is too many?