Only One Thing Will Make You A Better Writer

Obviously, you need to hone your craft and develop your skills, and there are certainly a multitude of styles and genres to choose from. But the one thing you definitely have to be is open. Open to the idea your work might need to improve.

But you can’t be honest about what you need to do with your writing if you worry about what other people think of you. What they think of your writing is another matter. But tying up your self-worth with the stories you produce is not helpful.

The work is the work, and you are you.

Read more »

Novels Of the Future

The three major forms of storytelling are books, television shows and movies. Books are the odd man out because they require active participation. You can sit back and let the story wash over you with a TV set or cinema screen. Books, you have to engage your faculties a little more actively.

 

While television and cinema have gone through major changes over the years as they try to take advantage of advancing technology, books have stayed more or less the same over the last 500 years.

Meanwhile TV and film have been having a battle royale as they try to outdo each other, and the kinds of stories they tell have developed accordingly. Has the novel been left behind?

Read more »

Marketing For Books

What makes a book sell? Obviously a good story that’s well written is going to be a big selling point, but once you have a finished product, what makes your well-written book sell better than my well-written book?

And what makes the other guy’s terribly-written book outsell both of us?

Read more »

Linear Writing Leads To Flat Narrative

By linear I don’t mean the way time is structured in your story. You don’t have to write scenes all out of order Christopher Nolan style to make it interesting.

This is what I’m talking about: A man is hungry. He goes to the kitchen and makes a sandwich. He eats the sandwich. He is no longer hungry.

The journey from hungry man to sated man is very straight. It’s easy. It’s obvious. It’s dull.

When someone wants something you have the beginning of a story. When they get it you have the end of the story. But the bit in between is the interesting part, and making it too linear won’t generate much enthusiasm in the reader.

Read more »

Knockout Storytelling

We’ve all read books that we couldn’t put down, that had us up into the early hours as we kept thinking, “Just one more chapter.”

It isn’t unique to a specific genre or a particular style of writing. All types of books can create this effect.

I think every fiction writer wants to hear a reader say, “I just couldn’t put it down.” But how do you turn a story into an unputdownable page turner?

Read more »

Joy Of Completion

It can be quite a gruelling process to write a novel.

Sometimes you will just know there's no way what you're writing is going to end up in the finished product. 

Things aren’t going well. There’s no point carrying on. The story isn’t working. You’re going to have to rewrite everything, maybe even give it up as a bad job and start from scratch.

Why not just stop now and not waste anymore time going down a blind alley? 

Read more »

Indestructible Rules Of Writing

These are the rules you must never, never, never break when writing.

Just kidding. There aren’t any rules that can’t be broken when writing fiction. But these are the things I choose to abide by when I’m writing my stories. My personal rules. There’s absolutely no reason you need to follow any of them.  

Read more »

How To Write Better Fiction

Sometimes a scene in a story has nothing wrong with it (nothing obvious, anyway) and yet it doesn’t work. It’s a necessary scene, important to the story, but it feels flat and uninteresting. People who read it will notice it’s a bit lacklustre, but not really know why, or how to fix it.

Usually it’s a more sedate scene, a moment of discussion or reflection, maybe dialogue heavy, but artificially turning it into an action scene doesn’t feel right.

For those instances, I offer the following techniques to make a flat scene more immediate and engaging.

Read more »

Giraffes and Illegal Downloading

Why do we live in a world where so many bad things happen?

That’s the sort of thing kids ask, and for which there never seems to be  a good answer. But there is.

If bad things didn’t happen, if earthquakes and hurricanes and tsunamis didn’t exist on this planet, neither would life. Well, maybe some blobs in the oceans, but that’s about it.

For living things to evolve and adapt, they need to be threatened with annihilation. Catastrophe and disaster and extinction level events are what got us to where we are today. Allow me to explain.

Read more »

Finding Your Voice

Having a strong voice that people will enjoy spending time with is a key part of writing a story. Lots of books on writing will encourage you to have a unique and distinct voice. Not many of them will tell you how to go about developing one.

So how do you make sure your voice is strong and consistent and interesting?

Here’s how I would do it.

Read more »