Jo-Anne Richard’s blog

One of our mentoring participants had a thorny problem with speech tags the other day – which we were able to solve with examples from the work of another. A small group of characters were [...]

We come upon our character lying in bed (or in a restorative bath, for that matter). She sighs, overcome by the dramatic events which have lately overtaken her. Events which she then remembers. [...]

There’s a distinction that writers need to make before they become great. It was a point I made in a university course I taught recently – and I think it came as something of a revelation. But [...]

Fights, or action sequences, which involve many peripheral characters, are difficult to write well. We have a tendency to rush them. We give the results of the clash, rather than carrying us [...]

Every now and again, a character has a realisation which changes everything. It hits him between the eyes and forces him to view things in a completely new light. Since our readers have been [...]

One of our mentoring participants sent me this quote recently and it resonated: “Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is [...]

Details are magical. Use them well and they can conjure us to another time and place. They can also transport us into the state of mind and emotions of the characters. The way a character sees [...]

I was listening to a podcast the other day about two guys who’ve created an app which generates inspirational messages from random phrases. First they fed it vast numbers of inspirational [...]

I’m a great one for fooling myself, because so much about writing can make you sad. Saying goodbye to a great idea because it doesn’t carry your current story forward, or fit the personality of [...]

New writers often write too formally – as we were taught to write at school. Remember those ghastly business letters? They certainly couldn’t be accused of demonstrating any kind of writer’s [...]

Every now and again, we’re called upon to assess a manuscript in which the theme is pasted across it like a banner. I’ve set out to make people realise how badly dogs treat their humans in the [...]

I day-dreamed my way through my entire school career, and was consistently punished for it. I found the drone of the maths teacher’s voice created exactly the white noise necessary for me to slip [...]