Tips for Writers

Reading an unpublished memoir, sent to us for assessment recently, I was initially beguiled by an entertaining anecdote, with vivid characters. Ah, so far so good, I thought. But then we moved to [...]

“Everybody who writes fiction draws from their own life, but if it ended there, it would be very boring,” says writer, Judy Blume. I came across her advice the other day and it chimed with me [...]

I don’t know about you, but I heard a great many lockdown resolutions which included the words “book” and “finish” or “get on with”. And I’ve heard an equal number of retractions since. I don’t [...]

Events, even carefully described disasters, don’t trigger our emotions. Only people can do that. We once had a mentoring participant who asked if readers really cared about the characters. “Don’t [...]

1. Write a lot Style is just another word for voice. The only way to generate a style that is uniquely yours is to write. Voice is all-important, and very difficult to prescribe. It can’t be [...]

“It’s best not to dwell on what you’ve written, wishing it could be different. We all write what we can. We do the very best we can. You might think, oh, I wish I could write like so-and-so, but [...]

Way back in the misty dawn of time, I had a university professor who saw himself as something of a Svengali. When I told him I longed to be a writer, he asked me why. I told him of my love of [...]

You don’t need to feel strongly about a theme or subject to write about it. In fact, I think it’s a disadvantage. I dislike theme-heavy fiction. I find it heavy-handed and didactic and it makes [...]

In the nineteen-eighties, a writer named Elizabeth Tallent published four novels, and her short stories appeared frequently in The New Yorker. Then followed a 22-year silence. She has broken it [...]

I read something about literature the other day which warmed my heart. It’s something I’ve always believed and which I think holds great lessons for writers. Here’s an extract from the article, [...]

I am constantly exhorting writers to avoid adverbs, but to use instead “strong verbs”. And they respond by saying, “Okay, but what is a strong verb, and how do we recognise it when we see it?” At [...]

I love it when good writers give advice on “small issues”. When would-be writers sit at the feet of writers they admire, they’re often looking for pointers on the grand roll-out of plot, or ideas [...]