A recent piece of advice I heard from a successful author was for new writers to focus their attention on their chosen genre. But what does that mean? I think it means to be successful you have to give your potential readers what they want. The problem however is discovering your potential reader base and …
Tag: fiction
Editing – early lessons learnt from professional editors
In this blog I want to discuss editing, why it is so important, and when to do it. I also want to draw upon some of my early experiences with professional editors and communication in the business world. A simple definition of editing from Google is as follows: Editing is a stage of the writing …
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The writing process
It is almost eight years since I started writing novels, and I've learned an awful lot in that time. It hasn't been easy. I had a story I wanted to write and I wanted to start writing it as soon as possible. But I soon found out that you need to make some key decisions before …
Mythic Metaphors
Recently, I finished the first draft of my third book. It takes time to distance yourself from a manuscript before you can objectively edit it, so I picked up a project that had been working on for some time. The idea behind the project is to create a high-level story blueprint to see if a …
Dialogue – the seven rules
I've been writing for most of my life. It was hard not to. It was part of my job as an accountant to write reports, letters and other forms of communication. So learning to write fiction shouldn't have been that difficult, should it? But of course it was. Business writing is about communicating facts and …
Holding back the backstory
To make your characters come to life, you need to understand their lives before your story begins. Part of fun in writing is getting to know your characters. One of the ways is to prepare character sketches of the main characters. This should be more than just a a visual description of the height, weight, …
Bad guys aren’t necessarily all bad
Unless you’re dealing with satanic supernatural characters, an easy mistake for new authors to make is to assume that the antagonist has to be the epitome of all evil. In practice, the bad guy may well think he’s his own hero. He just sees things differently from the good guy. Like the hero, he has …
How many types of plots are there?
According to Christopher Booker's 'The Seven Basic Plots' most stories can be categories under one of seven basic structures. For example, Jaws, Alien and Beowulf would all fall under the 'Overcoming the Monster' category. 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' fall under the 'Quest' category. Booker is not the only one to …
Making the main character likeable
All great books and movies seem to have a great lead character that the reader or audience can identify with and root for. How do authors and screenwriters do it? Think about the books and movies you love. What aspects of the lead character’s character did you like, and what attracted you to them? Were …
What makes a good story ending?
Having covered story beginnings and middles in previous blogs, it seems only natural to cover story endings. Whether a story ending is right or not can ultimately only be judged by the reader. If the ending is not consistent with the direction the story is taking the reader, they may well feel disappointed and let …
JMJ Williamson 