The stories of fellow writers really inspire me to keep bashing away at the keyboard. Learning about other people’s journeys, the difficulties they’ve encountered and overcome, their unwaivering passion for writing, can help me get through days when I feel like giving up.
A few posts ago I included a bit about listening to music while writing. I’m a lover of peace and quiet, but a few people came back to me with recommendations and since then I’ve experimented. Be it the grand classical music of Lord of the Rings, psychedelic jams or funky Latin rock, I’ve discovered a particular tune can really spur me on and help clock up all-important words.
NaNoWriMo is once more upon us and the excitement is building. Here are a few of the best tips I’ve picked up from taking part to help you prepare to crush that 50k word target.
Procrastination has been so widely discussed in the writing community I know it’s not just me that suffers from this curse. Countless hours lost to daydreaming, scrolling through mundanity on the web, reading news articles on subjects I’ve never once shown an interest in. Sometimes I sit there ready to go and a thought pops into my mind. I’ve not cleaned those fish tanks in a few weeks. Another forty minutes goes by. Think of all the words that could have been written?
I’ve seen this acronym all over the place lately. It sounds like a daemon H.P. Lovecraft forgot to make. Then I read a very helpful post by mylifewithbooksblog and all became clear.
After my research post looking at reasons why people stop reading a book, poor characterisation ranked top. I come across many articles looking at protagonists, but few to do with the bad guys, and a poorly characterised villain is just as off-putting as a poorly characterised hero. In this short article, you’ll read a few simple ways to make your bad guys of pure evil more compelling, and your conflicted antagonists more intriguing.
This week I’m taking us on a tour of something which gets taken for granted: viewpoint. Viewpoint, in a nutshell, is the perspective through which your story is told, the eyes observing what happens. Most would say there are three types of viewpoint, but to make things easier I’m going to say there’s four. Bear …
For some writers editing is the most loathsome part of the process. For others it’s their favourite. Yet undoubtedly it’s the most important, and given the rise in popularity of self-publishing, it’s more crucial than ever to know how to edit your work.
A few tips on writing effective dialogue.
When I first began writing it’s fair to say I was ignorant of most of the rules. I never stopped and asked myself, ‘what is the writing process?’ I just had a need to pick up a pen and get things down on paper. Recently I came to review some of the first bits of …
