The Pantser’s Life For Me: To Plot or Not to Plot
I began one of my books with the sentence, “All I’d said was, I wouldn’t mind seeing her in her knickers.” That was all I had – except the pantser’s abiding thought: “That sounds like an interesting book. I wonder …
Genre Writing: Defying the Police Procedural Rules
Writers of genre fiction who don’t give readers exactly what they expect from that genre can pay a heavy price. It’s generally accepted by authors that writers of “literary fiction” can write their own rules, but if you write genre …
Show, Don’t Tell & Abusing Adverbs
If you’re a writer, or want to be a writer, you’ve heard about Show, Don’t Tell often enough, In fact, you believe you do it. So why all those adverbs?
Philip Larkin
I read Required Writing by Philip Larkin when it came out in 1983. It’s been sitting on my shelves ever since and a couple of days ago I decided to read it again. It was a good decision, because there …
Getting to know your characters the Helen Simkin way
I’ve said before, and a lot of people know, that I wanted (and want) to extract myself from Mandrill Press. I’m happy to go on having them publish my books, because someone has to, but I don’t like the close …
Writing Characters Who’ll Keep Readers Captivated by Roz Morris
First, a disclaimer. I’m a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and so is Roz Morris. That’s as far as the connection goes; I’ve never met her, though I’ve seen plenty of her posts and know quite a …
Place and the novelist
What has place to do with the novelist?
There was a discussion at this year’s Hawkesbury Upton Literature Festival about writers and a sense of place. I wasn’t able to listen to it, because I was engaged in something to …
How Sharon Wright: Butterfly came to be written
Writers get lots of questions about their books. Maybe this will answer some of them.
The first and most obvious question is: Where do you get your ideas? I always say the same thing: I have no idea. And sometimes …
Film to Book & Book to Film
How do you turn a film script into a novel?
We hear a lot from writers about their experience when someone turns their novel into a film. In this post, I’m focusing on something I’ve developed a little niche interest …