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5 ways to start a story: Choosing a bold beginning
Great authors show us there are many ways to start a story. You could begin a novel with a narrator/character introducing himself, like Salinger's Holden Caufield or Dickens' David Copperfield. Or you could begin in the thick of action, as Ray Bradbury's does in his classic novel, Fahrenhei...
January 21st, 2024
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Decoding the Hero's Journey
Whether you're a fan of mythology or simply interested in the art of storytelling, let's delve into the world of the Hero's Journey. What is the Hero's Journey or the monomyth? The Hero’s Journey is a widely recognised pattern of storytelling and is essentially a circular storytelling ...
January 15th, 2024
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Top blog posts for 2023
1. Writing productivity hacks The word ‘productivity’ sounds dry and technical, like something that belongs in a boardroom. Yet writing productivity – being able to create with the least possible stress and struggle – is what divides prolific from occasional authors. This post takes a look a...
December 17th, 2023
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Fate deals the cards: a review and interview with romance writer Romy Sommer
Like taking a trip to Italy Reading Romy Sommer’s seventh romance novel, My Fake Italian Marriage, is like taking a trip to Italy. It’s a novel richly redolent of the landscape, food, smells and sensibilities of Tuscany, around the hilltop medieval town of Montalcino. The novel is set on an ...
December 10th, 2023
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Making dialogue sound natural
Whether you’re writing a novel or a short story, you are going to want to make your dialogue natural and true to real life, as it’s spoken in the real world. How do you go about achieving this, when ‘natural dialogue’ can be boring to read if you write it verbatim? As to why you should make y...
December 3rd, 2023
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Self-editing after NaNoWriMo
Self-editing is a vital part of any writing process. Having completed a write-a-thon such as NaNoWriMo, you may have a shiny new manuscript on your hands if you’ve gone the distance. Now you need to start self-editing your manuscript. You might want to call in a professional editor at some point...
November 27th, 2023
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Writing my novel with the Now Novel process
In the following months I'll be blogging about my own novel writing journey using the Now Novel process, from the highs to the lows, and how I manage to navigate them. For years, I have lived with the bare bones of a story I want to set partly on a resort in the North West part of South Afr...
November 12th, 2023
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Baring your soul: ways to write a memoir
We live in a time when baring your soul by writing a memoir has become so popular that bookshelves, literal and virtual, are awash with the genre. And importantly, they stock memoirs of ordinary people. There was a time when it was more common for only the very well-known to write memoirs. We re...
November 5th, 2023
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Mastering NaNoWriMo: expert strategies from veterans
National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short) is just around the corner. This can be an exciting time, a way to get a 50,000-word novel completed, or part of one completed. For those of you who haven’t done it, the task may seem a little daunting. Three veterans who have done NaNoWri giv...
October 30th, 2023
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10 key takeaways from Bird by Bird
Here are 10 key takeaways from a book that has become iconic: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by memoirist and novelist Anne Lamott. It’s been nearly three decades since it was published in 1994. In the years since it’s become something of a cult book, recommended by writ...
October 22nd, 2023
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Beyond stereotypes: portraying realistic LGBTIQ+ characters
Getting beyond the stereotypes and writing credible, relatable LGBTIQ+ characters is possible. You might want to do some research, if you don't identify as queer, and you will want to avoid the tropes mentioned below. The first kiss Back in 1991, the popular TV legal drama, LA Law was in ...
October 15th, 2023
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From trauma to triumph: using life writing to heal
As a life-long keeper of journals, I have chronicled the ups and downs of my life in sometimes minute detail. When I parted from, and moved out of my former partner’s home, I filled up notebook after notebook with a dissection of what went wrong, how we might have saved our relationship, and...
October 8th, 2023
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