Writing and Editing
Prophecy in Storytelling Prophecy is a favourite fantasy trope, and it can be used to great effect if you’re thoughtful about it. Before you dive in to planning your oracle’s speech, or working out how to turn your prediction into a poem, it’s worth having a think about the pros and cons of introducing a …
First drafts are always bad. Right? Well, maybe, maybe not. This oft-repeated bit of writing wisdom gets very mixed responses, including people being offended that aspersions are being cast on their hard work, people feeling discouraged at the prospect of putting a lot of time and effort into something destined to be crap, and people …
I’m both a writer and an editor. This isn’t an uncommon overlap; while not every writer enjoys editing, or vice versa, there are a lot of people who can get a kick out of either creating or critiquing words. No matter how much I enjoy both writing and editing though, and no matter how much …
I wrote a post recently on punctuating dialogue in which I referenced dialogue tags, and I wanted to take some time to explore these in a bit more depth. Dialogue tags are used to provide a reader with information about who is speaking and how they are speaking. They can be used for clarity, emphasis, …
I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for a whole year now. I probably wouldn’t believe it, if not for WordPress sending me a rather sweet little anniversary message the other day. I still feel like an absolute novice with this if I’m honest, but over the course of the last 52 weeks I have managed …
Continue reading "One Year of Blogging, Five Lessons I Learned Along the Way!"
Recently, a friend of mine uploaded a video talking about some of the common misconceptions around fanfiction, and mounting a comprehensive rebuttal of those. It made me think about my own history with fanfiction, and I wanted to contribute my own defence of a practice which I think is unfairly maligned. My experience of fanfiction …
It can be tough, managing a large cast of characters, working out how to give them all the right amount of page time, deciding who needs developing and who doesn’t. One way to look at this is to know how you’re categorising your different characters. There are a bunch of ways to do this, of …
It’s hard to make time for writing, even when our days are just their usual level of jam-packed. Introduce a holiday and it becomes virtually impossible, or at least it feels that way, to get any work done on a writing project. I’ve already talked about some of the ways you can sneak writing time …
It isn’t always easy to draw a clear line between your main characters and your supporting characters or, at the other end of the character importance spectrum, between your supporting characters and your background characters. And that isn’t a problem most of the time; it’s not like you need to be able to sort everybody …
Continue reading "Are Your Supporting Characters Pulling Their Weight?"
Imagine the scene: you’ve sat down to write, you’re trundling along through your scene, happy as a clam, when you run into a stumbling block. There’s something you realise you haven’t explained—about the world your story is set in, or your character’s backstory, or anything really—and you’re not sure you can proceed without saying at …
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