Guest post by Ian McHugh One major challenge of stepping up from short stories to novels is managing a larger ensemble of characters. In my impetuousness, I exacerbated this problem for myself by starting from real historical events. Reality is way less tidy than fiction. In real life, people bob up [...]
Guest post by Zena Shapter I didn’t mean to become one, but over the last few years I’ve become a social media consultant. Writers started asking me how to use social media and, after a while, I thought – why not? Since I know about social media … why not [...]
Guest post by Ian McHugh Something writers are often exhorted to do is “write what you know”. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your stories should reflect the literal truth of your lived experience, although they can. My first published story, “The Alchemical Automaton Blues” was basically a recounting of a real [...]
Guest post by Zena Shapter Why is it that we only realise how bad we were at writing novels… once we’re finally good at writing them? When I finished writing my first novel, I honestly thought it would be a simple matter of promoting it to the right agent or [...]
Guest post by Ian McHugh Some of the best advice I ever got as a writer was to “file off the serial numbers” from stories I admired and use what I’d got from them in my own work. This is, as it sounds, an exhortation to steal – shamelessly – but [...]
Guest post by Zena Shapter I’ve had this thought so many times… Wouldn’t it be nice to do nothing else in life but write? Usually it’s when I’m working on an uninspiring work project, on my hands and knees cleaning up milk spilt by the kids (yet again), or washing [...]
Guest post by Ian McHugh I didn’t start writing stories – at least, not with the serious intention of having them published – until the year I turned thirty. Prior to that I’d fiddled about with ideas and worlds, maps, creatures and characters, even plots and actual scenes without ever progressing [...]
Guest post by Zena Shapter I was sick this week. I was run-down, had the flu, was tired and slept a lot. My hubbie took over where he could. My children patted me and said ‘poor Mummy’. One day I opened the front door to some door-to-door sellers of solar [...]
Guest post by Ian McHugh I think a lot of people come at this notion the wrong way – that, in writing, you must kill your darlings. A friend in my writers’ group was talking one day about his long-term novel project in these terms – that he needed to kill [...]
Guest post by Zena Shapter Time – as writers it’s probably our most precious commodity. We need it to write. We’d give anything to have more of it. We juggle it. We savour it. We devour it. Sitting down at my computer to write, time can vanish in an instant [...]