by Ian McHugh (writing at ianmchugh.wordpress.com) I’ve been talking with my little girl, age 8, about how stories work. This started a couple of years ago when we read the first of Cressida Cowell’s How To Train Your Dragon books. When the hero, Hiccup, got exiled from his Viking tribe at about [...]
by Ian McHugh (writing at ianmchugh.wordpress.com) A common question that crops up at writing workshops is “How do you go about getting stories published?” So much so that I’ve started building the short version of the answer into my workshop introductions. The short answer goes like this: McHugh’s 3-step Guide [...]
by Leife Shallcross (writing at leifeshallcross.wordpress.com) In 2011, when I decided to ‘get serious’ about my writing, one of the first things I did was book myself into a Year of the Novel course with the very knowledgeable and generous Craig Cormick, through the ACT Writers Centre. One of the [...]
by Zena Shapter (writing at www.zenashapter.com) A writer-friend asked me the other day how I handle rejection. What a great topic for a blog, I thought! Over the years, I’ve developed a fantastic set of tactics to handle rejection, so I thought I’d share them with you… PLEASE NOTE: these [...]
Guest post by the CSFG Hive Mind (written by Ian McHugh) Star Wars being the endless font of storytelling wisdom and etceteras that it is, and after some lively discussion at our monthly CSFG members’ meeting, Everything I Know About Storytelling I Learned From Star Wars has spawned a not-very-long-awaited [...]
by Dr Gillian Polack (writing at Queensland Writers Centre) Some days, it’s hard to think in sound bites. We work at it. We make our pitch perfect; we communicate a digest form of our grand idea. The idea is, of course, to lure readers. As writers, we’re trained to summarise [...]
Guest post by Ian McHugh The first drafts of stories tend to be turds. That can be a difficult thing to admit about your newly completed masterpiece, but it’s okay: Mythbusters have proved that you really can polish a turd. The easiest way to figure out how to polish up your [...]
Guest post by Chris Andrews A few years back I found myself with an unwieldy manuscript that wasn’t working, and I couldn’t figure out why. So I rewrote the ending and half the story before applying for two manuscript development programs. I made the short list for both. BUT it [...]
by Phill Berrie (at Phill's Follies) Was Shakespeare really Francis Bacon? Or perhaps William Shakespeare was the name Christopher Marlowe used to publish his plays after secretly escaping death and fleeing into exile. These are both serious possibilities being studied by literature scholars(*) using computers and stylometric techniques like word [...]
Guest post by Nicole R Murphy I love being an editor. I love working with stories. I love identifying an author’s strengths and using those to work on the weaknesses. I love the ‘aha’ moment when an author really GETS their story and then it flies. If you’ve never been [...]