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Here are ten links we've seen that are worth sharing.
3 Key Ideas to Help You Start Your Novel from Stacey Carroll.
Anna Codrea-Rado on how she writes consistently.
Tom Wolfe's draft outline for Bonfire of the Vanities.
Write Your Novel is a new 8-part podcast series aimed at helping you, the writer, develop your novel draft. Created by novelist Yvonne Battle-Felton, the series features acclaimed writers reading from their books and conversations with the authors around an element of craft. Each episode ends with a writing exercise focusing on the technique the writer discussed. The exercises encourage you to write, re-write, and read.
The Writers Helping Writers site has a nice article on How to Nail the Purpose of Your Novel's Scenes. Readers have a purpose when they sit down and open a book—they have expectations of enjoying a novel they think is in the genre it claims to be in. How upsetting when that novel fails to deliver what’s rightly expected. For every scene in your novel to work, it has to fit genre expectations. Don’t dismiss that.
Now Novel lists Ten Steps to Better Plots. ‘Change’ is what propels a story forward. It’s brought about by character-driven and action-driven scenes.In a thriller novel, for example, character-driven scenes show reader the stakes (the main character’s loving relationship with their child, for example). This makes action-driven sequences such as high-speed chases all the more nail-biting and intense since we are aware of all the personal, cherished things driving the main character’s will to survive. To develop your story satisfyingly, make sure you balance character-driven scenes with action driven ones.
Read Poetry has some magical tips on writing by the phases of the moon. The balsamic moon represents a time of healing. Take time to clean your writing space and add more meaningful objects. Your corner should be a reflection of your soul.
Fantasy Hive has great tips for writing about building a story world that contains real magic. It’s time to ask yourself: Who is using magic? And why them?
Pan Macmillan have selected twelve poems about Autumn that should inspire your writing as we journey through the season.
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
As the Summer ends it's a perfect time to read BBC Culture on the dark side of the seaside and its gaudy, dismal, decline from Victorian pomp to Morrissey welcoming Armageddon. The seaside is a zone where all bets are off. It gives us the opportunity to write our own rules; in some cases, that can mean the usual codes of respectability cease to hold much sway. |
