fiction

  • Monstrous Mistakes!

    In my blog, I’ve mentioned the importance of checking your work through for mistakes. It’s so easy to miss a full stop off the end of a sentence, misspell a word, place speech marks in the wrong place, leave a word out or add one in where there shouldn’t be one and so on. Some…

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  • My Writing Week

    My ‘Writers Bureau’ in-box is full this week, with many students looking to send in assignments before the Christmas break. After all, it’s December Sunday so not long to go! I’m also doing the same as my students and submitting articles and short stories before the end of year deadlines so all in all, a…

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  • Top Tip Of The Week

    Crafty Commas! A lot of new writers are unsure where commas should be placed when writing dialogue. Here’s a guide to help you: If you lead into a passage of speech with ownership, a comma should be placed before the words of speech e.g.: Sarah said, “Would you like a cup of tea?” Alternatively, if…

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  • The women’s weeklies are jam packed with jaw-dropping and dramatic stories. Surely they aren’t something to be considered by a real writer? These magazines do pay extremely well, sometimes offering £100 for a star letter of only a hundred words or so. True-life tales pay bigger money with some earning the story-teller a whopping £1000.…

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  • Top Tip Of The Week

    Naughty Numbers! Last week, it was page numbers and this week, it’s numbers in the body of your work. Are you sometimes unsure whether you should write numbers in word or figures e.g. ‘8’ or ‘eight’? Generally the numbers one to ten are written in words and those that come after are written in figures.…

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  • An Electrifying Ending!

    Last week I started you off with a short story beginning. I hope you found it useful in sowing the seeds of a story in your mind and allowing you to develop it further for yourself. Now here’s an ending (again, as with the ‘blistering’ of last week, ‘electrifying’ is rather an exaggeration but, as…

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  • Top Tip Of The Week

    Page Numbers! With more and more publications accepting submissions by e-mail, it’s easy to get out of the habit of adding page numbers to your work but it’s always useful to include them. The editor may wish to print out a copy of your work. If the pages are numbered, he/she can clearly see the…

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  • Sometimes it can be difficult to start a short story off. Perhaps the title won’t come, or the opening line just doesn’t flow. Or maybe that’s all going smoothly but you’re stuck after coming up with an eye-catching title and enticing opening. Here’s a beginning to help you (ok, it’s not exactly blistering but the…

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  • My Writing Week

    A gentle ease-in – or not?! I’m sure most of you will know just what I mean by it taking a week after a holiday to get back into work mode. Though, work often has other ideas! ‘The Writers Bureau’ is always busy so I have a lot of catching up to do there so…

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  • Top Tip Of The Week

    My tip for writers this week is to read, read and read. This applies to magazines and books. Not only are they entertaining, they can help you in your own writing including, how to structure paragraphs, setting passages of speech out, as well as grammar and punctuation issues. It was while reading an Enid Blyton…

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