fiction
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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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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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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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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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For those of you living in the UK, you’ll be lucky if you escaped a good soaking this week. The heatwave of the summer seems a little distant but perhaps my writing exercise will help you to find that ray of sunshine: You have two themes to pick from: Holiday Heaven Holiday Hell You can…
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Headless Chicken! This and ‘two steps forward and three steps back’ are words which come to mind this week. As any self-employed person, or most employees for that matter, knows, it’s not easy trying to get up straight when you’re taking a week off. It’s half-term next week and I’ll be away (as will my…
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Three dots is plenty! My top tips have included advice on not overdoing exclamation marks as well as dashes. Now it’s the turn of the three dots… An example of when this is used is where a character’s words trail off in speech e.g.: “I need some time to think about it…I’ll let you know…”…
Esther Chilton 