tips for writers
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Last week, I was guest blogger on ‘The Writers Bureau’ weekly blog. My tip advised writers not to throw away old work. You might be able to tweak an article or story and send it to a different market. Even if you look at a piece of work and think Yes, I can see why
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Apologies for interrupting my weekly series to bring you news of the launch of my book. Normal business is now resumed! But I would like to thank you all for the support you’ve given me with the book 🙂 This week, I’m covering the D, E and F of short story ideas. I hope they
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Take a deep breath and just do it! In my role as a writing tutor and through meeting lots of writers through various media, I’ve found that many don’t send their work out. The reason? For some, they simply enjoy writing and want to write for themselves which is fine. For others they’re too scared,
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Building on my top tip from last week and the topic of dialogue, how do you differentiate between direct speech and indirect speech? New writers are often confused so here’s some help: Direct speech is where the character says the words for himself e.g.: “How dare you copy my answers! I’ve worked hard for this
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This is the first in a new weekly series of short story ideas. I ran a series of A-Z article ideas a short while ago and thought it only fair that short stories had their turn. I hope you find it helpful in stimulating your writing mind: A is for AMBULANCE: When you think of
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Dreary Dialogue So, you want your dialogue to sound as realistic as possible? If you listen to everyday speech, you’ll notice that it goes something like the following: “How are you today, Mavis?” “Oh, I’m…er…not too bad. Well…um, now you mention it…uh, it’s…you know…well, this knee, um…well, I just have to…you know, put up with
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Do you feel as if your writing needs a change of direction? Have you ever thought about copywriting? Don’t even know what it is? I was in exactly the same boat a few years ago. Read on and perhaps it’ll set you thinking about trying something new: A Copywriting Career I hadn’t ever thought about
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Check, check, check! It’s so important to check your work before you send it out. Mistakes easily creep in. Set your work aside for a few days and then read it through. If you leave it for a while, you then see it anew and mistakes stand out. To show you how easy it is
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If you’re writing a short story or novel and one character has a large passage of dialogue, you can break it down into shorter paragraphs rather than one big block of words. This helps readability. You’ll find an example below. As you’ll see, each paragraph should begin with speech marks, but only the last paragraph
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The Numbers Game A lot of publications and competitions now accept work by e-mail but some still prefer work to be submitted by post or accept both. If you’re sending an article, short story or novel by post, always number your pages. In busy offices with lots of different scripts, it’s easy for pages to
Esther Chilton 