In historical fiction, it’s common for writers to include documents, such as letters, diary entries, and newspaper reports, in their stories. These can be real documents from the period they’re writing about, or they can be fictional documents they’ve created...
Third person limited is one of the most popular viewpoints, and it’s not hard to see why. It allows us to escape the confines of a single character’s head, but there’s still plenty of scope for the reader to form an emotional connection to the story. That said, in the...
Flashbacks are an important part of storytelling, enabling writers to connect the events and actions of the present to things that have happened in the past. They’re a particularly useful tool for demonstrating character motivations and introducing plot twists. If...
Act one is critical. It’s your chance to pull your reader into your story and show them why it’s worth investing their time. In it, you have to 1) persuade them of the quality of your writing, 2) pique their interest in your story world and characters, and 3) show...
Everyone makes mistakes, even seasoned and successful authors. Normally, you don’t know you’re making them until someone else – someone not quite so close to your manuscript – points out the glaringly obvious. So, to help you get a head start, here are the five most...
When you’re trying to find an editor for your novel, it can be hard to make sense of all the different specialisms. Content editor, line editor, copy-editor, proofreader? What do they all mean and which one do you need? To help you make sense of it all, I’ve produced...
Sometimes you read a book and, from the very first page, you know it’s going to be brilliant. Reading The Scarlet Thief, the first novel in Paul Fraser Collard’s popular Jack Lark series, was, for me, one of those times. For anyone not familiar with Paul’s writing,...
Why do readers keep turning the page? The answer is simple – they want to find out what happens. But how do we seed the questions that they want to know the answers to? Mysteries, secrets, and lies are excellent ways of doing this. When used alongside conflict and...
A couple of weeks ago, I published a writing case study that featured Matthew Harffy’s excellent book, The Serpent Sword – the first in his Bernicia Chronicles series. Matthew read the case study and enjoyed it enough to agree to an interview with me as a follow up....
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