It’s amazing how often you think you are completely finished with your editing only to look over your work again to find it strewn with errors. Sometimes these errors are just typos and mistakes with punctuation and at other times they are more serious. What these errors show you is just how important proofreading is. [...]
Sometimes it seems as though the world is against you when you are a young writer. If you haven’t experienced a whole lot in your day to day life then you can find yourself without any real subject to act as a vehicle for your creative talent and you may not have the time to [...]
One of the things that every budding writer should have is a vocab book. You can use an address book because it is already laid out alphabetically, but make sure it is a reasonably thick one because there are just so many words out there you’ll want to jot down and remember. When you are [...]
Clichés are a serious problem for lots of aspiring writers. You need to avoid them wherever possible, because all they do is mark your work as unoriginal. Clichés might appear as sections of plot that use often-seen bits of action with characters that are too recognisable to feel original and exciting. However, they may also [...]
You should always make sure that you follow an agent’s guidelines when you submit material to them. You’ll often find that agents will routinely disregard material that doesn’t meet their exact criteria. The following stipulations usually come into play for all submissions: • Double spacing • Precise font and font size • Page numbering • [...]
Nothing is more certain to put an agent or editor off your work than basic errors. You should make sure that your work is absolutely devoid of simple grammatical and spelling mistakes before you send it for assessment. This means proofreading. You should only proofread when you are feeling alert otherwise you are wasting your [...]
There is nothing quite like writing a novel when it comes to practising your style. Even if you finish a novel which does not get taken up by a publisher, the mere act of completing it will give you confidence to go on writing. It is not uncommon for writers to begin their second novel [...]
Perhaps the most winning attribute a budding novelist can have is determination. It takes dogged persistence to get through those difficult passages that seem to present such impassable barriers when you are at different stages in your novel. However, the persistence required to finish the novel itself is not where it stops. You need to [...]
As most writers know, finding time to sit and write as you have a great idea is unlikely. Keep a pen and notebook with you AT ALL TIMES and you can jot down any particular inspiration or sentence/line that you have thought of. You can then refer back to your notes when you have a [...]
A great writing lecturer once told me that, in order to write your best work and effectively edit and take criticism, you have to be fully prepared to kill your babies. What he meant (rather than brutal child murder), is that your favourite line in a poem, or paragraph in a story, or chapter in [...]
