There is more to storytelling than just spilling your imagination onto the page. What is the three-act structure? How does structure compartmentalise a story? What is a structural map? There’s plotting and subplotting. And characters. What makes for an interesting character? What is an arc? What do readers expect from a character? What is pacing? … Continued
Once you finish writing your manuscript, what do you do next? Submit it somewhere Give it to friends to read Revise. If you answered number 1 or 2, you’re wrong. A first draft shouldn’t go anywhere. You might think it’s brilliant. It’s probably not. A first draft is a spill: ideas, prose, phrasing, idiosyncrasies, crap, … Continued
There are lots of people out there offering fast, nasty mentoring packages. They’re fast, because the mentor wants the quickest turnaround possible, which inflates their bank account. And they’re nasty because, often, the mentor knows very little about writing, or the publishing industry – if anything, they know just enough to bluff their expertise. Usually, … Continued
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything longer than a paragraph. I thought it would feel unfamiliar, but it feels like coming home. My spontaneous hiatus from writing, reading and generally functioning is coming to a close, and I am feeling a hesitant kind of relief. Prior to my internship at Busybird, I had … Continued
Someone once asked me what I would do if I knew I would not fail. I responded, without a shade of hesitation, that I would write a book. Have I? Nope. Do I want to? Most definitely. Will I? I don’t know. What if I fail? For years, the book I have had my heart … Continued
Competitions are exciting. We all want to be recognised. We want our work to be lauded. We want that celebration to spread across the publishing industry and consumer market and let people know we (and our work) exist. We want to mean something. Then you have the practical output: competitions can lead to goodies, like … Continued
Authors often comes to us, asking what means they could employ to improve their manuscript. There’s editing, which would look at the manuscript in terms of structure or copy (or a combination of both). There are also workshops, although they’re designed more to improve the writer’s skills, which they will then apply to their manuscript. … Continued
I take immense pride in writing as a craft, so it annoys me when people trivialise it, consider it a shtick, or don’t take it as seriously as they should. Let me break down some of the things I’ve heard, the outlook some employ, and how they should actually be looking at it … … Continued
