Top Ten Writing Mistakes Editors See Every Day

Here, in no particular order, is my top ten list of common mistakes in unpublished (and unpublishable) manuscripts, on a scale of ‘Don’t do this’ to ‘For the love of god, no!’ In my early authorial career, I’m pretty sure I did all of these myself ... I’m writing here of structural and technical issues in the narrative itself, whatever the genre.

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How to Write a Novel

The word ‘narrative’ comes from the Latin verb narrare, ‘to tell,’ which is derived from the adjective gnarus, meaning ‘knowing’ or ‘skilled,’ so a ‘narrative’ is a telling by someone that knows what happened, and has the ability to tell it well. In a novel, the narrative can be usefully broken down into the following components …

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Writing Historical Fiction

Writing historical fiction offers a unique set of challenges: How far should you let the historical record dictate your own plot? Should you dramatize famous historical figures, or should your central character or characters be fictional? How do you build a lost world in the pages of your book? This is also a task that requires meticulous research ...

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Trust Me, I'm a Book Doctor

When I consider the sheer volume of creative writing courses, masterclasses, retreats, manuscript assessment and ‘author solutions’ services currently available to aspiring authors (for example when I can’t sleep), I am often reminded of the rapid rise of Spiritualism, a process that Augustus De Morgan likened to the spread of smallpox.

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Good and Bad Sex in Fiction

Accept that you’ll need to do a lot of re-drafting. A good sex scene can give your novel a bit of sizzle, but, just like the real thing, it can also go horribly wrong, so always be ready with the blue pencil. As Kenneth Williams was fond of saying, ‘Whenever see innuendo in a script I whip it out immediately.’

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Ten Creative Writing Tips from Edgar Allan Poe

Sensations are the great things after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations — they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet. If you wish to write forcibly … pay minute attention to the sensations.

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Becoming Your Own Editor

You can pay someone else to do all this, but the serious writer should be able to edit for themselves. There aren’t any short cuts – you really do have to work through your text line by line. Here are some of the common problems you should be hunting down and fixing...

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Has My Idea Been Done Before?

When Professor Chaos first hit South Park, he was hampered in his evil schemes by the realisation, at every turn, that ‘The Simpsons already did it.’ And as any writer or criminal genius will tell you, the quest for originality routinely brings you to your knees.

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Unveiled

All revolutions start with five people meeting in an upstairs room...

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How to Write the Perfect Christmas Ghost Story

'A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself, “If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!”’

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Calling all New Year’s Resolution Writers

So, you want to write a book. You’ve wanted to write a book for a while now, and this is the year you’re going to do it. While others have sworn off the drink, the cigs, and the chocolate, your New Year’s resolution is to write...

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The 2021 Olga Sinclair Prize for Short Fiction – Judge’s Comments

It was with great pleasure, not to say humility, that I was asked to judge the 2021 Olga Sinclair Prize for Short Fiction, the results of which were announced this evening.

To give you an idea of what I was looking for in the entries, let me offer some advice…

 

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