There is something incredibly powerful about a pair of fresh eyes on a manuscript. I often write messy first drafts, usually favouring the camaraderie of NaNoWriMo. The result is underwritten, lacking in subplots and loaded with inconsistencies – my characters will almost certainly change job/eye colour/personality between those first wonderfully

Writing can be a lonely old pastime, spending hours and hours with your characters, who are great (of course they are, you created them!), but not, of course, real people. One of the things I’ve learnt as both author and editor, is that writing friends are invaluable.  Before I was

Screenwriter William Goldman says, ‘You always attack a movie scene as late as you possibly can. You always come into the scene at the last possible moment.’  The mantra is: Arrive late and leave early. And the same should be true of fiction.  Arriving at a scene or plot as late

If you’re anything like me, you will have the beginning of hundreds of stories planned, written and scrapped. This is a habit I started in Year 6 of primary school and continue to this day. So how do you get to the end of your manuscript? Here’s how to get

If you’re anything like me, I thoroughly enjoyed the run up to Christmas, Christmas day itself and the cheese induced haze that followed. But very quickly my mind turns to the new year and how I can be a better person (and more importantly, a better writer /editor). As the

What happens after you’ve completed your first draft? You’ve written every day (or nearly every day) for a month and after all the plot wrangling, character exploration and getting words down onto the page – whether they wanted to get written or not – you’ve got a first draft of

Write the big stuff small and the small stuff big In romance writing, as in life, it’s the small things that count: the brush of a hair away from the face, an unexpected touch of the hand, a glance across the top of a piano (thank you BBC’s Pride and

Two things prompted me to write this post. First, my realisation that by focusing on querying and editing, I’d not written anything for a very long time. Second, I’m sitting here with my feet in a bowl and it’s just lovely. I was starting to feel guilty, anxious even, having

Editing can be a huge investment – in both time and money – especially for the new author who is yet to make anything from their writing. It can also be a risk, particularly if you pass your manuscript to an editor too soon. If there are things you can

I recently discovered the term ‘As you know Bob.’ I loved it instantly because the terminology made me giggle, and the meaning levelled up my writing – almost immediately. Put simply, ‘As you know Bob’ is where two characters have a conversation about something which, in real life, they would

So, you’ve just finished your manuscript. It’s been to a couple of friends or beta readers and you’ve completed at least one self edit. Soon, you hope to publish your writing and share it with the world. But before you do, you’ll want to work with a professional editor. Editing