We’ve reached the hard part of the creative process: STARTING. This is the moment of commitment. You’ve made your choice, you have an idea – now you must start writing. This is when the demons come out to play and procrastination takes over your life. Suddenly there’s a million other things you need to do… Continue reading The Creative Process: Starting to Write
CHOOSING is the second stage of the creative process and it starts with a question: what do I write? Inspiration has struck and you’re buzzing with ideas. Now you must choose between them. Choosing is unavoidable if you want to create. In fact, choosing is unavoidable if you want to live. But choosing is hard… Continue reading The Creative Process: Choosing the right idea
WISHING is the first stage of the creative process and is about nurturing your desire to create something. This is where you look for ideas and inspiration, and research stories to obsess over. The Desire to Create To create anything you need a space in which to do it – not just a room of… Continue reading The Creative Process: Nurturing your creativity
Writing a book is a transformative experience – terrifying and thrilling at the same time – like exploring a jungle or climbing a mountain. The process can take many twists and turns and you never know where you’ll end up. With that in mind, this series will explore the creative process and map out some… Continue reading A Writer’s Guide to the Creative Process
I learned a lot in 2014. For most of my life I believed it was me who was crazy, but last year that changed. I was finally able to say: it’s not me, it’s the culture I live in. The world is going to hell. We appear to be driving at full speed into a… Continue reading 2015: The Year of Living Dangerously
Writers hate rejection. So does everybody else, but writers and other creative souls will experience more than their share of the dreaded scourge. There aren’t many other occupations that have to deal with such high levels of criticism and sheer indifference. There are many ways to deal with rejection. Getting drunk and gorging yourself on… Continue reading How to Deal with Rejection
Writing a synopsis is one of my least favourite activities and I’ll do almost anything to avoid it. But a well written synopsis is essential if you want to sell the book you’ve been working on for months/years. A synopsis is the sales pitch for your novel and it’s designed to entice an agent or… Continue reading How to Write a Synopsis
Creating dialogue is one of the most enjoyable and the most challenging parts of writing. Dialogue isn’t like real speech. If you write dialogue to resemble real speech you’ll end up with something unreadable. If you don’t believe me, record a conversation between your friends or family, then transcribe it word for word. It’s a… Continue reading How to Write Dialogue
Description is the bedrock of storytelling. Good description brings a scene to life and makes it vivid in the reader’s imagination. This is achieved by following one of writing’s sacred rules: Show, Don’t Tell If you write your story by showing the reader what’s happening rather than just telling them, it’s more involving. It draws the… Continue reading How to Write Description
At the heart of every successful novel are good characters. And by ‘good’ I don’t mean a character who never does anything bad, is kind to small animals and children, and never swears. Well written characters bring a story to life and give the reader someone to care about, root for, or even love to… Continue reading How to Write Characters
Before you begin to write a story there’s one crucial choice to make: who is the narrator? The narrator is the character(s) telling the story, whether that’s the protagonist, multiple characters, or an observer. The point of view (POV) taken by the narrator is the reader’s way in to the story – it’s how they… Continue reading How to Write Point of View
The hardest part of writing a novel is the opening. As attention spans shrink and a million distractions pull at our minds, it’s harder than ever to get people to sit still long enough to read to the end of the first page, let alone the first paragraph. An average novel is between 80,000 to… Continue reading How to Write Opening Lines
Jessica Davidson 