Nail Your Novel
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Nail Your Novel
1M ago
Authenticity is a troublesome concept in the arts at the moment. There are things we’re ‘allowed’ to write, things we’re not ‘allowed’ to write. While this raises valuable debates, authors have always written about characters, places and situations outside their personal circumstances and experience, and made works that are honest and truthful. That’s our craft ..read more
Nail Your Novel
1M ago
I’ve had an email from a high school student who’s writing an English assignment on careers he would like to follow. He said: Would you answer a few questions about your job journey? I’m very interested in what you do. His questions were fairly standard, and they made me realise how most creative careers are anything ..read more
Nail Your Novel
2M ago
What makes a poem a poem? How is it a different beast from richly written literary fiction? In prose, it seems, we can do most of what a poem can do, beyond just telling a story. Creative expression, profound thoughts, metaphors. We can even control how the text falls in the reader’s mind through our ..read more
Nail Your Novel
2M ago
On a podcast recently, scriptwriter Moira Buffini was asked this question. What do you do if a character is boring? ‘Cut them out,’ said Moira. I don’t necessarily agree. Sometimes cutting a character is the right decision. If the narrative is too crowded. Or your brain is. And all writers need to be bold about ..read more
Nail Your Novel
3M ago
Nail Your Novel
4M ago
Melanie Brooks recently launched her memoir A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief, and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all. It’s a book she desperately wanted to write but didn’t, for a long time, know how. The journey to find the book within her is in many ways as profound and changing as the ..read more
Nail Your Novel
4M ago
Holy allsorts, I’ve been judging this prestigious prize! It’s an interesting assignment to read a bunch of books and not have to fix them. So I’m writing this post in celebration, to consider exactly what a good storyteller does. Actually, you already know what a good storyteller does. They gobble your hours and insist you ..read more
Nail Your Novel
4M ago
I’ve just guested again at Litopia, the online writers’ colony and community. Each week they have a YouTube show, Pop-Up Submissions, where four manuscripts are read and critiqued live on air by literary agent Peter Cox @agentpete and a guest, or sometimes two. This time the other guest was longtime Litopian and author Jon Duffy ..read more
Nail Your Novel
5M ago
Steven Belletto has a distinguished career as a professor of literature and the author of several critical works, and all the while he’s been brewing fiction of his own. His first novel is called For You I Would Make An Exception, and keeps the reader on their toes with a deft braiding of genre expectations ..read more
Nail Your Novel
5M ago
This post was originally written for the Writers & Artists Yearbook blog. I included it in a Nanowrimo roundup post and got a note to tell me the link was dead. So here it is, live and kicking. November is National Novel-Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. If you haven’t come across it before, it’s a worldwide ..read more