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I like character questionnaires but I don’t do them slavishly. If there are questions where I don’t know the answer and I don’t care, I leave them. However other questions may provoke a stream of thoughts that go off on a tangent and I follow them. I find they are a useful tool (and that is all) when I want to work on a particular character and…[Read more]

Rewriting it has been on the back of my mind. I’ve felt this way about some of my short yarns before, and rewrote them into stories that were published and I’m now proud of. I didn’t think of it as rewriting, more like “extensive revisions,” maybe because that doesn’t sound so daunting as rewriting. That’s probably what I’ll end up doing with the…[Read more]

Doug – if your writing strikes you as ‘amateurish’, it’s probably a good thing; it means that, in the time since you originally wrote the novel you have grown and developed as a writer and are already – subconsciously – aware of it.

It’s very hard to do, but have you considered completely rewriting the story from scratch? It’s something I did…[Read more]

I once tried out a character questionnaire from Emma Darwin’s blog on a principal character of mine, and my answer to seven out of twenty-one questions was ‘Dunno’ and/or ‘Does it really matter?’ Some of the other answers were pretty vague. But while writing the story I never had any difficulty in imagining what she’d say or do.

The character questionnaire. I’m with Richard. I don’t doubt they’re great if you find them useful but for me they are disheartening.

The other ‘favourite’ which sends my spirits groundwards is the implication, sometimes a very thinly-veiled instruction, that creative prose should learn from film or TV. If studying that medium helps fire…[Read more]

Thanks for all your replies! They are refreshing, helpful, and sharpen my perspective on things. They also bring things to mind that I’ve read in the past, like Ray Bradbury’s dashing off the whole first draft with the creative side of his brain, shutting off the editor side until the draft’s finished and cooled off.

Dean Koontz, who describes…[Read more]

Everybody has their own way of working; mine is very like Tony’s above. The important thing, I believe, is to find out which way suits you best, and not put yourself in a creative strait-jacket by blindly following some ‘rule.’ What works for some people may not work for you.

For example, we keep hearing ‘cut, cut, cut’ when it comes to editing,…[Read more]

Hi all, I’m not yet fully versed in the ways of the craft and have wavered between perfectionism and writing tens of thousands of words without any edits. I certainly prefer the latter, but the former seems to bring something to the table.

I started a novel back in 2013 as I managed a hotel in the Peruvian Andes, and all these years later I’m…[Read more]

Midsummer madness

The queue was going nowhere. He gave up wiping the sweat; it poured in carefree torrents down his forehead, around his nose and dripped from his lips and chin onto the white, cotton shirt his wife had bought him for his birthday back in November.
‘It will look great on you in the summer when we’re in Greece!’ she had said.…[Read more]

Am I allowed to agree with all of you? When a writer like Stephen King just says something and it works, it’s because he is utterly confident with his voice. I’m not his biggest fan, but I have read a lot of his work and I do appreciate the extraordinary flow of his prose. I’m willing to bet he’s not on the heavy side when he edits.

I’m terrible.…[Read more]

Mad has touched on what I posted (and lost!) yesterday.

Sometimes, I think we confuse perfectionism with finding our own, unique writer’s voice. We try so hard to make it sound ‘right’ that we forget we’re trying to express something of who we are, who our characters are, within the world we’ve created. Of course we want to make our stories the…[Read more]

Great news Kate – well done!!

Perfectionism is a curse. But the desire for perfection is necessary, if we’re ever to get to be as good as we can be.
Every time I re-read anything I’ve ever written, I find myself changing a word here, a phrase there. A sentence can be cut completely and rewritten, and in the next rewrite, it comes back again.
I found comfort in the quote from…[Read more]