Category: Articles
For all of my adult life, from my first university right up to the moment that I am typing this up on my keyboard, I have been professionally positioned on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) side of the…
When you are writing a novel, finding your way around the various chapters can be a pain. I often need to make additions, check consistency and of course the frequent “how did I spell his name again?” search. Scrolling around…
Introduction Amongst the writing community, there is a lot of discord and even occasional hatred regarding prologues and epilogues. I am not one of these, and I am basically very supportive of their usage in the right circumstances. But what…
A romance is about love between people. In writing romance, you have to make those people believably interact to create that one extra, and most special character: The relationship itself. How important is gender and sexual orientation to the way…
The rating system has become a kind of Publishing Relativity, with the fewer the stars, the slower the sales. Let’s be clear, left to honest opinions only; even Shakespeare would not always score so high! Because not every book will…
I am doing a set of story cards for my next collection of stories. These will appear in the book itself (‘One Beautiful People’), and also be used to advertise and hopefully get a few people excited. I think the…
Anything in the field of creative art should come from a human soul. All artwork in this article by Michelle Walls As a registered Control Freak, I have always taken on the design duties for my book covers. This was…
Surprisingly to some, there is more than one way of writing in the ‘third person’ and many writers draw clear dividing lines between the approaches. In a previous article, A matter of perspective in storytelling, I took a quick look…
Minds of their own To begin with, writing requires the ability to disassociate oneself from true reality and go with the version that is inside one’s own head. We often call this imagining of other worlds and non-existent people ‘fantasising’,…
Naming a character is the author’s act of creation, of giving a soul to a concept born from the ‘DNA’ made of a chain of her words. Introduction Characters can’t breathe until they have a name that you believe in,…