How To Write Fiction

HOW I CAME TO WRITE A NOVEL AND WHAT IT TAUGHT ME How I came to finally write my book. Or advice for fiction writers on how to develop the skills, techniques and mindset required to write a novel.  After many years of talking about it, I finally got around to writing a novel. It’s a thriller called  The Ninth Death of Zachary Green. It wasn’t necessarily the novel I thought I was going to write. But I wrote it and the process taught me more about writing than I could have ever imagined. It’s why I’m going to be posting…

A LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF Or tips for fiction writers who are struggling with feelings of self-doubt and need to boost their confidence.   Dear 25-year-old Nick I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that you’re going to do it, kid. You are going to write your novel. It’s going to take you longer than you’d imagine, but you’re going to crack it. You’re going to successfully create a plot that works. You’re going to dream up a cast of characters to drive your story forward. And you’re going to get to say lots of…

EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES THAT’LL GET YOU WRITING What is writer’s block? The short answer to that is it’s a pain in the tuchus. Anyone who’s written has endured it to some degree. As a journalist, I most commonly encounter it when I’m trying to start a piece. By contrast, when I was writing my first novel, I found that writer’s block could strike at any time and was far more tricky to overcome.  Through the course of writing my book, however, I realised that every case of writer’s block is essentially caused by the same thing, regardless of what you’re writing. It’s a fundamental lack of self-belief…

BASIC WAYS TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF YOUR WORK ‘Know your enemy.’ So wrote Sun Tzu over 2,000 years ago. OK, so he might have been talking about how to defeat Chinese warlords but it’s a great bit of advice. Especially for us writers. Because if you recognise the enemies of good writing, you can eliminate them from your work. And if you do that, you’ll instantly improve the quality of it, as well as your writing style.  I’ve picked up much of what I know about writing from my years working as a journalist, copywriter and editor. But, as…

TECHNIQUES THAT’LL HELP MAKE YOUR WRITING SHINE Welcome to part two of this post about how to improve your writing style. In part one, I talked about the need to identify and eradicate the enemies of good writing. If you missed it, you can read it here. In this post, I want to delve deeper not that subject and reveal some of the tricks and techniques I picked up while writing my first novel The Ninth Death of Zachary Green. As such, it’s aimed primarily at fiction writers but, hey, if you’re all about the non-fiction you may find some useful stuff in here, too. Read on to…