I was reading the Guardian bookclub article today and it was a short piece about coincidence. It is a matter of coincidence that I have been tinkering with in a touch-up of my oh-so-nearly finished novel recently. There is, in the fourth chapter, a coincidental moment that takes control of the story and gets my protagonist toContinue reading “It’s a narrow world”
Category Archives: second draft
My recent adventures with short stories
I have been writing a lot of short stories lately. I hadn’t written one for ages, I think the last one I wrote was the first one I sold and that was in 2007. My novel took up all of my time since then but recently I decided to take a break from it (thereContinue reading “My recent adventures with short stories”
Writing the synopsis
As if finishing a novel wasn’t a taxing enough task there waits an even harder ordeal once it is done. Taking the ninety thousand words already written and then collapsing it into a couple of pages in a way that sums it up briefly, gives a sense of the style, themes, plot and character andContinue reading “Writing the synopsis”
How to finish a novel
My novel is nearly finished. But then again it has been nearly finished for about six months. The problem isn’t that I haven’t been working on it, it’s that my definition of ‘finished’ keeps changing. The euphoria that followed that completed first draft quickly subsided with the acknowledgment that everything I had read turned outContinue reading “How to finish a novel”
That difficult second draft pt 2
A few months ago I was working in a job that afforded me a bit more down time than I was used to and so, knowing that the first draft of my book was almost complete, I spent a lot of that time reading as much advice as I could on how to take aContinue reading “That difficult second draft pt 2”
