A new year means a new beginning for many people, and it presents an irresistible opportunity for me to talk about beginning a story, even if most of you are probably in the middle of something at the moment. The first question that comes to mind is
Read more →Since it is two weeks until The Dark Lord’s Daughter goes on sale and my brain is entirely full of all the fuss around the book launch, I thought I would talk some about the way the book opens and why and how I made some of
Read more →One of my best friends is in need of some writing advice. She says: “I have vague ideas, or scenes, or a few lines of dialogue about a given idea, which I try to make notes of as they come. But I don’t know how or have
Read more →“Beginning: The point in time or space when something starts.” – Oxford languages. From that deceptively simple definition stems a lot of writerly misunderstanding. At a rough and very unscientific estimate, around 90% of the writing advice on beginnings talks about what belongs in the first few
Read more →As near as I can tell, “prewriting” is a trendy catch-all term for “everything a writer does before they actually sit down and start writing the story.” Even that definition is a little dicey, given how many writers go through a stage where they’re writing down bits
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