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About Ellie

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So far Ellie has created 14 blog entries.

Writing: good, bad and brilliant

We’ve all read one: a book so badly written that it made us want to fling it across the room rather than put up with reading another chapter. (Some of us will have struggled through to the end, while some of us might actually have flung it across the room…) When a book is [...]

Writing: good, bad and brilliant2023-09-18T22:31:47+12:00

Has your story stalled? Three solutions to revitalize your writing!

We’ve all experienced that horrible feeling of getting stuck. We had a perfectly good story idea, maybe we even got started writing it, but now we’re unable to make any progress. Maybe you call it ‘writer’s block’, maybe you’d describe it as feeling ‘lost’ as to where your story is going, or maybe for [...]

Has your story stalled? Three solutions to revitalize your writing!2023-04-12T19:58:19+12:00

Two (counter intuitive) secrets of writing good dialogue

Good dialogue should be easy to write, right? After all, we all have a lot of real-life experience to draw on for inspiration. We spend a lot of our time having conversations with our friends, family and colleagues, and we’re constantly hearing fragments of other people’s conversations in cafes, at bus stops, at work… [...]

Two (counter intuitive) secrets of writing good dialogue2023-03-31T23:01:56+13:00

Why don’t my villain’s “redeeming characteristics” work?

...and how do I genuinely make my villain more human? If the villain of your story insists on demanding huge ransoms while cackling demonically and perhaps even stroking a pet cat, it’s time to do some serious editing! And your villain doesn’t need to be exaggerated to need editing – they may be just [...]

Why don’t my villain’s “redeeming characteristics” work?2022-05-03T19:28:17+12:00

How to be a productive writer this year – our top three tips

New year, new blank page. Have you made a new year’s resolution to write more, to get started on that novel, or something along those lines? Whether you’re one to make resolutions or one to just be generally determined to become a more productive writer in 2022, we’ve got some tips for you to [...]

How to be a productive writer this year – our top three tips2022-01-07T08:03:05+13:00

Help – my character is misbehaving!

Oh, the horror of that moment, when you know exactly what should be happening next in your story, but it’s clear that your character has other ideas. Some of us like to keep a tight rein on our characters and stay in control of the plot at all times, while others prefer to let [...]

Help – my character is misbehaving!2021-12-18T14:24:15+13:00

How to win at NaNoWriMo

It’s November – National Novel Writing Month! If you haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, it’s a challenge where you attempt to write the first 50,000 words of a novel between the 1st and 30th of November. That averages out at 1,667 words a day, which, though challenging, is an achievable target. Taking part in National [...]

How to win at NaNoWriMo2021-11-01T21:00:06+13:00

Help – my character is boring!

Three tips for transforming a character from dreary to intriguing Have you ever had a character just sit there on the page – not literally, of course, but figuratively – simply refusing to do anything exciting? One of the (many, many) challenging aspects of being a writer is that our task is to create [...]

Help – my character is boring!2021-06-03T11:42:19+12:00

Why are adjectives so terrible? (And what to use instead)

It’s advice that writers hear time and time again – kill your adjectives. But why? What have adjectives ever done to us that they don’t deserve a place in our stories? Of course there is a place for a select few adjectives in stories, but all too often adjectives are committing the writerly sin [...]

Why are adjectives so terrible? (And what to use instead)2021-05-13T21:55:26+12:00

Why ten words a day is a good writing goal

I was talking to a writer recently who had set themselves the goal of writing ten words a day in 2021. That might seem like an odd goal to have (“Ten words is a sentence or two! It adds up to about one chapter a year! Why not be more ambitious?”) but we talked [...]

Why ten words a day is a good writing goal2021-03-14T12:17:59+13:00
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