Ellie

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 [...]

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 [...]

(And what to do about it.) There is no two ways about it: writing a novel is a mammoth task that, if you decide to undertake it, is going to consume a significant amount of your waking hours (unless you’re John Boyne). Even so, persistence should eventually bring you to the point where you’re [...]

Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries is – in case you’ve somehow managed to miss all the fuss – a doorstopper of a novel, set in Hokitika in the middle of the gold rush in the 1860s. This Man Booker prize-winning novel is elaborate and complex, with a large cast of characters whose lives are intertwined [...]

Sharing your writing with others and asking for their feedback is daunting at the best of times, but if you want to improve your skills as a writer, it is hands down one of the most useful things you’ll ever do. Receiving a critique of your work, even when you have asked for one, [...]

Tell us a little bit about yourself I live in west Auckland with my grown-up (mostly!) son and my ginger-and-white feline overlord, Fang. I currently wear my hair in a Mohawk cut (‘cos why not?) and for my fiftieth birthday, I decided to have my eyebrow pierced. I am not known for my brilliant [...]