Ellie

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… [...]

...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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]