Tag Archives: first drafts

The best of Ray Bradbury’s advice for writers

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This is my writer’s discovery of the day! A lecture by Ray Bradbury at the Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium. No matter that it was 10 years ago. His wit shines and his advice holds true in a timeless way. Besides The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes, Mr. Bradbury wrote over 30 novels, as well as 600 short stories and essays in every genre. In fact, he spent years writing short stories before he even tackled his first novel, which was, by the… Continue reading →

Four great books on ‘How to write a book’

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There’s no shortage of people who want to help writers. Googling ‘how to write a book’ produces over 46 million results. Change the term search to the slightly more cynical ‘so you want to write a book?’ gets you close to 3 million results. Try searching Amazon with ‘how to write a book’ and you have almost 10,000 book covers shouting (you can almost hear some of them) written by people who promise you’ll learn everything you need to know in 30 days. And it’ll… Continue reading →

Writing a book? Don’t start at the beginning!

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In case you haven’t already discovered this, or simply need a reality check, novels don’t grow in a linear fashion and first chapters don’t usually get written first. Logically, the beginning seems like the only place to start and If you were doing anything else except writing a book, it would be. But gathering ideas for a story is like plucking at tufts of clouds and tucking them into the right places in your story without destroying their essence once you’ve flatly adhered them to paper.… Continue reading →

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