Harry Potter and the End of Chapter 3
Earlier this week, J K Rowling posted this on Twitter: Quite coincidentally, a couple of days earlier I’d just started doing what the sign said I shouldn’t; rereading Harry Potter…
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Four publishing lessons in four minutes
In 1995, my first novel, Telling Stories, won the Reed Fiction Award for the best unpublished novel. The prize was $5,000, a flight to the Dunedin Writers Festival to receive…
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5 Quotes from Ian Rankin
Ian Rankin is author of 21 Inspector Rebus novels along with 20 others. He’s also written plays, graphic novels, short stories and an opera(!). Photo…
Read more »15 Famous Rejection Slips
Rejection slips are part of a writer’s landscape. All authors get them at one time or another, and they usually reflect the opinion of one particular reader — often an…
Read more »The Lester Dent / Doc Savage Master Plot Method
Lester Dent was the real name of the author almost all of the Doc Savage novels. (They appeared under the pen name Kenneth Robeson, a creation of his publisher.) There…
Read more »Writing with a tomato
The Pomodoro Technique is a method of time-management many writers find useful. It was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980’s and takes its name from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer…
Read more »Advice from J K Rowling
When J K Rowling spotted a Twitter comment from @beauty_jackson that read: “HEY! YOU! You’re working on something and you’re thinking ‘Nobody’s gonna watch, read, listen’. Finish it anyway.” she…
Read more »Check your popularity with n-grams
Y’all know about n-grams, right? Wikipedia nails ’em: … an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sequence of text or speech. The items can be phonemes,…
Read more »Lee Child on writing and research
A while back I asked Lee Child a question. Not in person, but via a Goodreads author promotion, and he was gracious enough to give a detailed reply. I suspect…
Read more »Bad writing for beginners
Toby Litt on bad writing: Bad writing is mainly boring writing. It can be boring because it is too confused or too logical, or boring because it is hysterical or…
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