jumbled letters

Four Best Editing Tips

Morning, writer friends!

Today’s creative writing tip is for you, if you have finished the first draft of a novel. (Congratulations if you have, by the way!)

Here are my four BIG TIPS:

1. Leave your first draft alone for a while – a couple of weeks if possible. Coming to your story with fresh eyes will help enormously.
2. Make a . . .

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Girl in red velvet dress

Strong Words

Hi everyone, and welcome to your creative writing tip of the week!

I make a habit of reading books of the age we publish for at Dernier Publishing, for research. It’s amazing how much you can learn from what other people have written. I thoroughly recommend it (if you’ve been receiving these tips any length of time you’ll know that!).

One book I’ve been reading recently has frequent use . . .

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Ragged child

What One Thing Does Your Protagonist Need?

At the beginning of your story, your protagonist may or may not want or need nothing, but if something doesn’t happen that will jerk him or her into action, you won’t have much of a story.

We all have physical needs – warmth, shelter, clothing, air, medical help, food, clean water, safety. We also have emotional and spiritual needs – we need to love and be loved, to matter, to use the gifts God has given us.

Your protagonist may . . .

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superheroes

Voices

In the Write for a Reason course we are looking at dialogue this week, so I thought I’d share a bit of it with you!

Develop a different voice for each of your characters.

When writing dialogue, give each of your characters their own . . .

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dog and moon

Are You Going To Tell?

This week in the Write for a Reason course we are looking at “showing” instead of “telling” and I thought I’d share a bit with you! Those of you who have been with us for a while may have seen this before, but there’s never any harm going over the basics. Hope you find it useful. 🙂

How do you spot “tells” in your . . .

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tabby cat

Twists and Surprises

This tip isn’t just for writers of Christian fiction, so do share with your writer friends!

Most stories benefit from a twist at the end of the tale. We all like a surprise ending! Perhaps the girl decides to marry the best man, the auntie is really the child’s mother, the baddie wasn’t . . .

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view from window

Cut It Up!

Good morning everyone. Hope you all had a lovely weekend. We managed to have a BBQ with family yesterday and it didn’t rain, although the black clouds rolled over thick and threatening more than once (well, we do live in England!).

I’ve not long come back from a holiday in the mountains, with a fabulous view from the guest house window. Looking over the photos reminded me of a writing . . .

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