Category: Creative writing tips

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 . . .

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 . . .

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 . . .

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 . . .

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 . . .

Last week we took a look at writing your final page before you’d written the beginning (or at least, got very far into your novel).

But what if you find yourself going over and over the ending and getting frustrated, because you can’t seem . . .

Do you:

start writing at the beginning of your novel?
write the ending first?

I know it sounds crazy, but there is some merit in having the final page all sown up before you’ve written the bulk of your novel . . .

Good Morning Writer Friends!

Ready for another writing tip? This time you’re going to have to do some work! 🙂

However long ago school was for you, I’m sure you will remember at least some of the novels you studied for English. We dived into Graham Green’s Brighton Rock, amongst others, for O levels (yes, I really am that old!). I read An Inspector Calls when . . .