1. Never tell anyone the plot of your story until you’ve finished writing it. Once you’ve told your story, even in outline, some part of you relaxes. The story-telling urge is fulfilled. You’ve seen your audience react to it, and actually writing the story then becomes something of a chore, like you’re repeating yourself. It’s much better to keep the urge alive, driving you on until you’ve got the story down on paper, and you can then present it to the world in all its glory.

2. Write first, edit later. You can go back and polish the first draft once it’s finished. The important part is to get the bare bones of the story down on the page. Editing comes later. If you spend hours working and re-working every sentence, trying to get it perfect before moving on to the next, you’ll never get anywhere – which is one of my biggest problems and one I have to consciously work against.

3. Think long and hard before you use a word other than “said” to attribute dialogue – and don’t modify it with an adverb if you can help it. Words like “whispered”, “hissed”, “screamed”, “blurted” should be used extremely sparingly, if at all. “Said” is much better. It doesn’t get in the way. Using a word other than “said” can sound clumsy – especially if you then modify it with an adverb like “suspiciously”, “urgently”, “happily”, “grimly”, etc.

4. Write the story one scene at a time. If you’re going to eat an elephant, you have to do it one mouthful at a time. In the same way, you can’t write a whole story or novel in one go. Break the narrative up into a series of important incidents, and then write a scene describing each incident.

5. If an editor askes you to make changes, make them. Don’t be precious about your masterwork. If an editor has taken the trouble to write to you to suggest making a change to your story, it means they’re really interested in it, and usually (if you’re sending your work to reputable editors) they’ll know a damn sight more than you do about what sells in their particular market. If they suggest a change, make it.

I just stumbled across this – a free e-book from poet and business coach Mark McGuinness called Time Management For Creative People, designed to help you maintain your creative focus while dealing with other commitments.

Sometimes when you’re writing, it’s hard to come up with a good name for a character. That’s when I turn to my spam email folder and scan the randomly-generated senders’ names. Just today, for instance, the folder contains emails from:

• Cornelia Kraft
• Abe Keeler
• Roland Floyd
• Nixon Doyle
• Caeser Murphy

If you’re a perfectionist like me, and you spend ages on a first draft trying to make every sentence perfect before moving on to the next, there’s a link on today’s Velcro City Tourist Board to a quote from Anne Lamott that you might find liberating:

“The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go — but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.”

I’m trying something I’ve never tried before – I’m writing a direct sequel to one of my short stories, picking up the characters from the award-winning ‘Sunsets and Hamburgers‘ three years after we last saw them.

The story’s called ‘Movies and Bottled Beer’ and it’s been inspired by Alice Dragoon’s superb reading of ‘Sunsets and Hamburgers’. I listened to it in the car this morning and it’s left me desperately wanting to revisit the characters in order to find out what happens next…

“Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. …Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“Short sentences, short paragraphs, active verbs, authenticity, compression, clarity and immediacy.“

You can learn a lot about brevity and clarity by studying business writing. Here are a few websites I’ve come across in my day job:

• Writing advice from Phil Turner (link via Velcro City).
• Word Wise
• Andy Owen & Associates
• Writing Machine

“Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.” – Goethe