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Cooking up Great Book Buzz: An Author’s Experience
In an earlier post for WU, I wrote about the process of writing my audio-first novel for adults, A Hundred Words for Butterfly, and how it had differed from other novels I’ve written, because of the...
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Naming Characters
Naming characters is one of the fun things about creating stories. But it can also be one of the most troublesome. Sometimes names for your characters just pop into your head, other times you have to...
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First Impressions: Book Covers
It’s a new year, and a new occasion to have another look at a fascinating topic. Almost ten years ago to the day, I wrote a piece for Writer Unboxed about book covers, so I thought this was the...
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Story Strands: Using Varied Narrative Forms in a Novel
Newspaper articles, extracts from books, diary entries, audio transcripts, records of phone calls, email chains, text messages, social media posts: all of these and more can be and are used in novels...
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The Hardworking Magic of Book Design
One of the things that has struck me most forcibly throughout my career as a writer and, later, as publishing director of a small press as well, is how important good book design is. Humans are visual...
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Tense and Tension
It’s such a basic part of the framework of writing that sometimes we forget how effective it can be, playing around with it. I’m talking about tense, and how varying it within a story, from past to...
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Food in Fiction
In life, people’s days are punctuated by meals. Food is an important part of our lives: of course, we need it for survival, but it’s much more than that. It’s pleasure, it’s penance, it’s anxiety,...
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The Last Word: Epilogues
There’s a lot to be said for and against prologues, as WU contributor Dave King has pointed out in two excellent posts recently. But what about epilogues? Certainly not all novels have them. Certainly...
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Living and Writing in a Regional Area
Armidale autumn street(photo by Sophie Masson) Although I was brought up partly in Sydney, Australia, and partly in France where I’m originally from, over the whole of my professional career as a...
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Working With an Editor
I’m just at the very end of the editing process for an upcoming novel of mine, and it’s got me thinking again about the extraordinary job of an editor, and how it’s such a wonderful thing working with...
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