Category: Writing tips

When editing, I often find myself pulling out a key sentence from a long paragraph to stand on its own. These are important, emotional moments. You might think the reader will understand their impact on the story either way. So why does it matter how they sit on the page?… Continue Reading... "Why the space around your writing can be just as important as the words themselves…"

First drafts are often full of repetition. When you’re in writing mode, trying to get words onto the page, it’s very easy to end up using the same word a number of times without noticing. But it’s one of those things that stands out very clearly when you read your… Continue Reading... "Repetition, repetition, repetition: is it always a bad thing?"

For Halloween 2021, I challenged myself to tweet a piece of horror writing advice every hour throughout the spookiest day of the year on #24hoursofhorror. To save you searching through Twitter to find them, I’ve collated them all here too. If you’d like to read or reply to the tweets… Continue Reading... "24 tips and tricks for writing horror"

Don’t just write a shopping list of features This is part of that classic piece of advice, “Show, don’t tell”. Say your character is a teenage girl… you could simply tell the reader that she’s a sixteen-year-old dark-haired girl who’s an outcast at school, but you shouldn’t need to do… Continue Reading... "How to write effective character descriptions"

Speech tags or dialogue tags are the little bits of prose between lines of dialogue that tell the reader who’s talking, and perhaps also something about the way they talk or what they’re doing. “We know that,” they said, in perfect unison. “The question is how often you should use… Continue Reading... "How often should you use speech tags in dialogue?"