I wrote Lilian’s Spell Book to be a really gripping supernatural adventure story, a Chinese box of a haunted house mystery, and a study of a normal family in a very weird place. Here’s a plot summary: Lilian’s Spell Book is a paranormal adventure novel about an ordinary English family – mother, father, pre-teen […]
Cast your mind back to the recent and the twenty year-old books I asked you to pick out and read – it’s very likely that within the first five or ten pages of the recent one more takes place, and what does happens is faster. Scenes in movies have become shorter, scenes in stories have […]
Instead of a reading event, the Republic of Consciousness Prize asked all the authors/translators to do a reading from their shortlisted books. Here we are: The books are Jean-Baptiste del Amo’s Animalia, translated by Frank Wynne and published by Fitzcarraldo; Minoli Salgado’s Broken Jaw, published by The 87 Press; Hanne […]
Two important things that can happen in any scene are 1. that a person has a realisation or makes a decision, and 2. that someone acts on a decision – or just acts spontaneously without thinking (if you believe that’s possible).
But right now a lot of people, and I’m guessing that includes you, are going to have a lot of spare time – or potentially spare time. You can use this positively. You can learn to do something you’ve always wanted to do. But I suspect that a lot of you are going to go back to the novel you’ve already dreamed about or half-started or abandoned midway.
Are you a writer who is in the shit with a particular story or novel? Send me your question, and I’ll try to give some helpful, practical advice. Be specific but try to keep it under 100 words.
If a reader doesn’t know a word, if they are forced to look it up in an online dictionary, it will stop them dead. It will break them out of the reading trance (I’ll write about this soon). And – almost certainly – it will them feel lacking in intelligence, stupid. It’s not a good […]
SYNTAX How long the unbroken paragraphs look, or how margin-hugging the dialogue is, are things the reader flashes on every time they turn a page. They are things they clock and judge in an instant. Assuming they’re not put off by either too great a density or too much white space, they will proceed into […]
Density isn’t something that often gets talked about, but it is one of the first things a reader notices about a book and one of the last things – sometimes years later – they remember about it. Writers dream of readers. They picture someone reading what they have written – if the writer is lucky, […]
Let’s spend a moment examining what story-time means for one particular genre: horror. (Some generalisations follow. Not all horror novels may conform, I realise.) The story-time of a horror novel depends upon a specific form of suspense, namely dread. Horror novels are dread-ful. But we can subdivide them in terms of microgenres, in terms of […]
