tips on writing – Page 2

Writing With Emotion – Four Top Tips

Written by Della Galton on December 27, 2015. Posted in Ice and a Slice, Inspiration, Tips on writing, Writing. 7 Comments

Writers are in the business of selling emotion. I forget who said that, but it’s true. We read – or at least I do – because we want to feel something. We might want to feel amused, uplifted, scared, touched, nostalgic or excited – or any combination of these. But we always want to feel something. We want to escape into an alternative world. A good writer will take us there. They will make us feel emotion. How do they do it? Well I can tell you how I do it.

Create Larger than Life REAL FLAWED Characters We have to care about the characters. Which means they have to be interesting. They need something that we love or possibly hate about them. They cannot be bland. They should be larger than life. Thing big. Flawed characters are great. So give your characters flaws. This is part of a review left on Ice and a Slice by James Nash. ‘This is ‘real life’ in all its complicated glory, challenging, gritty and very, very funny.’ Paradoxical flaws are the best I find. Especially if you don’t tell the reader straight away why the character has them. For example, in my novel The Morning After The Life Before, one of the main characters, Didi, has a phobia of white. She can’t eat white food, she can’t keep milk in her house. She can’t have white appliances in her kitchen. Yes there’s a very, very good reason and it’s a vital part of the plot but I don’t reveal that until later in the novel.
Use Universal Truths We all know what it’s like to feel we don’t fit in. That we’re not good enough. That we’ve been abandoned. That we’re not loved. We all know what it’s like to be human. Capitalize on these universal truths. Make your characters feel them. Transfer onto the page how you felt – when YOU felt these very powerful emotions.
You MUST Care It’s very hard to write emotion by numbers. The first person who has to care about the characters is you. And I mean you have to really care. You can’t just pay lip service to it. You can’t write emotion from a distance. You have to care so much you’ll feel pain if your character were to die. Bring this pain in from your own experience. We all know what it’s like to feel extreme pain. Use it, relive it, get it on the page. Wring out your soul. That may sound overdramatic (not to mention painful!) but it really works. What comes straight from the heart goes straight to the heart. If you feel it I guarantee your readers will feel it too. Don’t hold back. Don’t skate over emotions – they are everything. Absolutely everything.
Go For High Stakes Give your characters emotionally charged dilemmas. Make the stakes high. Loss of love, loss of life, loss of family. If you take us into a war zone I guarantee we’ll care. If you take us to a life threatening situation or a death bed situation we’ll care. If you show us the tenderness between mother and child, or of any kind of unconditional love we’ll care.

Also – try to keep it real. We are interested in the nitty gritty bits of human life. The specific details.

I’ve had some amazing feedback on my Ice series. I’ve had many many emails from reader telling me they loved SJ because she is warm and very flawed. In Ice and a Slice she is struggling with a drink problem. She is very much in denial. One of my reviews for Ice says, ‘SJ is flawed and vulnerable and sweet but also sometimes self centred and thoughtless, just as people in real life are. She often tries to do the right thing with it backfiring spectacularly – sometimes with comic results.’

I was so thrilled to read this. And it brings me on to my next point.

One last bonus tip. Pathos and humour are amazing if they are on the page side by side. One will point up the other. Don’t be too dark. There is humour in the darkest situation. And actually, not so often quoted, there is pain in the lightest situation.

Ice and a Slice is half price between December 27th 2015 and January 3rd 2016

Book two in this series, The Morning After The Life Before, is half price between Jan 3rd 2016 and January 10th 2016.

Happy New Year 🙂

Six tips for writing shorts for Nanowrimo

Written by Della Galton on November 4, 2015. Posted in ideas, Inspiration, NaNoWriMo, Tips on writing, Writing. 5 Comments

As I mentioned in my last blog I’m busy doing Nanowrimo this month. But as usual I’m writing 50k of short stories in November not a novel. This is more useful for me, being as shorts are my day job. I thought I’d share some of how I work with you – in case it’s helpful. Here are my top tips.

Keep them all in one document. I call mine Short Story Bonanza 2015 (Nano likes a title). And it’s easier to keep a word count if they are all in one place. I do start a new page for each story and I head it up with the date. (I don’t often have a title when I start a story.)
I don’t necessarily start a new story each day. I try to finish the one from the day before. After all, the object of doing Nano is that I write saleable stories and they have to be finished at some point. So I finish as many as I can in draft. But there might still be the odd one unfinished. And that doesn’t matter. Very freeing.
Make Nano the first thing you do. I tend to get up early at least every other day and start at 6 ish. That way my words are often done by nine and I can get on with the rest of my day. I can’t tell you how good that feels!
Use prompts to get going. I love A Writer’s Book Of Days by Judy Reeves. It has a prompt for every day of the year. Fabulous. I’m not a plotter. I never have been. I sit at my desk, and I start typing. I trust the process. The main thing which stops us writing is us. Our lack of confidence. Our internal editors. Switch off these negatives and just write. You can do it.
Do not use any Nanowrimo time for editing. Always do your daily word count first. Edit later. I edit most of my Nano stories in December. I like editing and it’s a lovely thing to do in December. I do edit some of the Nano shorts in November. But I take them out of the main document and save them as a new document. I’m always cutting when I’m editing so I don’t want to be cutting any of my nano words, do I?
Nano with a friend. I’ve got a writing friend coming over later today and we’re going to have a go at writing a story each, using the same theme. This makes it so much more fun. And it’s inspiring. And we can get feedback straight away should we want to edit the story and send it out before the end of Nano.
Oh and one last bonus tip.Make sure you’re stocked up on coffee or biscuits! Or whatever you need to reward yourself! (cake in my case). We deserve it.

And if you’d like any help with writing short stories, please do check out my book, The Short Story Writer’s Toolshed. £2.49 for kindle or £4.99 for the paperback.

Happy Writing!

How do I stop my romances becoming predictable?

Written by Della Galton on October 4, 2015. Posted in Dear Della, Questions from Dear Della, Short stories for magazines, Tips on writing, Writing, Writing problems and solutions. 5 Comments

Here’s another question from a recent postbag at Writers’ Forum. This one comes up quite a bit. We’re talking fictional ones by the way!

Q A common cause for the rejection of short stories (I know, because I’ve received many!) is that “the story line was too predictable”. I find this very hard to avoid particularly when writing a romantic story for the women’s magazine market, when the maximum number of recommended characters is only three or four. What can be done to stop the reader from working out that the boy and girl who meet at the beginning of the story are not inevitably going to end up in each other’s arms?

A First of all, I emphasize with you. I agree that writing a romantic short story for a magazine is one of the hardest genres to crack, for exactly the reasons you state. Here are some tips that I hope may help:

While the romance is likely to be a little bit predictable, other aspects of the story needn’t be. You might want to try a unique setting. I’ve sold more than one story which featured a wedding or romance set somewhere unusual, for example an ice hotel. Think about setting your romances somewhere unique or unlikely.
You can also experiment with viewpoint. It’s a common misconception to think that romances need to be told solely from the female perspective. They don’t. A romance told from the male perspective, or possibly even a child’s perspective (providing it isn’t the child having the romance) can work just as well and make your story a little different. You might also want to consider dual viewpoint, a romance told from both the hero and the heroine’s viewpoint. I’ve sold a few of these.
The romance needn’t be your main plot line either. It could actually be a subplot. Perhaps consider writing a family story, where the romance is relevant to more than one generation or a cosy crime story where the romance underlays the solving of a crime.
Also, don’t forget that it’s possible for the writing itself to be predictable. The use of language and a slightly different style can give romance a new freshness. As can a slightly different structure, i.e. a monologue or diary format.

There’s actually a very fine line between predictable and unpredictable. And actually it’s always an editor’s perception, there’s a little bit of luck involved too.

So I wish you good luck.

Holidays for Writers – are they worth it?

Written by Della Galton on August 22, 2015. Posted in Inspiration, Retreat, Writing, Writing conferences & schools. 4 Comments

I’ve recently been lucky enough to spend time at two well known writers’ Summer Schools. The Writers’ Holiday at Fishguard (Pembrokeshire) and Swanwick the Writers’ Summer School (Derbyshire).

So what can you do at a writers’ holiday? Apart from network and enjoy yourselves a lot, that is!

Here’s a selection of the 2015 courses provided at each.

Novel Writing
Manifesting your goals – writing goals – naturally!
Writing for Children
Poetry
Short Stories
Script writing
Painting – discover the artist in you.
Writing historical fiction
Writing contemporary women’s fiction
Writing for magazines
Meditation

The speakers are impressive too. Experts in their fields, they range from authors to agents and publishers to magazine editors. Check out their websites for next years selection.

Oh and then there’s the entertainment. The last night pantomime at Swanwick. The Cwmbach male voice choir at Fishguard. All unmissable entertainment.

What’s the food like? Well, Swanwick has a reputation for school dinner food but I thought this year’s was pretty good actually. Fishguard isn’t bad either. Waitress service, choice of menu. Huge breakfasts. Fantastic. But then maybe it’s just the company of other writers – you never know who you are sitting next to? That little old lady at breakfast who turns out to be the author of 40 plus novels or the woman who’s the world expert in chimney sweeps! Who needs food!

The accommodation is good at both but you won’t be spending much time in your room. There is far too much going on and you won’t want to miss a thing.

Both holidays are superb value. Fully inclusive for a week and around £500.

Will you come away inspired and buzzing and fired up to get on with the lonely business of writing. Well, I always do. Both courses have Facebook and Twitter pages. Check out their websites on the links above. So you can keep in contact all year long. I highly recommend both ‘holidays’.

Fishguard is more intimate – around 50 delegates and they have a weekend in February as well as a week in July. Swanwick has around 200 delegates and has activities going on from dawn – meditation on the lawn – till dusk – late night discos and writing sessions.

Fishguard is set on the beautiful Pembrokeshire coastline. Great for walking if you want to clear your head between courses.

Partners are welcome at both. Some pix below to give you a flavour of both but please do check out their websites.

My next Saturday course in Bournemouth by the way is Create Off The Page Characters. This is workshop based and suitable for beginners or experienced writers. And will be useful for you whether you write short stories or novels. Should be great fun. Small group guaranteed. Very relaxed environment. Constructive feedback.

Date: Saturday 17th October – 10 till 4.00
Venue: Kinson Community Centre, Millhams Road, Pelhams Park, Bournemout BH10 7LH
Cost: £45

Please email me via this website if you’d like to book or find out more details of my Bournemouth course.

I’m also teaching at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester, 8th to 10th April 2016 and in Alicante on 13th June 2016 for a few days. Email me for details of these if you’d like more info. I also teach at Woman’s Weekly offices in London. Please see their website for details. I’m also at NAWG this year 4th to 6th September and Woman’s Weekly Manchester Live 10th to 12th September. Phew, no wonder I feel a tad tired! I wore myself out just writing that!

Della guitar — me having a guitar moment by the lake at Swanwick with the lovely Helen Ellwood

Me teaching at Kinson — Me teaching in Bournemouth.

Do all stories need conflict? and How do unknown writers get published?

Written by Della Galton on July 22, 2015. Posted in Dear Della, Questions from Dear Della, Writing. Leave a Comment

A couple more question from my post bag at Writers’ Forum 🙂

Q: Do all stories have to feature conflict, resolution and growth, with false hopes and disappointments along the way? I appreciate that a straightforward happy little narrative would be largely purposeless and therefore unengaging, but I find it hard to accept that all stories should follow the ‘story arc’.

A You are absolutely right when you say that a straightforward, happy narrative might be unexciting to read. I call stories like this linear, i.e. a piece of writing that moves in a straight line with no surprises to a conclusion that is largely predictable. I think that there should be a story arc, but that can mean many different things. My personal definition of a story is a piece of writing where a character begins with a problem or conflict, which is resolved by the end in a satisfying, but unexpected way. The character should change in some way by the end. This provides the main arc of the story. I don’t think this can be too formulaic.

It’s not a case of putting in complications or ups and downs for the sake of it (as I thought when I first started writing stories). They all have to be relevant, both to the initial problem, and also to the character. There is huge scope in this. You can use different structures, you can use flashback, and you should use emotion, which for me, means writing from the heart. You can create twists by the use of misdirection. You can create surprises by withholding information from the reader.

Much depends on the length of the story. It’s difficult to have a big story arc in a flash fiction piece of say 500 words or even 1000. But there should still be some kind of story arc or progression. I hope this helps to clarify.

***

Q This magazine seems to be full of advice for writers who have already ‘made it’ and had their work published. However, there are still many of us who are trying to ‘make it’ and from our side of the fence getting published can sometimes feel like an impossible feat. From here, it seems that to sell your work and be published, you already need to have been published previously. But what if, like me, you don’t have any previous examples or clippings to show? How do you then sell your work and get published?

A Let me reassure you that you don’t have to have been published to get published. We all have to start somewhere. The key to getting published is to write what publishers and editors want. So first you need to know what that is. And you can find out by doing your own market research. Here are my top tips on market research.

If you want to write for a particular magazine then first of all make sure they accept freelance submissions. If they don’t you’ll be wasting your time approaching them. Whether it’s fiction or features you want to write, ask for their contributor’s guidelines.
Buy several copies of the magazine and look at house style. Is it chatty, or more serious and/or literary?
Check the lengths of fiction/features they publish, 1000 words, 2000 words etc. (writing outside of these lengths will result in automatic rejection because they won’t have the slots to put your work.)
Check the target reader they are aiming for, including age, sex, type of person. Adverts and letter pages are a good guide to this.
Check their house style – do they prefer first person viewpoint or third, male or female etc.
Make sure you are writing for their target reader.
Make sure you send your submission to the right person and in the right format, e.g. via email or by snail mail.

If you are writing features you should send a query letter/email first. Head up your query with an eye catching title or question. I highly recommend Solange Hando’s book, Be a Travel Writer, Live your Dreams, Sell your Features: Travel Writing Step by Step. This is a book about selling travel features, but its excellent advice applies to selling all features.

Here’s an example of a query letter sent to a dog lovers magazine, which resulted in me being commissioned to write the feature.

Dear Debbie,

Feature query – Ten ways to help your local dog sanctuary

I was wondering if you’d be interested in a feature about the above. As you know, many sanctuaries, especially those that rescue dogs are in dire straits, thanks to the credit crunch. And the small ones tend to get hit the hardest.

Since June this year, myself and four friends have raised nearly £1000 for DAWG (Dorset Animal Workers Group).

The feature would cover various simple ways of raising money, i.e. what we did – and how we did it. Plus other things dog lovers can do to help their local rescue centre. I can provide illustrating pictures.

I’ll look forward to hearing what you think.

It is possible for a writer with no credits to be commissioned to write a feature. You just have to write what is wanted. Once you have been commissioned, make sure you supply the feature promptly. Be professional. You will usually have to try more than once. Perseverance in all types of writing for publication is the key. I hope this helps. Good luck.

Tips on writing emotion

Written by Della Galton on July 5, 2015. Posted in Tips on writing, Writing. Leave a Comment

Writers are in the business of selling emotion. I don’t remember who said that, but it’s spot on. If a reader doesn’t emotionally connect with a character they won’t care about them and they won’t read on. So getting emotion – whether it is sadness, humour, or a feeling of poignancy or tension – into your writing, is critical.

The million dollar question is how do you do it?

In order to ascertain what constitutes emotion, myself and a group of students brought in a selection of prose & poetry extracts which we considered emotional and set about analysing them to see if there was any common ground. Here are our findings:

It’s easier to get emotion from very emotional events. It sounds obvious but it’s worth mentioning. If you pick a subject that we all understand and have experienced, you’ll have a head start. Here are some universal emotional subjects.

Love – especially unrequited.
Death.
Loneliness.
Old age.
Loss of a person, pet, job, home.
Illness.
Darkness.
Fear – especially of a universal threat – from earthquakes to terrorism, spiders to flying.
Humiliation – fear of looking a fool or being left out.
Not fitting in.

Sensory detail is key in every type of emotional writing. So have your character hearing, touching, tasting and smelling her surroundings. Don’t forget temperature.

Setting is very important too. Setting puts emotion in context. We need to know where your character is when they are experiencing emotional events.

Be very specific. Don’t say ‘it was a dark night’. Say, ‘It was a cold moonless night.’

Viewpoint is vital. We need to be inside the character’s head – not watching them from a distance. First person present tense works particularly well.

Pace is also very important. Particularly when setting up tension and when writing humour.

Interestingly if you are writing a very sad scene you can understate what you write. In fact you should understate to avoid mawkishness (imo). But if you’re writing humour you need to go OTT. Really milk the situation. Don’t miss a single opportunity. Humour and pace are strongly linked – as every stand-up comic knows.

Finally – if you feel it when you write it – the reader will feel it when they read it. What comes from the heart goes to the heart. Be authentic. Don’t hold back. Make yourself cry, laugh or feel afraid and your audience will be right there with you.

Ten Inspiring Quotes About Writing

Written by Della Galton on May 31, 2015. Posted in ideas, Inspiration. 2 Comments

1. Talent is not as important as authenticity.

2. Editing makes it perfect but raw is sometimes better. Don’t polish out the sparkle.

3. The best way to find your voice is to write more.

4. What comes from the heart goes to the heart. If the author feels it when she writes it – the reader will feel it when she reads it.

5. Write what you are passionate about, but don’t preach.

6. Never forget we are in the entertainment business.

7. The question should be not, what can I sell to this market? but what can I give to this market?

8. Without character, plot is nothing.

9. Life is the stuff of which novels are made. You have to live it to write it.

10. Never give up. You may be only one rejection from that book deal.

Happy Ever After – or is it? How do you get a good end?

Written by Della Galton on February 1, 2015. Posted in News, Questions from Dear Della, Tips on writing, Writing. 5 Comments

For me, endings have always been the most difficult thing to get right. But a bad ending can ruin an otherwise excellent story. There are all sorts of bad endings. You probably recognise most of these. They don’t really need explaining.

Is that it?
So what?
Where’s the rest?
I worked that out in Paragraph One.
Did I miss something?
What happened to Harry?
You’ve got to be joking!

So – how do you make sure your ending doesn’t fall into these categories? Here’s a list of types of endings and tips that might help to make them work:

Circular stories – link the beginning with the end, often by time or place, for example we end up when and where we began.
Twist – as it sounds. Spring a surprise on the reader, but do give them the clues to work it out.
Surprise – these are a little bit gentler than a twist. Usually a surprise means some piece of information is withheld from the reader. An agent I once had called it the after eight mint effect.
Straight ending – these don’t contain twists or surprises but they often contain a universal truth. They are often poignant. Can also be amusing.
Link the title with the end – these are often stories with a theme, for example, a story called Faith, turns out in the last paragraph to be about ‘faith’.
Motifs – you might have a running motif through the story, for example a recurring sentence, or a recurring phrase that ties up with the end.
An off the page end. You finish with a pointer as to where the story/characters will go next. Things aren’t neatly tied up but there’s an indicator that the characters will be ok.

It’s worth remembering the following too:

An ending must resolve the problem you initially set up.

It must be relevant to the beginning.

If you’re stuck for an ending, look at what you’ve written so far. The clues to the end will always be in what you’ve already written.

And while we’re on the subject of endings, did I mention the sequel to Ice and a Slice is out this week. Yay! The Morning After The Life Before is my latest novel and I’m very proud of it. SJ doesn’t quite get the Happy Ever After she thought she was heading for! Nice matching cover for Ice and a Slice too – Can you spot the hidden message in these two covers?

The fabulous covers were designed for me by Peter Jones. Find out more about his book cover designing service here.

The Morning After The Life Before comes out on 5 February 2015 and is available for pre-order here. Ice and a Slice with its funky new cover is available here. They are both £1.99, less than the price of a glass of Chardonnay!

The New Year’s Resolution every writer will keep

Written by Della Galton on January 9, 2015. Posted in ideas, Inspiration, Wednesday Writing Spot, Writing. 6 Comments

It’s that time of year again, isn’t it? We set a New Year’s resolution – this year we are going to write the novel, write every day, submit ten short stories a month to magazines. Will we keep them? Well, some of us will. But not many. Why not?

Perhaps because we are already over committed? Perhaps we don’t have time – however much we’d like to have it – to write that much. If you set yourself a ‘big’ resolution and you start to fail. Chances are you’ll give up, and feel guilty too.

Here is a resolution you will keep. No, it’s not eat more cake – although that is one of mine actually!

It is to begin a piece of writing. That is all. Just begin.

If you have time to read this blog, you have time to do this. Right now. Or maybe that should be write now! There are three simple steps. They require seven minutes of your time.

Step one: Look at the prompts below.

Step two: Set the timer on your watch/phone/ or clock for six minutes.

Step three: Write an opening paragraph for ONE of the prompts.

Prompt one

Incorporate the following three words into a first paragraph. Rain, cupcake, crash.

Prompt two

Use this picture to inspire your first paragraph. Stop reading and do it now.

Everyone done that? Congratulations. You have kept a New Year Resolution. It was that simple.

You have begun. You are a writer. What you do next is up to you. Do you continue to write or go and do the housework/play on Social Media/watch a television program? Maybe you could write a bit more instead of doing one of these things. Housework is overrated anyway. It doesn’t matter what you do next. You have completed a New Year resolution. You have begun.

Maybe you’ll finish the piece you started. Of course you’ll finish. You are a writer, aren’t you?

NB My weekly classes are held on Thursday Evenings, 7-9 and Friday Mornings, 10-12 at Kinson Community Centre, Millhams Road, Kinson. Email me if you’d like more details, or leave a message on this post.

If you would like to know more about writing, two of my writing books, The Short Story Writer’s Toolshed and The Novel Writer’s Toolshed are currently 99p on Amazon if you have a kindle or a kindle app.

Happy New Year. And Happy Writing.

Ten Stories NOT to send to Woman’s Weekly

Written by Della Galton on October 30, 2014. Posted in ideas, Inspiration, News, Short stories for magazines, Woman's Weekly, Writing. 20 Comments

Gaynor and Della — Woman’s Weekly at Blue Fin Buildings

I was lucky enough to be teaching with the very lovely Gaynor Davies at Woman’s Weekly last Monday. Here are a list of stories she currently does NOT WANT because a) they have too many already or b) they’d been done to death. So PLEASE DON’T DO THESE. hot off the press.

Stories about weddings.
Stories about funerals.
Stories about women finding themselves by doing a bungee jump (who’d have thunk it!)
Woman looking after neighbour’s cat/dog/budgie and coincidentally finding the man of her dreams! (Damn!)
You think it’s a child’s first day at school (told from viewpoint of mum) but it’s actually a man leaving a woman. (that’s one I haven’t even thought of!!!).
Retired husband getting under wife’s feet.
Stories about adoption – mother finding child or child finding mother.
Stories about infidelity – how many actual endings are there? Either she forgives him or she doesn’t.
Stories in letter format. Or any other story structure that you have sold them a few times. (It was good the first time – but not quite so original on the third outing!).
Children persuading elderly parents to downsize.

So what else is left? We asked Gaynor this. Here’s what she said. Stories about people, warm stories, quirky stories, believable stories. Stories with ends that do not read like the punchline to a joke. Maybe a bit of something sensual – but still within the Woman’s Weekly boundaries. These can stretch further than you think.

They are always short of 1000 words (900-1000) and 2000 words (1800 to 2000) and also 8000 words for the Fiction Specials. Happy Writing.

And did I mention I have two new novellas out – both previously published as Serials for Woman’s Weekly – in case you’d like a feel for what they DO like 🙂

Someone Else’s Child. Click here for a closer look.

Facing The Future. Click here for a closer look.

My novel, Ice and a Slice, is also on promotion from November 1st. 99p for a full length novel. Click here for a closer look.
Thank you for reading.

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