May 9, 2024
Ratika Deshpande My main struggle with writing fiction has always been coming up with a plot. I believe in writing the kind of stories one likes to read, but it’s not always easy to actually put that into practice. For example, I love reading about fantasy shops, scholars, palaces, and small villages. Yet it wasn’t…
May 2, 2024
By Dannye Chase Three years ago, on a bright April day, I finally got up the courage to hit “send” on my first story submission, for Improbable Press’s Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging anthology. (Well, okay, technically I made my spouse hit “send” for me.) When the reply came, it took a moment for the word…
April 25, 2024
By Nazia Kamali Coming from a family of doctors, I was raised to believe in the power of science and technology, and was conditioned to pursue the field. Writing was considered an extracurricular activity to pad the resume. Furthermore, writing in English was supposed to display my understanding of the second language that I learned…
April 11, 2024
By Ratika Deshpande I’ve been writing for about eight years now, during which I’ve gone through several phases of rejecting my writing before others could do so. Over time, I’ve learned to recognise these thoughts and developed ways to fight them. Here they are: 1. You think you are not ready This thought is especially…
April 4, 2024
By Dr. Meryl Broughton The paths to publication are many and varied. Mine was a bit like a lurching tour of different venues, seeking the right ambience where I could find acceptance for my unusual manuscript. When I started out, I was fresh-faced, clear-thinking and naive. By the end I was a seasoned drinker, familiar…
March 28, 2024
By Ley Taylor Johnson Character arcs are tough. There’s no way around it—despite being one of the primary drivers of the story, dealing with your protagonist’s emotions and weaving them into the plot is hard to do. You don’t want their feelings overwhelming the plot and making it seem melodramatic, but you also don’t want…
March 21, 2024
By Thomas Smith My novel, Something Stirs, was one of the first haunted house novels written for the Christian market. Maybe even the first. And as such, the publisher that acquired it had big plans for the launch and subsequent marketing of the novel. In fact, previously a non-fiction publisher, mine was to be the…
March 14, 2024
By Emily-Jane Hills Orford Food is a big part of our lives, so it stands to reason that food should, and does, appear in written works. It doesn’t have to be just a mere mention of some special ribs shared in a dinner scene in your murder mystery. Food can be incorporated into the act…
March 7, 2024
By Ellen Levitt Wordsmiths may chafe at writing routines, but many of us embrace (or at least face) routines and rigor, in our quest to improve our work and meet deadlines. The advice to “write everyday” or “make regular writing a habit” is pervasive and for good reasons. There’s even an app for writing every…
February 29, 2024
Isha Jain When I started submitting to publications, my work was published thrice. I was only submitting to a few publications while studying, and I didn’t bother researching the market for more opportunities. Last year, I took it seriously and started tracking all my submissions in an Excel file. I have to say, it is…
February 22, 2024
By Emily-Jane Hills Orford Setting the scene is a vital part of bringing a story alive. Why? Quite simply put, it’s a matter of setting the stage and inviting the reader along to feel and experience what the characters are experiencing. Here’s a simple example of a setting: She must have made a wrong turn…
February 15, 2024
By Lisa Kusel I wrote the first draft of “Love Lies Here,” my fourth novel, in a six-week burst of inspiration. My then-agent had just submitted my memoir about my family’s disastrous move to Bali to a slew of publishers and I needed something to distract me from that tortuous “now we wait and see…
February 8, 2024
By Elizabeth Davis So for whatever reason you have taken leave of common sense and sanity and decided that being an author was not enough. You want to run your own micropress. First, what is a micropress? Well, take a small press and then squish it down, to about two people running a business in…
February 1, 2024
By Simon Kewin For most authors, writing a novel – or many novels – is the ultimate aim of a writing career. It’s fair to say that most people read only novels and it’s certainly true that most publishing houses and agents are interested only in novel manuscripts – although there are exceptions. By and…
January 25, 2024
By Ishitta Nigam Picture this. You enter a café for your morning cup of coffee. There’s a queue, and you are patient enough, but your stomach grumbles in disagreement. You finally reach the counter and begin to recite your order, “Hi, I would like to have a cappuccino and a…” “…a croissant du beurre with…