Writing skills | Alison Morton Author

How well do you know your character? Part Deux

Following my previous post with questions to help you to dig down into your characters, here are a few more:

20. Which schools did your character attend? 21. How did they do at school? 22. Did they have a nickname? 23. Did they go on to university? 24. What did they study? 25. Why did […]

Writing bootcamp at the Circle of Missé

Never having taken part in a creative writing course, I was excited, but a trifle anxious, when I was invited to join a ‘writing bootcamp’ at the Circle of Missé, a creative centre near my new home in France.

Lead by Annie Kirby, a renowned short-story writer who is also working on a full-length novel, […]

Variety is the spice of life…

Although I’m working hard on my third novel (in between packing boxes!), and I think it’s important to focus on your main work, I’ve found it useful to tackle other, smaller projects. It stops you getting fixated, helps you draw breath mentally and makes you use different writing muscles in your head. You use different […]

Helping to track the timeline of a story

Writing the first book of my Roma Nova stories, I found I needed to develop a tracking system not only of the action but also of its timing.

It’s so easy when engrossed in producing any story, let alone a thriller, to inadvertently get events in the wrong sequence or introduce a character to another […]

Tightening and shaving…

I’m editing the second part of my trilogy and it’s causing some blushes of embarrassment. No, not the romantic scenes, but the proliferation of bland and/or superfluous words.

However did I include so many ‘just’s, ‘I wondered’s, ‘I thought’s, ‘suddenly’s and ‘Well,..’s? Well, I thought I’d just bash the story out, then suddenly I wondered […]