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5 Top Tips For Making The Leap From Short Stories To Novels

So, you’ve had an idea? You woke up in the middle of the night with a title that just screams to be the name of the next bestselling novel, or a plot line that is leaping around your head with such fervour that it just has to hit the bookshelves. You’ve already written short stories, but a novel- that’s a hell of a lot of words! 1) Think of short story writing as your novel writing apprenticeship Short stories are a brilliant way for any writer to learn their craft. By learning to write to a word limit you can… Read More »5 Top Tips For Making The Leap From Short Stories To Novels

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4 Lessons On Writing A Killer Logline

You have just completed writing the world’s greatest screenplay. Congrats! Now it’s time to show it to the world and prepare to cash that million dollar check that assuredly is coming your way. Hold on tiger. Before any production company, or producer, is going to read your unsolicited script, you are going to have to entice them with a little literary foreplay. We call this a logline. A logline is defined as one sentence that provides enough information about the protagonist, antagonist, setting, genre, and story that the reader can fully grasp what the film will be. The logline must… Read More »4 Lessons On Writing A Killer Logline

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What Script Editors Do AKA 5 Tips To Edit Your Own Screenplay

How To Edit Your Own Screenplay ‘How to edit my own screenplay’ brings writers to this blog every single day. So, when a plucky Banger threw down the gauntlet and challenged me to edit his pages here, I jumped at the chance! Ready? Then let’s go … To Download**: 1) First up, here is the original scene the writer sent me. 2) Secondly, here is the scene, with my notes on the actual page for clarity’s sake. 3) Thirdly, here is a “clean” version of the rewritten scene, based on my notes. (FYI – It’s really important to note these are not… Read More »What Script Editors Do AKA 5 Tips To Edit Your Own Screenplay

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5 Ways To Fall In Love With Your Character

Many thanks to novelist Mya Kay, who provides us with our second Bang On post on the theme of “Love”. Mya offers up some GREAT writing exercises for those of us who need to get to know our characters better and I ESPECIALLY like number 5, which I’d never heard of before. Thanks Mya! Enjoy, Bang2writers and make sure you check out Mya’s links at the end of this post … Often, writers find themselves caught between a love/hate relationship with their characters. A month later, they’re abandoning their story, without even realizing that it’s not their characters that may… Read More »5 Ways To Fall In Love With Your Character

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5 Steps To Writing A Novel: A Beginner’s Guide

Some great steps from Cressida today for those of you considering writing a novel for the first time. Thanks Cressida and good luck everybody who takes on the challenge! NOVEL FACTS The word “novel” is derived from Italian word “novella” which means “new”. The history of novel writing can be traced back to the medieval period, when novella was a more popular form of fiction writing. Novel has been a popular genre of fiction writing since its inception. This style of writing has been adopted by the likes of H.G Wells and Isaac Asimov. Check out The B2W Novel Writing Pinterest… Read More »5 Steps To Writing A Novel: A Beginner’s Guide

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7 Steps To Road Test Your Concept

You MUST road test your concepts BEFORE you start writing. I can’t emphasise this enough. Too many writers conceive half-baked ideas and then try and run with them regardless … Then wonder why they hit roadblocks and go down various insane detours. Don’t spend aeons trying to make a draft work when it’s simply a doomed exercise, because you haven’t done the foundation work. But how to road test your concept? Try these 7 simple steps: 1. Write a logline/ novel pitch 25-60 words, describing the characters and the situation they find themselves in. Remember those all important 3 Cs.… Read More »7 Steps To Road Test Your Concept

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5 Ways To Approach Your Rewrites (And How To Know When It’s Done!)

All About Rewrites Rewrites: for some, this is where the joy of creativity is set alight, the chariots of fire stampede, ablaze with inspiration! For others, rewrites are more akin to having your fingernails slowly removed in a dingy room under a dim bulb. I probably fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes about rewrites. But wherever you fall, rewriting is the reality of writing, whether we like it or not. I thought I’d take some time out from the 15th draft of my most recent work in progress to offer some pointers on how to keep your chin… Read More »5 Ways To Approach Your Rewrites (And How To Know When It’s Done!)

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5 Tips For Editing Your Work

Being a good writer is one thing, while being a good editor is completely different. There is a great possibility that someone is going to ask you to edit or review some type of document at some point of your career. It may be your boss who needs you to expand a certain report that has been started by another employee, or it may be your friend who is asking for help on proofreading a paper. Whatever the task is, proofreading and editing someone else’s work can be a real challenge. First of all, it is not easy to determine… Read More »5 Tips For Editing Your Work

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5 Ways Tweeting Will Make You A Better Writer

Aside from its ability to market your writing in the form of online articles and blog posts, tweeting can, over time, represent a writer with a whole host of opportunities to improve their writing and hone their approach. Anyone who uses Twitter to market their work needs to be aware of a few things before they delve into it with the intent of generating some sort of benefit for themselves: ● You need to contribute something in order to receive something — People can smell selfish tweeting a mile away, so make sure you engage your followers (and others) in… Read More »5 Ways Tweeting Will Make You A Better Writer

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7 Ways Of Developing Writing Ideas

  All About Developing Writing Ideas All of us hit setbacks in our writing sometimes. When we do, it can be a good idea to try out techniques other creative people use to keep their work moving. Here are a few techniques I use when I’m stuck at the ideas-developing stage, not sure how to turn ideas into a story. 1) Use The 10-3-1 Method 10-3-1 is used by designers at Apple, and it goes like this. Instead of taking just one initial idea and developing it directly into a product, designers work on 10 different ideas, being as imaginative… Read More »7 Ways Of Developing Writing Ideas

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5 Killer Errors That Will Sink Your Reputation … And Ways You Can Fix Them!

Killer Errors No one likes to think about spelling and punctuation errors in their writing. It’s the story that’s important. No-one’s gonna care about typos when it’s the content that counts. It’ll get corrected when it’s typeset. Yada yada yada. You can make excuses until you’re blue in the face, but the fact remains that literary professionals (including script readers) like to read well written English and if you’ve got pesky errors you will set off their grammar police sirens. Thing is, though, these mistakes are far easier to check for and to correct than you think. It just takes… Read More »5 Killer Errors That Will Sink Your Reputation … And Ways You Can Fix Them!

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Writing THE DECISION: LIZZIE’S STORY # 3 – Description & Characters

I run the Bang2write script consultancy, so read lots of spec novels every year as writers get them ready to either self publish, or show agents and publishers. The two elements that cause the most issues then in these novels are description and character. This is no surprise, since these are probably the most important elements of a novel, as readers perhaps notice them “most”. So here is a rundown of the issues I frequently see with description and character and how I tackled them myself in writing THE DECISION: LIZZIE’S STORY: DESCRIPTION 1) Grammar, punctuation, spelling. No one minds… Read More »Writing THE DECISION: LIZZIE’S STORY # 3 – Description & Characters

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