Link: Amazon, Goodreads. Price: £2.25
The protagonist is about to tell us the saddest story he has ever heard. It concerns how he and his wife Florence became friends with Captain and Leonora Ashburton, and how what outwardly seemed a happy life became riddle with lies, deception and betrayal. As our confused and saddened narrator attempts to sort out the story in his head, we are lead through a labyrinth of memories, maybe true and maybe false, to an inevitable, catastrophic conclusion.
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Link: Amazon, Goodreads. Price: £5.77
Two twins and their friend are lying in a back yard one night when the stars go out. Thus begins a story that spans thirty odd years, as the three of them find strive to survive and overcome the slow apocalypse that has overtaken the earth. What has caused the stars to go out? Who is behind this mystery? And how much longer does humanity have?
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Writing is about Fighting
Conflict isn’t important for what it is but for what it tells us about your characters. Your character isn’t what you tell us they think or feel. Your character is what they do. Action is character: what they do shows us who they are. A lot of writers make the mistake of trying to tell us who their characters are, when 100% of the time they would be better of sticking them in a tricky situation and showing the reader how they get out of it.
So, what does conflict mean, and how do we right good conflict?
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Our Book for September/October is The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
Charmaine sees an advertisement for a project called Positron that promises you a job, a place to live, a bed to sleep in – imagine how appealing that would be if you were working in a dive bar and sleeping in your car. The only catch is that once you’re in there, you can’t get out.
You’ll notice an important change – we’ve switched from a book a month to a book every two months, responding to feedback (including from me) that it was difficult to keep on top of the reading. So the deadline for your feedback is October 31st!
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“Write what you know” is one of the most common and misleading pieces of advice given to writers. It is often taken to mean that your writing should stick close to your own life and first-hand experiences. It sounds like good common sense – a way to avoid making and idiot of yourself and bring realism to your work. But, in the words of Admiral Akbar, it’s a trap.
Writing what you know is intended to make your writing believable. You were a police officer, so your story about a police officer will ring true. Straying too far from what you know threatens inauthenticity, and readers disengaging because what you are writing isn’t true.
Unfortunately, this interpretation of “write what you know” misses an essential fact about all good writing. Good writing is about discovery and imagination. If you only write what you know, your stories will be flat, sad, and uninteresting – because you have discovered nothing and underused your imagination. So, what do we do if we can’t just write what we know?
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