Roz Morris's Blog, page 61

Lessons learned from making a contemporary fiction box set – guest post at Jane Friedman

How do you organise seven time-strapped authors to collaborate on a project? Who does what, especially the tedious jobs like proof reading? How do you decide on an image, a price,�� a name, a thrust for the publicity campaign, how much to spend on advertising? Indeed, how do you get seven individuals to agree on […]

Two days of writer���s block unlocked a character���s secret

I’ve spent the last couple of days blocked about a scene in Ever Rest. Solving it became a bit of a saga – and an unexpected and rather important answer. The first symptom I noticed was irritation. A character in a scene I was revising was annoying me. I quickly figured out why. In previous […]

‘Music for the Revolution’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Debbie Moon

My guest this week is a master of many storytelling disciplines ��� including screenwriting and radio as well as prose fiction. She���s currently writing an action-adventure screenplay set during the Russian Revolution, with a decidedly spooky twist. Her soundtrack includes Holst, the romantic 20th century composer George Butterworth and a haunting, melancholy piano piece she […]

Clumsy dialogue – your mission statement for a subtle scene

I was editing a manuscript and came across a confrontation scene. It was well set up so that we understood the stakes, the context and why this encounter would sizzle. We were about to watch a protagonist face a mischief-maker and warn them off. Except the dialogue was painfully obvious. Realistically, the characters should have […]

‘Men, women, flirtation and heartbreak’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Chris Hill

My guest this week describes his novel as a romantic comedy about a young man���s attempts to find love through an internet community. Despite its thoroughly contemporary setting, he says it was sparked by a song from the early 1960s, by a band who have long faded into obscurity. Other songs joined it, to represent […]

What keeps you resilient as a writer?

The life of a writer is a kind of madness. We have the pressure to produce. The expectations of ourselves and, if we���re lucky, our readers. We have, usually, the feeling that we can never do enough – can���t write enough words or books, can���t be in enough online places, can���t sell enough copies. We […]

‘I heard a song being played in an electrical store’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Glynis Smy

I���m particularly pleased to welcome this week���s guest as I seem to have known her for all the time I���ve been zipping about the internet. When I was first blogging, and launching the original Nail Your Novel, she was writing and blogging too. Now she���s got five novels to her name, and one of them […]

Can writing be taught? And what do writing teachers teach?

The other night I was watching The Rewrite, in which a Hollywood scriptwriter reluctantly becomes a writing teacher. In the early part of the film he asserts that writing can���t be taught. In some ways, I agree. But wait, you might say. And you might brandish a kettle at me, or a pot as black […]

How do we label ourselves as writers? Guest spot at Dan Holloway – and the box set is available NOW!

Forgive the capitals in the title. That’s the problem of being in a group of seven, rather excited writers who’ve been working towards this moment since November. Our ebook collection, Outside The Box: Women Writing Women, went live yesterday. If you pre-ordered it, it will have arrived on your ereader. If pre-orders aren’t your thing, […]

‘Music for looking into the past’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Audrina Lane

My guest this week brings a real blast of the 1980s, with a bright red emphasis on romance (I guess it���s that time of year). She drew on the soundtrack of her adolescent years to create the love-torn characters in her novel, and the heart of the story beats to George Michael, Berlin and Patrick […]