Emma Darwin's Blog, page 24

When do you stop revising?

Debi Alper and I have just finished teaching our online course in Self-Editing Your Novel (a new one starts in January), and one of the questions that came up as everyone collapsed in a heap after six weeks of learning...

Hold the front page (till I've only got time to be Good Enough)

I've blogged before about procrastination, whether it's happening because your Inner Critic has found a dozen reasons for you Not Getting On With It, or he's declaring that it's all been done already, or he's dressed up as someone else...

Running with Wolf Hall

When Wolf Hall was published, I was up to my neck (and frequently out of my depth) in writing a novel. I love Hilary Mantel's writing, but I didn't dare go near it. A novel about high politics and low...

Pantsing forward, planning backward.

One of the writers in the Taming Your Novel workshop I gave at York has - to my delight - picked up in her blog on something that I've recently come to believe: that the division that we often talk...

Keep, bend, break and nonsense

Right, let's start with this blog's theme song. All together now: They're tools, not rules! Okay. And having let off a bit of steam and told the world where we stand on this issue, I'd like to remind you about...

Less, more, and Apollo in his chariot

You don't need to have been reading the Itch for very long to know that when we're talking about prose, I'm usually going to talk about specificity - particularity of experience - precision. It's an aspect of Showing, as opposed...

Why I'm a convert to Track Changes

You may know that I'm a great fan of working on hard copy; it means you can get away from the computer; with biro on print the original and the amendments go on looking separate and you can see your...

Crazy First Draft

It's nearly NaNoWriMo time, but every now and again, when I'm talking about the shitty first draft and other NaNo-ish concepts, someone says "I don't understand why anyone would want to write shit." Of course the idea is not that...

All the blog posts I mentioned at York 2012, and a big Thank You

I'm just back from the Festival of Writing at York, and if you don't know what I'm talking about, my post from the same point last year is here, and from 2010 is here. Apart from the usual frustration at...

An education in writing

One of my favourite authors of all is Elizabeth Bowen. And the other day I went back to my favourite of her novels, The Heat of the Day, which I can't recommend highly enough. Her characters and settings are so...