Fran Macilvey's Blog, page 44

Ten strategies to help us write a whole book

Ten Strategies to help us write a whole book.

Rachel’s question raises further questions. Why would a good writer find it hard to write a full-length work, a book? Short stories, no problem, novellas, no problem. A book? Ah, that will take me three years….

Partly it’s what we tell ourselves, isn’t it? I’m great at editing, a brilliant short story writer, but a whole book? Well, I suck at that! Actually, no, you don’t, because a book by any other name is simply a word count with a couple of ze...

Help! I Can’t Write A Book

‘Help! I can’t write a book’.

Okay, I have to admit, this was a new idea for me, a novel perspective – excuse the pun – but thanks to a FB post by Rachel A Dyson, I am currently obsessed with a new thought, a new possibility that there are writers out there who write well, and with discipline, and who are brilliant editors, but for whom the challenge is to write enough words to make a full-length book.

There are lots of strategies we can use to help us handle the slightly scary notion that if...

Killing Our Darlings

Killing Our Darlings

One of the main reasons we don’t get round to finishing a book, is because we become too attached to our words and cannot bear to edit them down. All our words are beautiful, and we cannot bear the notion that many of them, maybe even as many as half of them, will have to go. Who wants to publish a first book running to two hundred thousand words? Not me, I’m afraid, no matter how brilliant. (‘War and Peace’ is good, even sublime, but I gather that Tolstoy was not a nice...

Crashing Frankfurt Buchmesse Party

Crashing Frankfurt Buchmesse Party

As an author, the chances are, if you approach an industry professional out of the blue at a trade fair, they will say, ‘What are you doing here, and no, I don’t accept submissions / I’m not looking for any new clients.’ One I approached at the Frankfurt Buchmesse told me this three times, though I knew the state of play before I ventured to locate their particular stall, deep in the bowels of hall 6. It pays to do research, and I had already gleaned the inf...

Visiting Frankfurt Book Fair

Visiting Frankfurt Book Fair

In the midst of everything else that has been happening, I haven’t forgotten my intention to visit the Frankfurt Book Fair, and finally decided to commit, and make a holiday of it, two weeks beforehand. Our daughter has been on half-term break until today, and Daddy welcomed the chance of a breather, so I booked the fare, the accommodation and the Bookfair ticket, and we set off last Tuesday, arriving at Frankfurt mid-afternoon. Here we are in Germany, I thought,...

Pieter Alexander Hintjens: 3 December 1962 – 4 October 2016

Pieter Alexander Hintjens 3 December 1962 – 4 October 2016

After a long and painful illness, a battle with cancer over the last six years, my brother has died in Brussels, aged only 53.

My love for him has always been the adoring, muted kind that looked up to the light he shone, that basked in his enthusiasm and tried, and failed, to keep up with the thousand-and-one ideas he gave voice and form to. Many of his passions were beyond my comprehension but very real, nevertheless. As a computer...

Excuses, excuses

Excuses, excuses

A classic excuse which allows us not to finish, never to cross the finishing line, is ‘I’m still editing’. (So I can’t possibly send my manuscript out, or allow anyone to read it yet…)

As my dear friend Dorothy says, this excuse merely allows us to procrastinate in a very professional manner. Most people, when they hear we are editing, will nod their head respectfully and leave us to it. But therein lies the danger. At some point, we have to write THE END and I rather like au...

Writers Block Revisited

Writers Block Revisited

I sense that writers block is the culmination of a reluctance to write, a final, cul-de-sac signal from a mind too tired of being ignored to tolerate yet more prevarication. The mind says, ‘I want a break, I’m not enjoying this’ and all too often we ignore it, press on with our word targets, or with trying to meet impossible deadlines.

Perhaps we identify too heavily with the end result of our work, rather than allow ourselves to enjoy creative processes. We like to fo...

Writers Block

Writers Block

There is an on-going – and often rather heated – debate about whether writers block is real, or imaginary, a figment of fertile and rather sensitive imaginations. Whether, in fact, it would be easily solved with a dose of Epsom salts and a canter over Hampstead Heath or any other rather forbidding and earthy expanse of hill, moor, rock or mountain.

For the sake of the argument I will assume that Writer’s Block is real, and that it is a symptom of writers who try so hard to get i...

The curse of the soggy middle

The Curse of the Soggy Middle

I’ll start with this one, because no-one else ever seems to – other commentators usually start with something sexy and angst-ridden, like writer’s block. Not dissing writer’s block, but I think the curse of the soggy middle deserves to be the headline act, just this once.

I get rather tired of people obsessing about their word counts. Oh, they will patiently explain, but this genre requires me to write between 80,000 and 90,000 words, so these words have to stay....