Doing the research is one of the chief pleasures of writing historic fiction. There’s nothing like having an excuse to spend hours immersed in the everyday lives of artisans in Tudor England, artists’ models in Renaissance Florence, minor officials in the court of Louis XIV or whatever place and period you have chosen as your … Continue reading RESEARCHING FOR HISTORICAL FICTION
Writing
Concise [ kuhn-sahys ]: Expressing or covering much in few words
The advice most often offered to an aspiring writer is to be concise, to use as few words as possible to convey meaning. To that end, I think we need a campaign to adopt a bunch of words from other languages. After all, English has grown largely by this process, we should simply focus our … Continue reading Concise [ kuhn-sahys ]: Expressing or covering much in few words
Writing Tools
The great thing about writing is that all you need is a pen and paper. Except my writing is largely illegible, even to me. So I use my laptop. And then, of course, there is the matter of publishing, which adds more complexity. So all in all, I used quite a few bits and pieces … Continue reading Writing Tools
What did I learn?
I learned several things in the process of writing 'Bunco'. I'll try to generate a series of posts focussing on the main lessons. This one will be about the relative weight of some of the various elements mentioned in this graphic by Christopher LaPorte on his extraordinarily beautiful website. I'll touch on grammar in another … Continue reading What did I learn?
First blog post
My first blog post. The screen really does look very empty and white! About six or seven months ago, I started to write a novel. I actually forget what its working title was, but it soon became 'Bunco'. This wasn't close to being the first time I had decided to attempt writing a novel. I … Continue reading First blog post
Aiming for a Writer's Life 