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10 Gifts To Treat Yourself To in the New Writing Year

“Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address,” said Joe Fox in the 1998 rom-com You’ve Got Mail.

While it’s not fall, a new year has a similarly uplifting effect on the writers among us. The first month on a freshly printed calendar or the blank opening page of a new diary fills us with so much hope and anticipation for the year ahead.

The season of gift giving may have come and gone, but the new writing year is just beginning. Here are our top 10 items to treat yourself to this month.

Write Your Novel – Novel or Novella?

I know I'm always banging on about keeping on writing until you finish your book, but what if you've written your story all the way to 'The End' but it's only 30,000 words? Or 20,000?

Well, perhaps you've written a novella – and there's nothing wrong with that!

I strongly believe that the story should be the length it's meant to be; if you try to stretch something which is naturally a novella-length into a novel, you run the risk of writing lots of padding.

There's more good news: Novellas have been enjoying something of a renaissance since the advent of digital-publishing, with lots of people downloading and enjoying keenly-priced 'quick reads'. Publishers have capitalised on this by releasing novels in novella-length installments such as Cathy Bramley's delightful Ivy Lane series. 

So, what classes a story as a novella? And how can you be sure you've written one, rather than a bare bones first draft of a novel?

Word counts vary, but if your story is between 20-45,000 words you can safely call it a novella.

It's also likely that your story will have one plot rather than a central story with several sub-plots. If you've got the latter you either need to cut some out and refocus your story, or accept that you're writing a novel after all and flesh them out properly.

Write Your Novel – Building The Habit

Think about things that you do automatically every single day: Making a cup of tea in the morning or brushing your teeth before bed. You don't have to think about these tasks and you never (or hardly ever) miss them out. However ingrained and natural these behaviours feel, you weren't born doing them. Somewhere along the way, you developed the habit and now they are part of your life.

Now, imagine that whatever is it that you want to accomplish, be it writing a novel, getting fit, or learning to play the piano, could be integrated into your day in the same, easy way.

Before you all shout at once, I'm fully aware that taking two minutes to brush your teeth is a very small commitment in both time and effort, but it's also true that by doing it regularly you make a huge difference to your oral hygiene and health. Exactly the same can be said about taking five minutes to focus on your fiction or to eat an apple or do some yoga stretches.

Even tiny actions, repeated regularly over time, can have a huge impact.

The key to building a habit that lasts lies, I think, in three key aspects: The behaviour must be easy to complete, it mustn't take much time and, if it isn't something that gives you an immediate reward (such making a cup of tea!), the long-term goal must be something you genuinely care about.

Write Your Novel – The Doppelganger Antagonist

Last week, I talked about super-charging your story with a motivated, compelling antagonist. This week, I want to introduce a specific type of antagonist; the doppelganger.

A doppelganger antagonist is like the evil twin of your protagonist. It's a wonderful (fun!) device that can open up all kinds of possibilities for showing character and character growth.

In a nutshell, you make your antagonist and protagonist very similar so that they are like two sides of the same coin.

When they face choices or take action, you will highlight certain traits or codes of behaviour through their different responses. The doppelganger's extreme (or evil or callous or stupid) actions serve as a foil for the protagonist's heroism.

To give you an idea of what I mean by doppelganger, here are some examples.

Write Your Novel – Antagonists Need Love, Too

If you’re not familiar with the term, an antagonist is someone who, according to the Oxford Dictionary, ‘actively opposes or is hostile to someone or something; an adversary’.

In creative writing terms, the antagonist refers to the character who opposes your protagonist, driving the plot forward. They are the serial killer in a gritty crime book, the evil Queen in the fairy tale, the power-crazy evil genius in James Bond.

If you're writing a good versus evil story then you will find it easy to identify your antagonist (hint: it's the big baddie), but what about different sorts of stories? Romances? Thoughtful family sagas? Literary musings on the meaning of life? Will you still have (or need) an antagonist, then?

Write Your Novel - Building Momentum

November seems like a good time to talk about the power of momentum. At this very moment, thousands of people are typing away, racking up their word counts and trying to finish a 50,000 word draft by the end of the month. It’s worth asking why, exactly, the idea of NaNoWriMo took off and became internationally popular.

There’s the community, of course, and the time-limit of the challenge (it’s bloomin’ hard work but it’s just for 30 days), but I think one of the most important reasons for its success is that it demonstrates the power of building momentum.

If you persevere past the first week, you'll find that your daily practice of 1,500 or so words begins to take on a life of its own. It transitions from a seemingly-impossible task to something achievable, something real.

By working intensively on your book every day you begin to inhabit the world of your imagination far more deeply than before. The so-called 'real' world retreats and becomes grey and insubstantial; a distraction from your characters and the all-important word count goal.

The habits you develop – of writing whenever and wherever possible – just to get those words down, free you from procrastination and doubt, and you begin to get an emotional high from seeing your word count increase so quickly.

Write Your Novel – Back Story

What is back story and how much should you use? Opinions, as always, vary, but I think you should include as little as possible. Back story, happened in the past for your characters; it is not part of the story you are telling and too much will drag your narrative down.

So, let's identify back story. In a linear structure with a simple timeline (no flashbacks or skipping around), back story is anything and everything which happened chronologically before page one. So, what your protagonist ate for breakfast last week is back story. So is the argument she had with her mother last year, the three years she spent deep sea diving in the Caribbean, and, of course, her childhood.

It gets much trickier to identify back story when you're not talking about a simple linear narrative. If your narrative is constructed differently and it 'jumps around' in time, then you have to judge information on its relevance to your story, rather than when it occurred in your character's life. If you're planning on writing this kind of complex narrative, I'd recommend studying similar novels to see how they’re structured.

Write Your Novel – How To Survive NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo, as you're no doubt aware, stands for National Novel Writing Month. Writers around the world join together to support one another as they attempt to complete a fast first draft (or 50,000 words of one, at any rate) during November.

Writing 50,000 words in one month is a huge undertaking. You'll need 1666 words every single day. Alongside work and family commitments (not to mention creative problems such as getting stuck), that's a tall order.

But take heart! The first thing to remember is that there is no such thing as failing NaNoWriMo. Just trying it counts as a success. You will learn something valuable, even if that something is 'never, ever try to write 50,000 words in a month again'.

The rules of NaNoWriMo demand that you don't do any preparation on your story beforehand and, if you're fond of rules/like the idea of just diving in, feel free to adhere to this principle. If, however, you know that you're a planner or you would really like to do some creative 'discovery work' and brainstorm a few plot or character ideas in the week before, then I hereby give you permission to do so. The writing challenge is to produce a 50,000 word draft in a month, I don't think it matters how you get there ...

Write Your Novel – Find Your Focus

It will come as no surprise to you that we live in an age of information-overload. Our technology encourages us to multitask while simultaneously eroding our power to focus and, ironically, be productive. Online, we can struggle to finish one article before being lured away to the next piece of 'click bait', and this can spill over into other areas of our life. (Please don't say it's just me who finds it increasingly difficult to sink into a long reading session without stopping to check email on my phone?)

As you might imagine, this lack of focus is particularly unhelpful for getting anything creative, complex or difficult done, and if you're trying to write a book (with limited time available) it can be disastrous.

How to Enter a Writing Competition by Corvus Editorial Director Maddie West

With only 12 days left to enter the #LoveAtFirstWrite talent scout, a month-long event hosted by women’s fiction imprint Corvus and book discovery website Lovereading.co.uk, Maddie West, Corvus editorial director, is here with a few tips for entering writing competitions.

1. Know the rules. If the competition is looking for a dystopian sci-fi novel, don’t enter your sweet romance. If the submission should be the first chapter and a synopsis, don’t send the whole script.

Editor’s confession: I will take against your work if you haven’t read the submission rules correctly. I will try not to, because that’s the way you miss a great book and end up kicking yourself...but I will feel oddly aggrieved that you haven’t bothered to read the small print.

2. It’s tempting to get really caught up in your world when writing your synopsis – don’t. Make it attention-grabbing, short, sharp and snappy. The editor probably doesn’t need to know what colour top your heroine will be wearing in Chapter Five.

Editor’s confession: I often don’t read the synopsis until I’ve read the first chapter. As an editor, I want to know what your voice sounds like – after you’ve hooked me with story and character, then I’ll look to find out where it’s going!

3. Write the whole book or as much as possible. Sounds simple, no? Well, I have one very good friend who entered a competition, won it and then was faced with the terrifying challenge of producing a full-length novel in a couple of months.

Editor’s confession: When running a competition, I have an abiding nightmare that the judges pick a winner who hasn’t finished at least the first draft of their book. Writing a full-length novel is a bit like running a marathon – the chances of making it past the finish line if you haven’t trained are pretty slim.

Write Your Novel – The Power of Accountability

I often bang the drum for goal-setting and I truly believe this is one of the most powerful strategies for getting your novel written, but there’s a way to super-charge its effectiveness: Tell someone else.

Make yourself accountable for your progress to a fellow human being. Once you’ve set your goals and broken them down into manageable steps, send your to-do list to a friend and ask them to check up on you in a month’s time.

This has two great results. Firstly, you are treating your writing seriously and professionally (subconsciously aligning it to the way you tackle tasks in other parts of your life, such as your work or parenting duties) and secondly, you are increasing the pressure to succeed. Just a little bit. Your friend isn’t going to shout at you or point and laugh, but you will have to face them and say ‘I didn’t do the stuff I said I was going to do’ and that’s something you’ll want to avoid.

Write Your Novel – Follow Your Heart

It's natural (especially when you're just starting out) to emulate your favourite authors. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I'll go further and argue that it's a vital step in the process of becoming an accomplished writer and finding your own voice.

However, sooner or later, once you've written a couple of practice books or a hundred short stories or whatever, and your voice is coming through loud and clear, you need to decide what to write about. The kind of 'stuff' that will make up your fictional worlds. 

I'd humbly suggest that you follow your heart. What do you really love? Really, truly love. Do you geek out over science? Do you adore reality TV? Whatever it is, don't be ashamed of your passions – use them.

Whether it's ancient Greece, Emily Dickinson or the mating behaviour of water voles, your interest will help to carry you through the hard slog of writing a novel and your honest passion will shine through in your writing.

Write Your Novel – Concerning Fantasy

Over the last couple of weeks, we've discussed the genre of Romance and this week it's Fantasy's turn. Grab your cloak and broadsword and dive in ...

There are several sub-categories within the realm of Fantasy, including Urban Fantasy, Historical Fantasy and Epic or High Fantasy.

Urban Fantasy (sometimes called Contemporary Fantasy) usually includes a familiar setting (such as a modern city) blended with fantastical elements – a hidden alternative world, the existence of fairies or magic or vampires in our world, a human character with supernatural powers and so on.

Epic or High Fantasy takes place in an entirely fantastical world such as Tolkien's Middle Earth, and Historical Fantasy can use any or all of these elements but is set in an identifiable historical time period.

I adore reading (and writing!) Fantasy and books with supernatural elements, but there are a few pitfalls particular to the genre …

Write Your Novel – Active Characters

We are often advised to write active (as opposed to 'passive') characters but what, exactly, does this mean?

Active characters, perhaps unsurprisingly, take action. They don't just sit around thinking about their feelings or their situation, or get swept along by the events of the plot like a cork bobbing down a stream. They are in motion but, for that motion to be meaningful, they have to have a destination in mind. Enter 'The Goal' stage left ...

Yes, I've said it before but that's because it's vital: Your characters have to want something. They have to have a goal and they have to care about that goal. More importantly, however, you have to make the reader empathise with or, at least, understand their motivation, so that they are invested in the outcome. As always, the key lies in making your reader care.