I had a lovely day on Sunday at the Romantic Novelists' Association Annual Conference. The RNA are a glorious group of professional authors who have been at the forefront of fiction for fifty years. They have a remarkable history and a vast appetite for writing, talking, drinking, wearing great shoes and professional development, and supporting new talent on the New Writers Scheme. I was asked to give a workshop on The Writer's Voices, and, as is the way of such things, I ended up mentioning various blog posts, as places where there was more detail than I could go into on the day. So here are all the links I can remember mentioning, and if you're reading this, and remember another, let me know in the comments and I'll dig it up.
VOICE:
Hearing Voices: what is voice and why does it matter so much
The difference between style and voice
19 Questions to Ask (and ask again) About Voice
OTHER POSTS:
Examples of real-life work with psychic distance
Why Variety, including the Christmas Rule, Matters
Past and Present tense - in first person and third person
Internal (first person) Narrators and how to handle Point-of-View
External (third person) Narrators and how to handle Point-of-View
Filtering, Scaffolding and How To Perform an Explain-ectomy
Thinking, Introspection and Spilling Tea on the Dog
For most of these, and many others, click through to The Tool-Kit. The link is also up there at the top right-hand corner of the blog.
Click here for more about my forthcoming book Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction, which is due out from John Murray Learning in October, as well as other writerly events, including a one-day course I'm teaching at Ralph Vaughan Williams's childhood home, the National Trust's delightful Leith Hill Place.
And finally, you know that re-writing and revising are three-quarters of the battle to write well, but you're not sure that you set about it in the most effective way, you could think about joining the six-week online course that I co-developed with Debi Alper: Self-Editing Your Novel. We've run the coures 16 times and we're heading towards 200 graduates: the feedback is amazing.
