Fi Phillips

One of the downfalls of working on my novel over such a long period of time is that I can lose track of all the changes that have happened over the numerous drafts. More than that, I can forget to add the knock-on changes and repercussions of altering characters and plot lines. In her article How To Create An Editorial Map , Janice Hardy provides a straightforward and valuable approach to re-drafting and editing your novel. Have a look.

My bookshelves are overloaded to the point of collapse with all the reading material my family have collected over the years. With each new purchase, I rearrange them a little. With each house move, I cull a percentage of them but that always makes me want to buy more. My children devour books so quickly that every birthday and Christmas present list includes at least one new book for them. There are some books though that I will never part with, however full the bookshelves become, because they're tied in with my life journey and soaked with memories. They're keepers. 1. On Writing by Stephen King As a writer learning the craft, I'm drawn to discovering how successful published authors have arrived at that point in their lives. I don't fare very well with instructive 'how to' books on writing. Sharing a writer's personal journey is the best way for me to learn. I've read several books of this kind but the best I've come across so far has be...

As you can probably tell from the number of times I mention or quote Stephen King on this blog, I'm a massive fan of his writing and his creative advice. I bought his memoir, On Writing several years ago now and read it in a couple of days. It's a constant on my bookshelf that I dip into every now and then. It's a mixture of Stephen King's life and anecdotes thereof, and how he came to be the writer he is today. It's less of a 'do this' as 'learn from how I did this, failed, tried again, and eventually got it right'. On Writing would be a wonderful gift for a writer at any stage of their career. You can purchase it on Amazon or on Stephen King's own website  in hard copy or ebook.

I'm still working on the first draft of my second novel but a little help from a fellow writer is always welcome. In Nathan Bransford's How to Write a Novel , he discusses some of the main considerations when creating a novel. Have a look. This will be the last Tuesday Choice Words until the new year as December will be dominated by my advent calendar of writerly gifts.

Here's a good one - 22 Lessons from Stephen King On How To Be a Great Writer . Have a look. Robert McKee's Storylogue Q&A: Working with Multiple Protagonists

A friend recently self published for the first time and one of the most interesting (and exciting) elements of what I saw of the process (beyond the actual writing) was choosing a book cover design. She commissioned several artists, used a 'vote for your favourite' as publicity for her debut novel and went through a lot of previously unconsidered questions as to what she wanted. You can read more about her adventure here . As writers, we can concentrate so much on the words on the page, creating and honing, that we often forget the importance of book cover design. To a browser in a book store, the look of a book is the thing that will first catch their eye. If they pick up our book, they'll probably turn next to the blurb, but that initial capture is purely visual. The kind of book covers I like personally are very diverse. I find the covers of the Dark Towers novels by Stephen King to be quite eye catching. But then I also like the simple design of Carlos Ruiz...

Life is all about opinion. A lot of writing advice is just that, an opinion (my own advice included) or to put it more kindly, a writer will generally offer up tips and methods that have worked for them. There are some writers, however, whose advice I trust implicitly. One of those writers is Stephen King. I found an excellent article on the openculture site - Stephen King's Top 20 Rules for Writers . I especially love this quote about a story's opening line, "...Because it's not just the reader's way in, it's the writer's way in also, and you've got to find a doorway that fits us both".

As a playwright, I find dialogue relatively easy to come by. However, writing an action scene (and there are plenty of those in the novel I'm working on) is quite a challenge. Fiction University came to my rescue with two articles, P ut Up Your Dukes - Writing A Fight Scene and Finding The Balance when writing about Violence . Have a look. Stephen King Answers Questions

I haven't got to the stage of worrying about cover design yet in the process of creating my novel but this article, by J D Smith on the Writers & Artists website, explains  The Importance of Cover Design .

Today's choice words come from novelist, Chuck Wendig on his blog terribleminds . Chuck discusses plotting by 'mystery' and 'questions' in his post The Question Mark is shaped like a hook: question-driven plotting . It's well worth a read and something I'll be trying out for myself.

I was recently watching a YouTube clip where Stephen King answered questions about his approach to writing. When questioned about the use of notebooks, he had this to say, "People say do you keep a notebook? And the answer is I think a writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalise bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around. To me, it's like if you were to put breadcrumbs in a strainer and shake it, which is what the passage of time is for me. It's like shaking a strainer, all this stuff that's not very big and not very important just kind of dissolves and falls out. But the good stuff stays, you know the big pieces stay." He then goes on to talk about how he had the idea for 'Under The Dome' when he was teaching high school in 1973 and how the idea was 'too big' for him and he was too young for it. He wrote about twenty five pages of the idea and put it away. We now k...

It's a bitterly cold day here. After a muscle-numbing walk to the shops and back, I'm happy to cosy up at home with my keyboard and a cup of tea. As both a writer and  a reader of murder mysteries, I decided to sign up for the Crime Readers Association. Their website brings not only news of new crime fiction but also some wonderful advice from crime writers. The Question Authors Dread is a fascinating article on the CRA website from writer, Chris Simms. The wonderful Stephen King talking about 'how he gets inspired'. It's a little long (53 minutes) but worth the watch.

I've discussed the idea of monsters previously in my article, Loving the Monster , and the recent Hallowe'en season has got me thinking about it all over again. It seems to me that most of the fictional monsters and villains we meet through books, films and TV these days are generally created in a way that we can understand their crimes or brutal approach. For instance, in the novel, The  Warm Bodies (and subsequent film) by Isaac Marion, we find a zombie who grows tired of his life of noshing human flesh and seeks something more, well, human. He wants to fall in love and have experiences beyond his condition. In Dexter , the character of the title is a serial killer who appears to take delight in his gruesome murders but only slaughters criminals who have escaped justice. Time and again, the actions of fictional monsters and villains can be explained away but what happened to having a baddie who was just bad? I miss that. We need more thoroughly evil characters like...

The first day of autumn (Sunday) in the northern hemisphere greeted me with glorious sunshine. I spent the day in the garden dressed in a t-shirt (obviously there were trousers involved too - don't want to scare the neighbours' dogs). Two days on and the continuing blue skies are a wonderful companion for the crisp air and turning leaves. Troubleshoot your novel is an incredibly useful article from Nail Your Novel and one I'll be applying to my own work in progress. It's well worth a read.

So we've a new royal baby on our hands (and in all the newspapers), a little, so far un-named prince. The best thing of all (beyond the gleeful smiles on his parents' faces as they presented him to the press for the first time) is the way this new arrival seems to have stopped the world for a short time and brought people together. I wonder what he'll see in his lifetime. Do you use beta readers to try out your writing? I found a wonderful article on just that subject in the Compose literary journal. Written by Jennie Nash, it's titled The Book Club Beta Test .

Over in the UK, September has brought us weather that is reminiscent of Noah's ark-building days. There have been floods galore. The town I grew up in, York, has been especially affected. https://www.facebook.com/YorkPhotographer Over here in Wales, the playgrounds at my children's school have turned into ankle-deep paddling pools and I was forced to buy myself some new wellies. Cold, crisp September mornings are bracing and encourage me to look around but the constant drip drip drip of rain drops from my hood or umbrella just make me want to curl up on the couch. I use this feeling of rain chasing us away home, causing us to look down and inwards, in the first chapter of the novel that I'm writing to create a sense of people apart from the crowds that surround them, caught in their own thoughts, which is a major characteristic of my main character, Steve Haven. In The Mist , a story by Stephen King, the fog lends a similar quality of being disconnected but in...

A couple of days ago, whilst waiting in the car for my husband, with the window wound down in the futile hope that my rampant children might escape, I overheard a passing conversation. "She literally refers to herself as the next J K Rowling. I mean, that's ego. That's real ego." I don't know how this conversation began. Did 'she' refer to herself as the next J K because she was going to make lots of money, be famous, become a successful, prolific writer, or all three? I have no idea. 'She' could have been an annoying work colleague or a respected sibling. I don't know whether the speaker was criticising or admiring 'She'. It's so easy to make a judgement, especially when you have a writerly imagination. The aspect of the overheard comment that made me prick up my ears however was this. As a writer, should we/do we aspire to be a version of another writer? Did the aforementioned 'she' see herself as J K Rowling .2? I...