This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Ashley Hay is the author of The Railwayman's Wife, a novel set just after the end of the Second World War and which will be out in January. Ashley has given us her top five writing tips…
1. Get some words down – even if you suspect what you’ve written is terrible, you’ve got something on the page you can work with.
2. Read your sentences out loud; you can hear if the weight and the rhythm are working.
The following banner is an affiliate one. That means Writing Tips Oasis receive a small % of the sale if you purchase The Novel Factory, but at no extra cost to you:
3. Be hungry for the feedback of new readers – it’s such a relief to have someone playing in a manuscript with you when you’ve spent months in there battling on your own.
4. Try to leave a piece of writing at a point where you know what’s going to happen the next time you sit down with it.
5. If you get truly stuck, give it 15 minutes of staring at your screen – or your page – and then take yourself out for a walk. If you’re moving and in a different landscape, a solution quite often presents itself. Rebecca Solnit has this nice line about how we walk at the speed of thought – about four miles an hour – and I’ve always thought that made sense.