This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
1. Enjoy the process. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that but it’s so important.
2. Read. Read. Read. And then read some more. Make sure you read widely from magazines (filling the well for women’s fiction topics), newspapers (filling that well again), your own genre and others – history, biography, literary and everything else. It’s all storytelling and it can teach you so much.
3. If you have been away from your work for a while, rewrite it by hand. It helps to connect you to the story again. I also write out tricky passages as well as some of my more descriptive ones by hand.
4. Listen to your work. I use text to speech software that reads the work to me – you can’t hide from a clunky sentence or a missing word that way. The computer only reads what is on the page. It also gives you the necessary distance to edit.
5. Know who you are writing for. I wrote for myself and women like me. I knew the stories I wanted to read and that helped me to find my writing voice.The Cornish Stranger by Liz Fenwick is out now.