This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Lucy Dillon is the author of Lost Dogs and Lonely Hearts, which won the 2010 Romantic Novelists’
Association’s ‘Romantic Novel of the Year Award’.
1. Don’t use your friends and/or enemies as characters in your books.
2. Read as much as you can.
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3. Edit out as many adverbs as you can bear.
4. Read what you’ve written out loud.
5. Decide what needs to happen in every scene, and make sure the plot’s moved along in at least three different ways, even if two of those things aren’t immediately obvious to the reader at the time.