This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Rebecca Thornton’s new novel, The Exclusives, a psychological thriller set in a girls’ boarding school, is high on our TBR pile this month. Rebecca joins us now with a few of her top writing tips.
1. Don’t try too hard when you write. It hinders the characters and stops the inspiration from flowing.
2. Get the first draft down. You can tinker afterwards and polish the sentences when you’ve got the story on paper.
3. If a voice isn’t quite working but you feel it’s the story you want to tell, try writing from a different point of view or a different tense. It might jolt something into place. When I was writing The Exclusives, I started off in third-person. I tried so hard to be literary that it just ended up sounding pretentious and idiotic. Someone suggested I try first-person and that’s when it all clicked and I could just tell the story without thinking too much about the flow.
4. Location. If you find you can’t write, or are having trouble getting inspiration, change where you write. I used to work in this cafe near my house but I felt so guilty spending money on teas and coffees that I was getting totally distracted. I moved to the library and bought my own thermos flask in with me and this helped me a lot.
5. Characters lead a story. For years, I made the mistake of thinking about a plot and then trying to find characters to fit in it. When I realised that characters tell the story, the plot followed much more easily.