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A well-paced plot that keeps the reader hooked from the very first sentence to the very last is one of the hardest, but most important, things for a writer to achieve. Our section on Story & Plot gives you advice on planning and pacing, to help you make your novel a page-turner.
Can You Teach Great Crime?
The last of M R Hall’s blog series for Writers & Artists, sees him both explore what an aspiring writer can learn from the seasoned novelist and – perhaps more surprisingly – vice versa.
At the start of February, and after a few shout-outs on Twitter, my fellow Macmillan author …
Countdown to keep your novel pacey
Over
the summer I had the pleasure of reading Colm Toibin's Brooklyn.
For all the routine of his female protagonist's days, I found myself
compellingly drawn less into the narrative and more with
the narrative. A personal lover of jazz, there is a rhythm here
that pays homage to another …
How To Write Great Crime
This is the first in a series of three blogs by crime and screenwriter M. R. Hall. In this post, he poses questions that help guide your writing and then reveals how finding his righteous anger helped spur him on to finish his novel - and how finding yours can help you, too.
When I took my first …
Pacing your plot
Do
you find yourself 90% of the way through writing your novel, but with a lot of
action left to cram in? Or have you galloped through your main ideas, only to
find there's another 40,000 words left to write?
Pace is one of the trickiest things to get right, and one of the most …
Seven secrets of writing a page-turner
I wasn’t classically trained in creative writing as such,
but I did learn a lot of lessons ‘on the job’ from my brilliant editor, Marian
McCarthy, the pick of which I've set out below. Very best, Emma
1. The characters have to be believable and relatable …