Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2023 i Writing Magazine

Writing Magazine|March 2023

Comic timing

Comedy is a bit like terrorism. There’s no one set route into it, but it invariably ends up with your family explaining to anyone who will listen that they’ve no idea how you’d ended up like this. I once had what my mother considers to be a proper job in IT. She could explain it to the neighbours, and they wouldn’t pull sympathetic faces. People know what computers are and they’re useful. Stand-up comedians on the other hand, well that’s just a modernday court jester who doesn’t even get to meet important people. They should have seen it coming though. I was the weird kid who sat inside reading Terry Pratchett books when everyone else was out playing football. It has now been twenty years since I last told someone…

10 min

Writing Magazine|March 2023

WRITER’S WORKSHOP: Bringing your characters to life

In the last issue, we looked at character types, stereotypes, character names, if you can have too many characters, and where characters come from. We are now going to look at how to bring your characters to life on the page. Oh, and we’ll also be taking a look at where characters really come from... A character’s importance to the story First of all, it is important to understand the context within which the reader will experience the characters you create. This context is, of course, the story within which you place them. Two questions are instructive to answer: i) What is the story about? ii) What is the story really about? Let’s take, for example, The Lord of the Rings. The answer to the first question could be answered…

9 min

Writing Magazine|March 2023

Dreams can come true

It’s all been so unremittingly grim recently that a deep delve into escapist feelgood fiction is a welcome retreat from the everyday world. And it doesn’t get more uplifting than the romantic comedies of Jill Mansell, the bestselling author known as the Queen of Feelgood Fiction. Jill’s latest, Promise Me, sweeps the reader into a believable, relatable world where dreams can – in the end, and after a lot of ups and downs – come gloriously true. In person, Jill is as delightful as her books – friendly, approachable, involving, and making light of all the hard work that goes into maintaining a long career as a successful commercial author – Promise Me is her 34th book. ‘Uplit’s popular because we’ve been going through a really, really horrible time in…

6 min

Writing Magazine|March 2023

LOUISE HARE

TAP HERE To read an extract from Miss Aldridge Regrets Writing a second novel is notoriously tricky and I’m very grateful for some wise advice I received just after signing the publishing contract for my debut: write at least a rough draft of the second novel before the first comes out. Partly because, if your debut does well, the pressure increases. But also, no matter how much you try to avoid reviews and reader comments, it’s impossible. It can be easy to obsess over what people love or hate about your first novel, and that makes it harder to focus on what you actually want to write. Taking this wisdom onboard, I decided to explore a vague idea that I’d pitched to my editor at submission stage in order to…

One of the least-noticed and seemingly most unremarkable corners of a publishing contract is the author’s copies clause, in which the right of the author to buy their own books direct from the publisher at a set discount is set forth. For most first time authors, especially debut novelists it seems like little more than a friendly little provision, just one of the tiny, exciting little details that will make their first book deal seem so deliciously real. And indeed for most authors it is not a clause which will ever have much meaning in their lives and yet, in its own way it is a perfect exemplar of the way in which publishers reveal not only their essentially inequitable attitude to authors, but also the way in which that…

4 min

Writing Magazine|March 2023

Opposing views: How to write a dual narrative

From Charles Dickens to Anthony Doerr, writers have explored the possibilities of telling a story from dual perspectives. It allows you to focus on the contrasting experiences of two characters, or can even bring your reader into the mind of a character at different points in their life. But how do you juggle the competing focuses of a dual narrative? The first thing to consider is whether your story would benefit from a dual narrative. Do you have two key characters that you want to contrast with each other? Do you want to create a fast pace and ratchet up tension? Do you want to create an unreliable narrator? At its heart, the purpose of a dual narrative is to set two things against each other, and highlight each by…

8 min

3 min

Writing Magazine|March 2023

Imran Mahmood

Originally from Liverpool, Imran Mahmood now lives in London with his wife and daughters. Imran is a practising barrister with thirty years’ experience fighting cases in courtrooms. I asked how he found time to fit writing into his busy life. ‘As a barrister, I spend a lot of time travelling and whenever I get on a train I put on my headphones and write,’ he explains. ‘There’s also a lot of waiting time in court – waiting for juries or for a free court so I take advantage of that time too. ‘A thousand words is the aim each day but if I even get a hundred it’s fine. Writing every day creates a routine for me so that the thoughts I have at night can find a place in…

4 min

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