Every summer, Jericho Writers runs the Friday Night Live competition #FNL. The competition is open to anyone who attends their Summer Festival of Writing, and to enter you submit the first 500 words of your unpublished novel. This year I entered. I felt proud of where my writing has got in the last year and saw the competition as a way to focus my mind on improving it even further so that I could submit something worthy of being long listed. As the date got closer for the announcement of the long listees, I got excited. Would my submission get through? It didn't. But I still attended the webinars where the long listees read out their submissions for us all to vote on, and I listened intently. I wanted to know what was so much better about their writing than mine that they got through. What was it about these pieces that made them special? Was there anything I could learn? To help you follow where I'm going with this, I've included below the first 120 words of my submission....

When mum was my age she refused to look after my daughter. A toddler of 3 who needed collecting from private nursery 2 days a week, and taking to the nursery at the school she'd be attending. Mum said no, that was too much to ask. She'd seen how tired grandparents got looking after their grandchildren and 'knew what it was like' for these people she observed in cafes or walking around the park. ‘It isn’t fair to ask someone of 59 to do that,’ she'd say. It's a lot to ask of old people that they look after their grandchildren. I’m 59. I’m all my mum has left. I look after her, working full time, and she's right. I’m tired looking after her. But the big difference is that as I look after her, she's only going to get older and needs more and more 'looking after'. Had my mum looked after my daughter, she would only have got older and needed less 'looking after'. For the last 5 years we've WhatsApp'd every morning, so that I know she’s...

  Back in early summer when I was finishing writing my shitty first draft of my novel I came across Jericho Writers through watching a webinar delivered by the writer Lucy Atkins (Lucy is the writer of Magpie Lane and The Night Visitor, amongst other books). She mentioned that it helps when approaching agents if you can show that you've put some effort into learning the trade of writing, and Jericho Writers was one of the learning environments she referenced. So I joined, and boy, what learning I encountered from day one. There are masterclasses and webinars, videos and events. One of the first things I watched was a recording from a previous 'Summer Festival of Writing' where Debi Alper was delivering a session about self-editing. I immediately took to her and the approach she takes to editing. I was delighted as I carried on searching through the JerichoWriters.com website and found that Debi runs a six week course with Emma Darwin on how to edit your novel. I booked my ...

  When I first started to write I just wrote, let the words flow with no idea where my story was going to go, and only the hint of something in my head about what I might write. I let the ideas develop themselves. Then I came across the 'Snowflake' method which got me thinking about how I could at least have an outline of a plan. And that's what got me realising that I work much better with a plan. From there I learned about having a flatplan from Holly Dawson through a webinar she ran for Jericho Writers. I now have little prompts (you can just make them out in the photo above) which have the chapter, place, date, character list, what happens, and what the purpose of the chapter is. Using these prompts helps me to get my ideas out of my head. And more importantly they help me to keep working on my structure, making sure that everything fits together the way it needs to.  By using this approach I spotted some glaring errors in my timeline, and realised that I had one of my ...

Do you remember I said I was starting a self-edit course in September? I started, and wow! What a rollercoaster. I'm surprised daily by what I'm learning. At the start of the course I also booked a 1:1 with an editor, and the two combined have helped me to realise that I'm not actually writing a thriller. I'm writing historical fiction.  Now, you could be forgiven for thinking I should know what genre I am writing. Truth is, though, I used a contemporary parallel theme to help me tell the historical part of the novel, and I'd not realised that was simply a tool to get me to understand my writing, and to help me get into my writing. As a result, a big decision has been made. I'm committing murder. I'm killing off all of my contemporary characters and removing all the narrative that was about the current day part of the plot. I don't need it, I don't them. From this point forward, I'm writing a historical novel - and that feels epic! It feels like ...

                                                            I've finished the SFD of my first novel - my shitty first draft. I had to leave off writing for the blog so that I could finish - but now what? It's edit time. And I'm smack bang in the middle of the edit. How do you go about editing though?  thought at first that editing was about checking for typos, missing words, sentences or paragraphs that didn't work. How wrong could I be. Reading through my novel it became clear that editing is actually rewriting. The kind of edit I had in my mind was simply proofreading - still an important task, but not as crucial as the rewrite. I'm moving chapters around, changing how my main character gets her story across (I've gone from notebooks to letters), and changing how the granddaughter (the main character ...

I've tried to write novels for around the last 25 years - plus I wrote short stories before then. But somehow I never got far enough to move from writing, to writing a novel. That changed in February 2020. My daughter, The Angelic One, asked me to join her at an event at Waterstones in Liverpool that was featuring 3 women authors. As one of the writers works in a genre I enjoy, I agreed. What transpired was that Mama Bear bought tea at Pizza Express before the evening event, and Mama Bear bought all 3 books of the authors, with one of them being specifically for The Angelic One, and Mama Bear asked a question that lead to tips number 1 and 2 that kickstarted me writing my novel. Since then I've listened to podcasts and Instagram Live sessions, and I have found that 5 tips resonate with me, so I thought I'd share them with you in case you find them helpful too. Just write, have a go. You can't write something if you don't get started. This is a valid point - ...

Since school days, when my love for writing and reading started to mature under the tutelage of Mrs Hymers, I've been told to write what I know. Let's face it, though, you're not really that interested in a novel about an NHS programme manager. Silly though it sounds, I've only recently attuned to what the phrase means. It's not referring to my profession or what I do, but rather it's about writing from a place of knowing. If you know Liverpool like the back of your hand, then write about it, but if you've never been there it's maybe better to concentrate a place that you do know. However I realise there is something else about 'write what you know' and this place of knowing, and that's the role of research. It's ok for me to research something to the point where when I write about it, you think I have written about what I know. Take the photograph at the top of this post. Flowers in a jug sitting on hessian. What do you know about ...

A few years ago I did a creative writing course. At the time, I didn't enjoy it at all that much. It annoyed me. When I reflect back on it now, with the gift of hindsight and a few extra wrinkles, I realise I was expecting it to deliver something that it never promised me it would do. I thought I'd learn how to write a novel. Instead, the tutor was teaching me how to chisel and carve and polish words. It was up to me what I did with them later. It's obvious to say it now, but a creative writing course is never going to teach us to write a novel. Maybe a 'how to write your novel' course will do that - but even then (having attended one of those workshops, too) I'm not convinced. Any course or workshop can only whet your appetite and nudge you along the way. What, then, did I learn? Stating the obvious here, I learned firstly that I am creative regardless of the fact I'd convinced myself I was nothing of the sort, and secondly, I learned how to use...

I'm not a full-time writer, so during the week my work has to take priority. And there are times I find that a complete shame, with ideas trying so hard to escape onto the page. My writing room turns into an office (at least, during this lockdown period it does - usually I spend a lot of time on the road) with the work laptop open and the work phone pinned to my ear for big chunks of the day. That means nothing gets written for my novel between the hours of 8am and 6pm. Some days I'm then too tired to get any more ideas out of my head, having spent the day thinking, listening and writing for work. Often I will write early in the morning or later at night, but Scouse Lad has been ill (yes, he's had the lurgy) so I'm doing more around the house than usual. That means I'll be squeezing writing time in for another week. These are the days I have to be kind to myself, though. I set realistic targets for work days - 500-1,000 words - and if I don't hit that targ...