Columns – Writing Quips and Tips
A writer passes on the lessons she’s learned to make your writing better. Jo-Anne Richards muses on the challenges and excitement of a writer’s life.
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Writing Quips and Tips
Read our latest short story
Read our latest short story, The Pirate, by an allaboutlove all-time favourite author, Michael Spring.
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Writing Quips and Tips
Romance - Why Write It
If you think Romance is a lesser form of fiction, go off immediately and read Pride and Prejudice.
There are many kinds of genre fiction, but nobody accuses Ian Rankin or Ruth Rendell of being lesser writers – simply because they write Crime. Genre fiction has certain expectations and constraints. But what else you do with it is up to you – and your talent.
Writing Quips and Tips
Romance – Why People Read It
People write romance for all kinds of reasons. But if you’re considering starting your first love story, it’s a good idea to know why people read them.
Writing Quips and Tips
Romantic Fiction Writing - How to find ideas through daydreams
Daydreams as a source of ideas
We’re discussing four different sources of ideas that you, as a writer of romantic fiction, can milk at will. Ideas that, elaborated and complicated, will give you original stories that’ll form the backbones of your novel. In this piece, I’d like to tease out how much of a creative engine room your own day-dreaming can be.
Writing Quips and Tips
Romantic Fiction Writing - How to find ideas
Characters generate their own stories Some writers of romantic fiction regard ideas as the gems on which their fortune will be based. I believe, on the contrary, that ideas are a dime a dozen, available in such profusion that you’re never likely to run short of them. If this proposition sounds ludicrous to you – if ideas, or the lack of them, are the stumbling block in your creative path – then this short series of articles is for you.
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing Romance - Five More Tips
Good Romance relies on good characters. We need to believe in them. They should be strong and complex enough for us to identify with them.
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing Romance - Five Tips
Many people think Romance writing is a bit like knitting. There’s a pattern to follow and, even if you’re a bit clumsy at first, you can knock off a finished product in a few afternoons while the kids are out playing.
Writing Quips and Tips
Preparing for the writers life
I sometimes imagine all the unfinished novels in drawers. All the characters who will never finish their journeys; the stories that will never draw to an end. Perhaps that in itself could be the starting point for a story. (Just an idea.) But why is it that so many people start out on their first novel with such enthusiasm, put so much effort and time into it, and then …?
Writing Quips and Tips
How Journals Help Writers
Oh, I know you kept a diary when you were fourteen. Your awful brother probably picked the lock and read steamy passages to his friends. But even so … a journal kept properly can help your writing in many ways.
Writing Quips and Tips
The lessons of the Olympics for writers of romantic fiction
What lessons do the Olympics hold for writers of romantic fiction? Or, indeed, for writers of any kind? If you think this an idle question asked simply to cash in on the world’s current obsession with the events going on in Beijing, you’d be wrong.
