We are going down memory lane here at the Blood Red Pencil during the month of December, recalling and honoring BRP regulars and guest contributors. Today, we raise a glass (of eggnog, perhaps, because it is the season) in memory of Dr. John Yeoman , PhD Creative Writing. Prior to receiving his doctorate degree, Dr. Yeoman spent 40 years as a commercial author and chairman of a major PR company. He wrote children's books and historical mysteries for adults and ran the Writers' Village story competition. Dr. Yeoman died unexpectedly in 2016, but his words and his works live on. Dr. Yeoman's Hippo Yeoman series of instructional novels (unobtrusive tips explain the writing techniques used to craft the stories) are still available from Amazon Kindle, and are well worth working through:       His many insightful posts at the Blood Red Pencil include: How to Win a Writing Competition   How To Pitch A Self-Published Novel to A Publisher - Part One   How ...

Recently I wrote an Amazon review of a new novel, Dream of Darkness by John Yeoman*, book two in a mystery series set in the late 1500s. I’m a sucker for both mysteries and historical novels, so it’s not surprising that I enjoyed this book, especially since Yeoman is an outstanding writer. But this book is a lot more than a mystery or even a novel. John Yeoman ** is not only an outstanding writer, he is an outstanding teacher. Dream of Darkness proves it. Dream of Darkness is a fictorial. If like me you are not familiar with this term, here’s the description from its Amazon page: “an intriguing crime mystery – and also a step-by-step guide to writing your own novel. It’s one of the world’s first ‘fictorials’, an historical crime novel packed with clever but unobtrusive tips that show you precisely how it was written.” Before I began to read, I admit I was dubious. Sounded confusing. As I shuffled through the pages of the first chapter, it also looked confusing. There...

Help! They’ll hate my story. I can hear them now. ‘It’s lovely and so… you!’ Yes, they hate it.  Even if they say they don’t, can we believe them? At least, the verdict we get from an agent or competition judge will be honest. But honesty is cruel. No wonder new writers shudder when entering a major contest. Since 2009, many of the 3500+ contestants in the Writers’ Village * fiction award have asked me ‘Please be kind!’ Their terror is real. Why? If readers reject our story, they stomp on our soul. Here are seven defences against the terror of rejection. 1. Join the club! Virtually all authors who have left an enduring legacy were scorned in their debut years. It took Agatha Christie 23 attempts to get her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles into print. Every publisher in London laughed at William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies. Even J K Rowling had her new novel The Cuckoo’s Calling turned down by ten publishers before they discovered who had written i...

What’s the laziest way to find a plot? Let it find you! It happened to me recently in my kitchen in central England. Believe it or not, this little story will help you find a plot at once. Courtesy of Wise Geek I found my wife inspecting a brochure about pet insurance. “We don’t have a pet, dear,” I reminded her gently. “Yes, we do. It’s you.” She pointed at my rheumy eyes, stubbly jowls and odorous bathrobe. “Look, just £49 a year will insure you against mange, dropsy and gout. If you fall ill, they’ll take you to a pet clinic and feed you with premier dog chow rich in vitamins. That’s a lot healthier than the slop you’d get at a hospital.” “Or here,” I murmured, inspecting my breakfast of carbonised fried eggs. “Isn’t that more humane than the default method favoured by the National Health Service of sticking an empty saline drip in your arm and pushing your trolley into a corridor?” “Well," I conceded "it’s certainly cheaper than paying £2900 a year for p...

Here’s a fabulous tip for making sure your readers love your stories and want to read more. But first, let me ask you a question. As fiction writers, do we always write about ourselves? Our character may be a mafia don, nun, pearl fisherman or - in a sci-fi novel - a thinking blob of mud but, however we camouflage ourselves, it’s us. Isn’t it? First-time novelists notoriously write their autobiography behind a very thin disguise. When they’re into their tenth novel and the best-seller lists they’re still doing it, albeit with more skill. When Patricia Cornwell presents her medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta as a chip of ice - all business, no humour - we see Cornwell herself. We may admire her craft work as an author but we wouldn’t invite her to dinner. But when Kathy Reichs gives us Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist in a comparable job, we warm to her feistiness, fallibility and dry wit. We’d just love to go to Reichs’s barbecue. If the author is just like us, o...

To enjoy a story, we need to feel that the author's world is - within its own logic - plausible; and for a story, howsoever fantastical, to be plausible it must be grounded in the reader's world. Does that sound provocative? Let me explain. A sci-fi tale may consist improbably of a dialogue between sentient sunbeams. But at least we're familiar with dialogue and sunbeams. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is plausible (within its own logic), not solely because it's built on familiar epic myths, but because its weird characters are - arguably - human beings endowed with the properties of household pets. We know what they are. Within a story, we have to detect aspects of our own world. We know what that is. Otherwise, we just won't understand the story. Plausibility in fiction is the detection of familiarity. How can we give our stories that reader-engaging tenor of plausibility - or familiarity - even if our plots or characters are very weird indeed? ...

What’s the easiest way to find a plot for a story or novel? Let it find you! Just today I read a newspaper article about the chief executive of a media company - already a millionaire - who had voted himself a multi-million dollar bonus for the fifth successive year. Then he had used dubious schemes to avoid paying tax on it. I was outraged. Was he worth such a reward? No. Did he invest his surplus wealth in Good Works? No. He was an icon of unmitigated greed. And a plot started to emerge... I drafted a story in less than an hour in a white heat of anger. I added conflict. I imagined that the tycoon had an underling, poorly paid. She faced a moral dilemma. Should she stay loyal to her boss, who had done her many personal favours, or blow the whistle on his illicit schemes? On reflection, I made the man a decent fellow, brought up in terrible poverty and driven by insecurity to accumulate vast wealth. Did he deserve to be ruined? Hm... At the end, there was no moral conclusi...

In the first installment on Wednesday we ended the post with the following question and comment: What does a writer do who doesn’t want to hustle – just write? It’s a growing worry for many authors, and it will get worse. Now let’s fast forward to the year 2015. Let’s imagine self-publishing has matured. It’s accepted and respected in the publishing world. A lot of successful self-publishers have begun to ask themselves: what do I really want to do with the rest of my life? Become another J. A. Konrath and work 18/24 to boost my Kindle ratings? Or hype myself perpetually at Facebook, Google+ and Twitter? Or mount a thousand blog tours? Again, do I write or hustle? What happened to my dream of being an author, a person who writes fiction, not advertisements?  Maybe they thumb through that list of literary agents, long scorned. They decide that the traditional publishing route might have some merits after all. Goodbye to hard labour. Let the publisher do the hustlin...

News that self-publishing author James Oswald has gained a £150,000 ($240,000) advance this week from Penguin in a three-book deal will bring new hope to writers struggling to market their own novels. Oswald, a Scottish farmer, had self-published his crime mystery ebooks in a casual way for several years, but with limited success. The tragic death of his parents gave him a new determination to achieve stardom, as a tribute to their memory. He followed the now familiar route of offering his first novel Natural Causes on Amazon as a ‘loss leader’ without charge. Buyers were encouraged to pay £2.99 ($5) for the follow-up novel. He stumbled on the ‘funnel’ strategy now being used by many authors. Buyers went on an email list and were followed up. Repeat buyers were transferred to a ‘friends’ list. They got personalised attention, special offers, discounts, and lots of love. That’s how John Locke sold his first million ebooks and it worked for Oswald too. He had already sold or given ...

Are you a peacock or a weaver bird? Some writers - peacocks - flaunt their lovely words and beg us to admire them. Others are weaver birds, patiently building a structure that’s serviceable but dull. Some preen. Some delve. Or so I’ve discovered from three years of judging the Writers’ Village story competition. Who wins the prizes? Peacocks or weaver birds? Neither. The cash goes to those who combine both colour and craft, preening and delving - with flair. Here are three fast ways to blend colour and craft and write a best-selling story - or, at least, win a cash award in a story contest: 1. Draft it quickly You have a plot idea, right? A few dramatic events? A snatch or two of dialogue? Scribble it all down as fast as you can. Don’t wait for the ‘right’ words to come to you. Clichés, stagy incidents, clumsy expressions? Welcome them. They’re fine. Just get the tale written! Then throw it in a closet for a month. Pluck it out with a sniff, tone it down and tune each ...

What do new authors hate even more than agents who don’t acknowledge their manuscripts? The apostrophe! Why? It’s like a Christmas gift from an uncle with poor taste. They don’t know where to put it. That was clearly the dilemma of councillors in Mid-Devon this month when they ruled to banish all apostrophes from the county’s street names ‘to avoid confusion’. At a stroke, or lack of it, they have turned ‘Baker’s View’ into ‘Bakers View’, a haiku of enchanting ambiguity. Does ‘Bakers View’ still mean a view once taken by Sir Samuel Baker, the Victorian explorer, after whom the street was named? Or a stance traditionally assumed by local bakers at the summer solstice when they gather to view the rising of the dough? Or does it now mean nothing at all, like a novel by Martin Amis? Yes, punctuation matters! It’s also a dilemma. If we get it wrong as authors, agents won’t read beyond our cover letter. Get it right and somebody in a different culture will chide us for illiteracy....

Horror! The last typewriter factory in Britain has just closed its doors. This month, without a clatter of protest, the west has succumbed to Microsoft Word. Courtesy of MorgueFile How can this fateful event help us to write better stories? Please allow me a moment to digress... With the demise of IBM Selectrics and their manual predecessors, we must finally say goodbye to those days when our every ms was as finely worked as a medieval palimpsest. Do you remember that era? Our pages were weighted down by correction fluid, stained by coffee and smudged by erasers. (Grey ones for top sheets, pink ones for carbon copies.) Fast forward to the present day. The typewriter is dead. So what? Its demise is not just a trivial footnote in history. It marks a radical change in the way you and I think. Up to the 20th century, writers had a tangible and direct relationship with their work. Everything came out of the tip of a pen. Writing was a sensual experience. Typesetters went bl...

How many ways can you hang a page? Or a scene? Or a chapter? Page hangers are a relic of the Victorian three-deck novel that was delivered in monthly installments. Each installment ended with a little advertisement for the next one. How ever would our hero escape from that flooded cellar and those hungry red-eyed rats? Yet even today they are a fixture in best-selling suspense novels. Mistresses of melodrama Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell use so many page hangers - around three per scene - that they must pluck them out of a database. Not every novel calls for hangers, of course, but the ploy is useful when the scene shifts into a different point of view or sub plot. It buys the author time. We’ll put up with a lot of digression if we're sure that the mystery posed by the page hanger will soon be resolved.  Here are seven proven page hangers and how to use them in your story to create suspense. 1. The seamless transition This is not so much a hanger as a link betwe...

‘My life began the day I killed my psychiatrist and started an illicit relationship with my tortoise.’ Are you still with me? Of course, you are. A story that opens with an intriguing mystery, even a silly one, is a story that gets read. And we don’t have a second chance. The first paragraph is the advertisement for our story. Imagine if an advertiser started with his name, the dimensions of his factory and the biography of his parents. Would we buy his product? Hm… A lot of stories are like that. The writer ‘eases us in’ with a long slab of scene setting or character description. Meanwhile, where’s the story? The reason to read on? Here are three tested ways to open a story and persuade the reader to read on:  1. Drop in a time bomb. Every good story or novel hinges upon one key incident. Maybe our character chances upon buried Nazi gold, or Jane discovers her husband is unfaithful, or a child witnesses something she was not supposed to see. Without that incident there i...

Our most effective stories are often those which achieve the illusion of hidden ‘depth’. The reader glimpses a world, multi-dimensional, behind the story. So the tale appears real. We can conjure this effect of smoke and mirrors in many ways. Perhaps we set the tale, wholly fictional, in a real location and cram it with authentic detail. In Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse stories - set in Oxford, England - the reader can sit on the actual chair at the Turf Tavern where the characters - and Morse himself - once sat. The chair is real. So the story must be too... Or we interweave the story with genuine events, as witness Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night . Or we present our story, wickedly, as non-fiction. Paul Kavanagh’s thriller Such Men Are Dangerous was accepted by many readers as the dramatised autobiography of a real CIA agent, until it was exposed as a publisher’s hoax. Defoe’s chilling A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) was widely believed at the time to be an eye-witne...

Why does a powerful story grip us? A tale that gives our feelings a roller-coaster ride will certainly keep us turning the page but will we remember it a year later? Perhaps not. Yet another tale might linger in our memory for a lifetime. Why? Because it has a strong theme . A theme is a re-enactment of some primal human drive. It’s the essential meaning of a story. If a police officer is promoted to a top job for his success in arresting drug dealers, that’s a news report. But if he turns down the job because he wants to carry on arresting drug dealers - maybe drugs destroyed his family - that’s a story. Why? It has a meaning. Its theme might be ‘there’s no ambition sweeter than revenge’. How do you deepen a story with a powerful theme? One way is to detect the pattern of primal emotions already present in a story - and bring that pattern out. Arguably, ‘meaning’ is the detection of pattern. Find pattern in a well-written story and the story acquires ‘meaning’. A t...