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...

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 ...

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...