Ruth’s Blog
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My first full day writing workshop
I've been looking forward to this for weeks, and anxious about it too, and last Saturday, January 17th 2015 at Kendal library I led my very first full day writing workshop. And I really enjoyed it, although I was pretty exhausted when it was over: partly the several...
Clues, red herrings and ‘reveals’
The current novel is my first attempt at crime fiction, after reading tons of it over the past decades. Reading other authors' crime fiction is easy: you can be self-righteously critical of too much information, too little information, too many clues, none at all,...
Do our characters need to be ‘likeable’?
Every now and then I check to see if anyone has posted a review of my books on Amazon. Not that they make any difference to sales - or do they? - but just out of curiosity. The reviews are usually good, I'm pleased to say, but one for 'Forgiven' was a 3 star and I...
Letters from readers
I'm sure more famous authors get loads of letters from readers, but for me it's a new phenomenon: just a few, usually handwritten, in a card or on their own in an envelope. The writers tell me what they've enjoyed about my books. If they're local, they say how they...
My first writing workshop, Jan 17th, Kendal Library
Well, actually, it's not quite my first. That was at the Borderlines Festival in Carlisle in September - which was a great book festival, by the way - but it was only an hour and a half, not long enough to do anything substantial. Even so, I enjoyed it so much that I...
Character, Complexity and Point of View
Weeks ago I thought the outline for Book 4 was almost finished: just the odd twist here. or an extra chapter there and it was done, waiting to be fleshed out in all its detail in the first draft. Then I had to step away for a while to focus on another project and when...
Writing a novel: where to start?
I suppose I've learned quite a lot about writing a novel over the past few years. A long time before that I learned how to write sentences and string them together into paragraphs that followed each other and made sense. I can recall some quite good writing in my...
Slow snow falling on Friday
I wonder how much the physical circumstances of writing affect my thoughts. The last post, about ‘Flow’, I wrote in an apartment on the 14th floor of a condo building in downtown Winnipeg, as the traffic streamed into the city and construction workers on yet another...
‘Flow’
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man with the unprounounceable name, introduced us some years ago to the concept of 'Flow', defined in Wikipedia thus: "Flow, also known as Zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in...
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