Tag Archives: editor

Planning a novel? A Pantser’s confessions

Pantser Sophie wrestles plot. Plot shifts ground. Pantser Sophie regroups…

As long as I’ve been a writer (i.e. since I was about seven) I have struggled with plot. It was the very first thing the agent who took me on as a wannabe novelist said to me. It was the first thing that my last (so far) editor said, too.

In the umpty-um years between, I’ve been to conferences and taken notes about plotting. There were courses I attended, writing gurus I followed, even plot templates I hammered my story into matching. Save the Cat, though inspiring in many ways, has much to answer for.

Alas, messy thinking is clearly hard-wired. Continue reading →

Fantasy with Rules : what makes fantasy compelling

This week Sophie read a “fantasy with rules” book she had dropped part-read ages ago and now couldn’t put  down. It started her thinking about fantasy again and why she loves the genre.

Single round-bowled wine glass on a black reflecting surface, full of an orange cocktail, with ia slice of orange fruit and a sprig of rosemary, with ice cubes visible in the mix.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

On Monday this week, horribly hot and awake at three in the morning, I scanned through my Kindle library looking for something compelling to read. And, buried in downloads of three or four years ago, was an intriguing fantasy, Unraveller by Frances Hardinge. Its world, and the very particular rules to be observed by visitors, gripped me immediately.

Yet when I read it before, I seemed to have come to a halt quite early and had only the vaguest memory of the story. This time, in less than a page, I realised that this was a real find and needed, nay demanded, proper attention. I forgot how hot and bad tempered I was and went back to the beginning.

It was like a glass of something wonderful: cool, sharp and blessedly refreshing. The deeper I plunged into the story, the stranger it got. And always there was that bite of compelling strangeness that I can never resist. Continue reading →