This month, I’m delighted to continue my relationship with The Asian Writer website by contributing a guest post on Common Mistakes in Writing Fiction and how to avoid them.

Here’s an excerpt from the post, which I hope you’ll enjoy:

Is there such a thing as a ‘mistake’ in writing? It’s a curious question, as of course, there’s no such thing as the ‘perfect’ work of fiction and so it follows that everyone makes mistakes in their writing, all the time. However, the more obvious mistakes most often occur in a first draft, when we are not too familiar with our material and are still finding our way with a new voice.

I don’t like to be overly prescriptive, as it can be those who break the ‘rules’ who go on to be our most innovative and exciting writers. Yet in the twenty years that I have worked as a creative writing teacher and literary consultant, there is no doubt that there are certain recognisable traits that can hinder a work, making it ‘flat’ somehow, preventing it from having a deep impact on the reader.

I’ve put together this list, as a checklist to consider as you begin a new work or edit a first draft. If one or two resonate with you, it might be worth paying some attention to that part of your work, to see if you can strengthen the writing by developing your skills in this area. Effectively, these brief notes are just a starting point for further exploration.

The post, available in full only on The Asian Writer site, outlines how to deal with the common mistakes and what action to take if one of these is an area of weakness for you. It covers:

• The preamble
• The distant narrative voice
• Nothing at stake
• The flat or passive character
• Overuse of adjectives
• The galloping pace
• The flaccid plotline
• Over-exposition in dialogue
• The missing conflict
• An absence of passion

I do hope that you enjoy it and look forward to hearing your response.

On January 22nd 2015, I will be celebrating the publication of my novel The Modigliani Girl. I’m really excited about this publication by Blackbird Books. To celebrate this news, I’ve decided to run a competition and to offer two sessions on the Writing Coach’s Full Mentor Programme, including appraisal of 50 pages of writing work as a prize.

Essentially, the winner will have two full telephone/Skype coaching sessions with me and editorial feedback on 50 pages of their writing work. You can be coached on any aspect of your writing life, from time management, focus and productivity to career progression or more general aspects of the writing process such as forming your characters or structuring your work. We can also work on agent/publisher packages.

Take a look at what others have said about their work with me here.

All you need to do is to simply pre-order The Modigliani Girl on Kindle before 22nd January 2015 (i.e. by 21st January) and contact me  to inform me of your purchase.If you also share this post on social media and inform me of your share, your name will be entered into the draw twice. On publication day, 22nd January, I will put all names into a hat and draw the winner.

Good luck! I’m really looking forward to finding out who wins!

To whet your appetite for the story, here’s the official blurb and Modigliani’s portrait used for the cover of the novel:

Anna Bright never wanted to write a novel. At least, that’s what she tells herself. But a chance encounter with a famous novelist and a surprise gift of an art book cut a chink in Anna’s resolve. The short, tragic life of Modigliani’s mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, becomes an obsession and before she knows it, she has enrolled on a creative writing course, is writing about a fictional Jeanne and mixing with the literati.
As her novel grows and takes on a life of its own, Anna feels her own life becoming increasingly irrelevant. She is absorbed by the story of Jeanne, who committed suicide aged 19 following the artist’s death, jumping from a high window in Paris, pregnant with his child. When Anna is invited to take part in a televised literary competition, hosted by an unscrupulous writing guru, she agrees, but later regrets her choice. Under the gaze of the camera, she has become part of a TV circus; unlike the Bohemian Jeanne, she has sold out. Will she manage to save her sanity and her relationship, before she becomes a by-product of the literary world? A deceptively light satire on the modern writing and publishing world.

I’m so looking forward to working with the winner of this competition. Don’t forget that in order to win, you need to pre-purchase the Kindle version of The Modigliani Girl by 21st January and inform me of your purchase via the contact form of this website. I will post a video of me pulling the winner from the hat on 22nd January.

If you want to keep in touch with The Writing Coach you can sign up for The Writing Coach newsletter, to receive regular updates. You can also subscribe to this blog using the subscribe button to the right or find me on Facebook.

When Sharon Zink launched her book Welcome to Sharonville at New Writing South in Brighton, we were lucky enough to have Nicola Joy recording the event on video.

If you enjoyed the previous post about Sharon’s publishing success and our mentoring journey, I hope you’ll also enjoy listening to Sharon speak in this video: UFOs, ghosts, grafitti and champagne… She is a wonderful raconteur and it was an absolute pleasure to interview her down in Brighton. As her publisher, Robin Jones of Unthank Books commented, wouldn’t she make a wonderful Ted speaker? Sit back and enjoy her fantastic storytelling and experience the joie de vivre of Dr. Zink (as well as her stunning vintage style…)

Win an appraisal of 25 pages of your writing work and a copy of my ebook in the Writing Coach Twitter/Facebook Competition (see below)

Could you and should you write a novel in a month?

Today marks the first day of NaNoWriMo, otherwise known as National Novel Writing Month, when thousands of writers worldwide join together with the common aim of writing a novel in a month. But if you’re new to the idea of NaNoWrimo and wondering whether the idea is totally crazy or actually has some purpose, I’d like to explore the pros and cons of freewriting and what you can gain from this approach.

First of all what is NaNoWrimo?

I’ll let the organisers answer that one:

“National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000 word, (approximately 175 page) novel by 11:59:59, November 30.Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality.”

But does this apparently crazy approach to novel-writing actually work? What is the purpose of writing so feverishly as this?

NaNoWriMo is effectively a month-long freewriting programme, where participants are encouraged to freewrite an entire novel.  Most participants spend no longer than around an hour per day writing, so this really is a case of writing the first thing that comes into one’s head.  You don’t go backwards and edit, you don’t worry about whether your character hangs together or whether the plot makes any sense whatsoever.  Some NaNoWriMoers do in fact ‘plan’ in the month before, so they have a rough outline before they start, but most just plunge in with a germ of something that fascinates them.  The idea is that you get something down and you learn to overcome writer’s block once and for all.  At the end of it, if you complete the marathon, you will have 50,000 words of very rough writing which you can then re-read and unravel and edit into something fresh. This year, I will be fascinated to watch the progress made by some of my clients as several members of The Completion Club here at The Writing Coach have opted to join in with NaNoWriMo and I’ll be excited to see what they produce.

Surely no-one who writes a novel this way ever gets published?

Julia Crouch's novel 'Cuckoo' began life as a NaNoWriMo novel

Not so.  Here’s a list of published NaNoWrimo authors:

Julia Crouch, for example, a former client of mine, came to work with me with a rough NaNoWriMo novel under her belt and she talks here about how she went on to polish it into a finished novel and get a three book deal with Headline UK on the back of it.  I’m immensely proud to have been part of the process that led to the publication of Cuckoo.

It’s important to remember that what NaNoWriMo provides is a framework that can enable you to get beyond any blocks and get words on a page.  But it’s what you do with those words afterwards that really matters.  Freewriting enables you to get past your own self-consciousness: your fears of ‘getting it wrong’ and not being sure if you have a story within you.  Once you have that very rough draft, then you can spend as much time as you want shaping it, editing it, taking out the bits that totally don’t work, adding new characters and depth, a better plot and improving the language.

Would you work that way yourself?

In truth, I think that every writer has to find his or her own best way to write a novel (or a book of any kind) and I don’t think that any of us have a right to prescribe that method to others.  NaNoWriMo is one way of working that has been successful for many authors.  Around 200,000 people sign up for NaNoWriMo each year (and around 30,000 complete the marathon).  So if you look at the list of published authors in that light, it doesn’t look so good.  That’s not the point.  The point is – if an author is going to be good enough to finish writing a wonderful, polished novel, they will probably do it with or without NaNoWriMo.

My personal view is that freewriting has an important role in the development of any creative writer – it is a tool in the box and one which we can all use to find out about ourselves as writers.  I remember first reading Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer within by Natalie Goldberg and being struck by her phrase:  “The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.”  Despite already having a degree in creative writing at that point, I’d never really played much with totally free writing.  It wasn’t the kind of thing that our tutor Malcolm Bradbury particularly advocated and I’m probably still too firmly entrenched in the way I wrote at that time, (the way I’ve written all of my novels) to ever really feel comfortable with the idea of freewriting an entire book.  At the same time, I do understand that it is often only through freeing the subconscious thoughts that we get to the grit of what we want to say.  For me, however, there’s another way of doing that.

What’s the other way?

"Get Black on White: Thirty Days to Productivity and Confidence for Writers"

When I wrote my own ebook Get Black on White: Thirty Days to Productivity and Confidence for Writers I did in fact write 30,000 words (the ‘Get Black on White’ programme itself) in 30 days in the form of a blog, although the material was later extensively edited for the ebook edition. The book does, in fact, serve as an ideal companion for NaNoWrimo writers.  As I wrote the ebook, it  was fascinating for me to see how much I had to share and how easily it flowed. But in the current edition of the programme, I no longer suggest that clients use it to ‘write a thousand words a day’ but rather to help them establish a routine of daily touching base with their writing.

For me, what matters most, is that we have a connection with our writing. I believe that the most effective way of writing lies somewhere between the two extremes of freewriting and writers’ block. I think it is vital that we do have a clear sense of roughly what we are going to write in any particular writing session (at least to have a germ of an idea or a sense of the direction of the scene we are about to write) yet we don’t necessarily have to know the detail of how that will be expressed – in other words, we allow for the insights that our subconscious mind will reveal to us.

If I were to describe my ideal writing state, it would be that of a kind of hypnosis.  Most likely I’ll have Bach’s Cello Suite playing (the Pablo Casals version) as I’m so used to writing to that music that it instantly sends me into a trance and it doesn’t interrupt my flow.  I’ll be immersed in the scene in my imagination, seeing it vividly before my eyes.  I’m not writing so fast that I’m writing gibberish but neither am I getting so worried about the perfection of the words that I fear writing anything down at all. I’m literally ‘there’ in my imagination, pausing when I need to tune in to the scene in more detail yet never for so long that I’m agonising over the words.

I enjoy the feeling of knowing that I am choosing my words carefully and I am, without doubt, a perfectionist.  I could absolutely write a novel in a month but it is not, I feel, my own personal style to do so.

So you don’t recommend NaNoWriMo?

How can I not recommend something which has enabled so many people to break through the barriers that affect their ability to write?  Anything that enables us to approach our writing in a different way, anything that enables writers to discover what it latent within them has to be a good thing. Simply, the helter-skelter approach is not the right one for me, but it might be perfect for you!   And who’s to say that one day I may not eat my words…

I am personally ‘between books’ at the moment.  I’ve been experimenting a lot with other art forms, with an acting class and photography classes (if you are on Instagram or Tumblr or Posterous, do connect with me via the links in these parentheses – I’ve been having great fun with iphone photography lately!)  But I have decided to use the momentum that NaNoWriMo has brought to our experience at The Completion Club to good use to make a commitment to myself to move one particular book idea on.  Instead of committing to 1600 words a day, I am committing to touching base each day on a new Young Adult novel idea.  That’s it – to ‘open the file’ in the words of Mark Forster.

Meanwhile, several of the club members are all buddying up with each other via the Nanowrimo forum as well as via our own forum, forming a kind of mini community within a community and I know they will produce some wonderful work.  Indeed, I am just a little tempted.

A Competition:

To mark the beginning of NaNoWriMo and the launch of my new-style Newsletter on 24th November, I’ve decided to hold a competition. If you’d like to win a free constructive appraisal of 25 pages (double spaced, 12 pt) of your writing in a one-hour telephone call (and via an annotated text) and a copy of my ebook Get Black on White:  A Guide to Productivity and Confidence for Writers, simply tweet the link to the ebook page or this blog post or share a link on Facebook to the same between 1st November and 15th November and let me know via Twitter (@jacquilofthouse) that you’ve done so and I’ll put all of the names in a hat and announce the winner here on 16th November.  Good luck!

Most readers of this blog will be familiar with the concept of the ‘Artist’s Date’, the phrase coined by the author of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron. In Cameron’s words, “The Artist Date is a once-weekly, festive, solo expedition to explore something that interests you. The Artist Date need not be overtly “artistic”- think mischief more than mastery.”

White goose at Winkworth Arboretum

Whilst I can’t claim to keeping that once weekly date solo, I do take my ‘down-time’ seriously and believe that it’s vital for all creative artists to have time away from the writing desk.  This ‘filling the well’ is so important to all artists – it’s a way of refreshing the spirit, engaging with new inspiration and having that all-important ‘thinking-time’ that is necessary if we’re to develop as artists.  This is something that I encourage in my children too.

One of my own favourite ways of filling the well is walking in nature.  These days, I’m getting mildly addicted to photographing plants and wildlife, so I generally carry my camera with me and use this time as an opportunity to really look at what is around me.  I find that taking photographs makes me pay attention to what I’m seeing – I look for detail that I might otherwise miss; when I have my camera with me, I’m focused on the external rather than the internal world.

I’m really enjoying this new creative outlet and I believe that it brings me back to my writing work refreshed and more ready to engage.  Today we visited Winkworth Arboretum for the second time and I share my photographs of the visit on my new photography blog including some more shots of this beautiful white goose who allowed me to get close-up and personal.  I intend to use the new blog to share quotations and insights in future, and I’d love it if you had time to take a look and if you feel so inclined, to comment and subscribe to my feed. (If you want this blog delivered to your in-box, you can subscribe by RSS or email by pushing the buttons to the right).  I’m a total beginner as a photographer, so if you’re a professional taking a look at the new blog, please be gentle with me!  I’m learning all the time and looking forward to getting some professional tuition soon.  But in the meantime, I find that nothing inspires my writing more than this time out.  So even this evening, on my return from Winkworth, my head began to buzz with ideas relating to my new writing project and I immediately took out my new iPad (yes, I succumbed) and began taking notes.  As it happens, the iPad also proved hugely useful tonight as I downloaded the 19th century books British Library app.  It’s incredible!  Almost immediately I stumbled upon several books that will be immediately relevant to my current project – like having my own private Victorian library at home.

Does this goose that I photographed today have any direct bearing on my evening writing inspiration?  Perhaps not.  But by going outside, taking myself away from my work, enjoying time with my family and engaging with the natural world, I was able to return to my writing work with a new excitement.  It’s so easy for us to feel that we need to be tied to the desk if we’re to create our best work.  But it’s simply not true.  We need to return to the desk regularly but we also need to engage with the world.  Else what will there be to write about?

Do share your thoughts on artist’s dates here.  What do you do when you need fresh inspiration?