NEWS
Here you will find news and views on our three courses, why you should consider enrolling, and updates on absolutely everything!
Third-person voice
Charlie Laidlaw is an author and tutor at Creating Writers As a writer you have to find your voice. A way of writing that is yours. It’s all about the stories you write and the way you tell them. Finding that voice can be easy or hard; we instinctively understand...
Do your research
Charlie Laidlaw is an author and tutor at Creating Writers To be credible, a novel must be authentic. It must have authentic characters, good or bad. The story, narrative and dialogue must unfold in places that feel real. Those places and those characters may be...
Defining your audience
Charlie Laidlaw is an author and tutor at Creating Writers Readers engage with books because we’re enthralled with the plot or the characters. We want to keep turning pages because we want to know what happens next. We like the story and the characters that populate...
Making things interesting
Charlie Laidlaw is an author and tutor at Creating Writers Most of us live fairly humdrum lives, but that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t make good novels. We fall in love, we grow older, we fall out of love. We make friends, we lose friends. Our lives are all about...
Thinking up real people
Charlie Laidlaw is an author and tutor at Creating Writers Your only task as an author is to write stories that people will want to read. To keep them turning pages to find out what happens next. But we mostly engage with books because we engage with their...
Naming names
Charlie Laidlaw is an author and tutor at Creating Writers Some authors will say that the names of their characters matter. Others will say that it doesn’t matter. Nevertheless, most authors spend a great deal of time thinking up names for their characters. It’s a...
Edit, edit, edit
Charlie Laidlaw is an author and tutor at Creating Writers A great many new authors worry endlessly about what they’re writing. Often, they worry so much about what they’re writing that they give up. But take the advice of American speculative novelist, CJ Cherryh....
Finding inspiration
Charlie Laidlaw is an author and course tutor at Creating Writers According to surveys, most people would like to write a book. The trouble is that while many people have a vague idea for that book, it often remains just that. A vague idea. The fact is that...
Structuring structure
Charlie Laidlaw is an author and tutor at Creating Writers To succeed as a writer your book must have a structure that works, and it must be told in a way that is engaging for the reader. A simple structure might be: you set the scene, and stuff happens that...
Finding a voice
Charlie Laidlaw is an author and tutor at Creating Writers A trick you have to master, based on the books you enjoy, the genres you read, your creative ideas, and the X-Factor of inspiration, is to find your “voice.” In a literary context, “voice” seems an...
Conflict resolution
Charlie Laidlaw is an author and tutor at Creating Writers All books involve conflict of some sort otherwise there would be no point in writing them, or for anybody else to read them. However, there are different sorts of conflict, several of which may appear in a...
A journey in structure
Charlie Laidlaw is an author and tutor at Creating Writers Every book has a beginning, middle, and an end. Put simply, a book is a series of events that move the story from A to Z. The journey from A to Z resolves the conflict that is at the heart of the story. Each...