The Wicked Writing Blog

Welcome to the home of writing award ideas and practical advice for story contest success. Fun and sheer tomfoolery are never far away. Feel free to add your comments. (To comment on a post, or see the comments there, simply click on its title. To see all the comments to date, click on the buttons 'Best' or 'Community' below each post.)

 

Showing Tag: "characterisation" (Show all posts)

Furtive Dreams & Secrets - Tips From A Mills & Boon Author

Posted by Tiffany Reisz on Thursday, February 7, 2013, In : Guest Posts 

Please welcome our guest this week, Mills & Boon author Tiffany Reisz. Tiffany shows us a brilliantly simple way to bring our characters alive, in any genre. She uses it to wonderful effect in her own best-selling novels which, she says, 'inhabit a sexy shadowy world'. Now her secret is yours!

I had originally titled this blog post: "Creating 3D characters the Lazy Way." And I admit I owe Dr John for that. He said titles that include the phrase "the lazy way" get more readers. But the title ...


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How to Romance Your Readers - and Sell More Stories

Posted by John Yeoman on Friday, November 16, 2012, In : The Writing Craft 
Here’s a fabulous tip for making sure our readers love our stories and want to read more. But first, let me ask you a question.

As fiction writers, do we always write about ourselves? Of course, we do. Our character may be a mafia don, priest, pearl fisherman or - in a sci-fi novel - a thinking blob of mud but, however we camouflage ourselves, it’s us. Isn’t it?

First-time novelists notoriously write their autobiography behind a very thin disguise. When they’re into their tenth novel an...
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Five Surefire Ways To Make Your Characters Stand Out From The Crowd

Posted by Shelley Noble on Saturday, July 7, 2012, In : Guest Posts 
Please welcome our special guest today, multi-published novelist Shelley Noble. In this fast-paced post, Shelley shows us five key ways to make our characters dynamic and unique. Shelley packs in a lot here, just as a good story does. This is a rapid-fire master class!

1. Backstory. 

Give them a Past with a capital P. Make it Traumatic, Dangerous, Ridiculous, Secret...

Then don’t tell us about it.  Make us guess, wonder, surmise about what happened before that put them where they are now.  Fee...
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Three great tips from an old crime writer

Posted by John Yeoman on Friday, August 12, 2011, In : The Writing Craft 
It’s amazing what you can learn from old crime writers, even when they’re poor authors.

I have just been reading Malcolm Sage, Detective (1921) by Herbert George Jenkins. He wrote around the time of Edgar Wallace but he lacked Wallace’s manic ingenuity. Jenkins, in a word, is stagy.

In his tales, the butler really does do it, the reader is presented with just two possible suspects of which one is blatantly a decoy, and the villain is called - nudge, nudge - ‘Sir Jasper’. That said, J...
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John Yeoman

Dr John Yeoman, MA Oxon, MPhil, PhD Creative Writing, FSRS*  is a UK university tutor in the short story. He has 42 years experience as a successful commercial writer, newspaper editor and one-time chairman of a major PR consultancy.

He has published innumerable works of humour, some intended to be humorous.

* Founder, the Society for the Rehabilitation of the Semi-colon