Good preparation for submitting is much more likely to land you a “fish” — I love fishing, and I’ve never been able to work out why. Until it occurred to me that fishing is a bit like sending my writing out to publishers and editors. There’s some luck involved, but it’s more about where you fish, what bait you use, and how long your…

You can use this for every draft you do — The first draft of a poem is often an exhilarating splurge on the page. All the things you want to say bursting out, many times in one sitting. You just want to get it out there and see what you have. That’s great. But it’s just the beginning. A poem…

The first step to getting over it is to stop staying it — I’ve just been to a writers’ conference, and if I had a dollar for every time I heard that term — imposter syndrome — being bandied around, I could have paid for my conference fees. It’s a term that has become very popular in writing circles over the past few…

It’s rhythm and flow, but it’s much more than that — Have you ever had a really good look at the sentences you write? Sure, you examine them for grammar and punctuation errors and fix them (I hope), but that’s like polishing the hood of your car when really your engine needs a tune-up. There are a lot of small ways…

Maybe the question is — will readers know the difference? — Those are scary ideas to me. I put a lot of time and energy into my novels, but more vitally for me, I put my imagination, intuition and serendipity into them. I also create characters that feel real to me, whose voices I hear in my head. The proposal that…

Tips for flourishes to add in your rewriting and polishing drafts — I’ve written before about literary devices that can add extra layers of imagery, meaning and impact in your novel — in a first draft we want to get the story down and show who our characters are. But in subsequent drafts, look for opportunities to add these little touches. …

You see them in poetry, but they work in fiction and memoir as well — If you read a lot of poetry and have studied it, you may know of some of these devices I am about to describe. “Devices” is the term we use in literature, but I think lots of writers would be more likely to think of these as “imaginative or heightened…

Getting rid of these will tighten your writing and improve pacing as well — My recent article on redundancies seemed to strike a clear note with many — and it reminded me to double-check my own writing! But as I continue to edit other people’s fiction, I gather more examples of things you need to look out for as you self-edit. Over-explaining There’s a tendency…