Here at Pen and Kink we understand that you would much rather hear from our authors than from us, so we invited the contributors to Legendary to stop by and write a guest post for our blog.
The first one up is Aisling Phillips whose story, “La Vie En Rose” has been called out (in a good way) in reviews.
My Top 3 Tips For Writing
by Aisling Phillips
Do you one of those days when you wake up thinking “Oh [insert favourite swear word here] I’ve got to get the book I’m working on finished in a week and it’s never going to be done in that time!” and then a writing surge hits you and end up writing twenty pages and coming so close to finishing that it’s kind of scary? And then you look ‘round my room, and realise there’s no one to hug, and find yourself thinking “Where is [insert hot up-and-coming celebrity, eg. Tom Hiddleston] when I need them?”
I’m sure every writer has those days.
But then just as a seesaw, or “teeter-totter” as the Americans call it, goes up, it also comes down, and you have a day when staring blankly at the laptop screen and re-reading everything you’ve already written time and time again, trying to visualise it right down to the last tiny detail, doesn’t get the creative juices flowing, and it feels like such a struggle to even write one line of dialogue that you feel like just packing it all in there and then and waving your writing career goodbye forever.
But before you do that, let me share with you my three best tips for writing something you, and hopefully others, will think is a winning bestseller.
Tip 1: Get Away From It All
If inspiration doesn’t come right away, take a break. I’m not saying hop on a plane to the Bahamas, although if you’ve got the time and money to, do by all means, but sometimes just going for a walk can give your ideas room to grow. A museum or a library, or even a bookshop, are the best places to clear your head and really concentrate on a story.
Tip 2: Don’t Hold Back
Always trust your own instincts with fiction, even if it’s something as mental as a science fiction story with no aliens but a load of robots, or a tale about Christian regeneration in modern Britain, or even just your run of the mill fish-out-of-water story with a hidden twist. If you feel it’s going somewhere and it can be good, then write it down, and when in doubt, remember – Harry Potter and the Hobbit got published!
Tip 3: Music Matters
Probably the most important one of all, no, what am I saying? Not probably the most important one of all, in my opinion, it is the most important one of all.
Listen to music whilst writing. More specifically, listen to the Bookshop Band whilst writing. Formed several years ago in a quiet little bookshop named Mr B’s Emporium in Bath, England, this is a band with a difference, as all their sound are written about and around different books the members have all read, ranging from Shakespeare to Fitzgerald, from autobiographies to folk tales, from the mad world of Wonderland to a haunted frozen wasteland in the middle of Norway. If anyone can help inspire a story, it’s the Bookshop Band. (You can find some of their songs on YouTube or else visit their website to buy their albums or get details of their live shows!)
And that’s it, the three best writing tips I can give.
The rest is up to you.
Out of Print
