From the writing desk

There is no shortage of writing advice on the internet. If anything, there is far too much of it. You can spend an evening watching videos about how to improve your novel and emerge with a list of rules long enough to ensure you never write another word. You must show rather than tell, remove every unnecessary adjective, avoid prologues, begin with action, keep your chapters short, give every character an immediate goal and never use a word ending in “ly” unless you want some

When I began building the world of Shadows Before the Dawn, the map was not a beautiful piece of fantasy artwork. It was a collection of shapes drawn on a whiteboard in a very small apartment in South Korea, where space was limited and apparently the most sensible use of one wall was to cover it with invented countries. At that stage, the map was there for me. I needed to know where the kingdoms were, how far characters had travelled and whether somebody could reasonably reac

The people closest to you may love your book, but that does not always make them useful beta readers. Here is what writers actually need from early feedback.