How To … Posts

Every author will ultimately develop their own approach to planning and writing a novel and there’s certainly no one-size-fits-all solution. Nor is there a consensus among the professionals. If you’re wondering how to plan your own novel, here are ten steps to get you started.

Clare Alan is a tutor on our first ever Writing an Original TV Drama Serial course, and an experienced script editor and producer who has worked on a range of TV and film projects in the UK and Ireland, including Solomon & Gaenor, factual drama The Investigator, Dangerfield, Silent Witness and The Vice. As the […]

Are you settling down into the new decade by starting to write a novel? Have you been mulling over a good story idea for years but failing to actually get it started? Or perhaps you’re putting words down but feeling unsure of what you’re doing and where you’re headed with it? Writing a novel can […]

This week, the Curtis Brown Creative team are back in the office after our respective dreamy summer holidays (sigh), and I decided to run a little Twitter poll: Having read a few disappointing books while I was away this year, I asked people to name the ONE thing that makes them want to abandon a holiday […]

How to edit your novel – our tips on tackling your structural edit and getting on a firm footing with your rewriting process.

Gytha Lodge reveals the importance of properly establishing time and place and shares three of her top tips for getting the setting of your novel right.

How do you write the killer pitch-letter for your novel? Here are Anna Davis’ top 15 tips on how to make your letter stand out from the pack.

Finding an agent is a matter of fit. It takes persistence and confidence, remember that publishing is a subjective business, and so what might be a NO for some agents is a YES for others. Catherine Cho, an Associate Agent at Curtis Brown, shares her top tips on how to send a query to a literary agent.

Well-handled dialogue is one of THE essential ingredients of a good novel. And yet it’s something that many writers struggle with and even shy away from. The trick to writing great dialogue in fiction is to make your characters’ speech carry the ring and rhythm of real-life conversations without actually trying to recreate them verbatim, […]

All of us need to think hard about how to create striking, memorable characters in our novels and stories – so really there should be something for everyone here.  So here goes … We have four separate pieces of writing advice plus writing exercises here for creating great characters in fiction… 1. Using little everyday details […]