Welcome to Death Of 1000 Cuts – making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time. This week we’ve got another In The Barber’s Chair, where we take the first page of someone’s novel or short story and pep it up a tad. If you fancy a turn in the barber’s chair, send me … Read more
Death Of 1000 Cuts Archives – The Best Writing Podcast 2018
Welcome to Death Of 1000 Cuts – making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time. Today it’s time for another installment of In The Barber’s Chair, where we look at someone’s first page then go at it with the scissors. A while back I asked you to send me the first page of … Read more
Thursday is fiction day – my posts are for those of us working on the noble art of lying to strangers for money. Death Of 1000 Cuts is my chance to expound honestly about ways to make us all awesome writers – one cut at a time. I’m a published author, I teach creative writing … Read more
Stop Handling Causality Badly, Causing Me To Hurl Your Novel At The Wall He sat in a large stone room, baked by enormous firepits that cast a garish light upon the revelers, causing beads of sweat to form on their skin as they danced, and drank, and yelled, and sang, and clapped. – The Way … Read more
This week, I’m starting a semi-regular feature called ‘In The Barber’s Chair’, where we look at someone’s first page then go at it with the scissors. Last time, I asked you to send me the first page of your novel or short story. Reader ‘Peter’ kindly obliged. The idea is to show good compositional principles … Read more
I’ve been working as a manuscript assessor for nearly a decade. Jesus. It involves reading aspiring authors’ novels and explaining why I think they haven’t been published yet. I teach creative writing for the Open University. I did the MA in Prose Fiction at UEA. I presented the C4 series How To Get A Book … Read more