Sally Quilford's Blog

Originally posted on the Pocketeers blog. When I presented a workshop for the lovely Write Place Writing School at the beginning of November, I touched briefly on ‘writing in the now’ and wanted to explore that point further. As it wouldn’t be fair to share my students’ idea I have come up with a scenario to explain what I mean. Annie and James meet in university when they join the same band, with Annie as the lead singer and James as the lead guitarist/singer. They are each other’s first love, but at the end of university life they go their separate ways because James decides to move to America to pursue his musical career. Ten years later they meet up again, and James is a huge star, whilst Annie is a backing singer, working to keep a roof over her and her young son’s head. Annie is still hurt that James left her and thought his career more important than their love and she is also angry that he stole the song that they wrote together and which became his biggest hit. S...

The recent case against Harlequin for plagiarism has brought up the subject of originality in writing romance. In that case, a wannabe writer accused Mills and Boon novelist, Kate Walker of plagiarising the wannabe writer’s romance in Walker’s own work, The Proud Wife .   The case was thrown out of court, with prejudice, and quite rightly so. The court document makes very interesting reading on the subject of the tropes using in romance, and I suggest you take some time to read it. It is long, but quite accessible for a court document. As a friend said, when I mentioned the case in a private forum, the problem is that so many new writers believe they are reinventing the wheel and that every idea that comes from their head is brand new and brilliant. Well it is to them, but perhaps not to readers. One thing that occurred to me was that the writer does not appear to have researched the market, and she clearly had not read a lot (if any) of Kate Walker’s books. One of Kate’s gift...

Lighter writing is often denigrated as being insubstantial and fluffy. Those who write for the women’s magazine and light romance market are not always considered to be ‘proper’ writers amongst the more serious writers. Yet, I would argue that writing light-hearted stories is no mean feat, and actually takes just as   much skill as writing gritty, misery-lit. You may have heard it said that easy reading is hard writing. I’d also argue that light or comic reading is hard writing. Douglas Adams, who wrote the classic Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy reputedly had to be locked in a room to make him write. I don’t think it’s a generalisation to say that the majority of writers start off writing autobiographical stories or poems. They painfully record every time their parents didn’t give them what they wanted, or every time their parents turned out to be flawed human beings just like everyone else, or every school playground slight, or every time the love of their life (for t...

Mary Sue could hardly believe it. She was on her way to college when she woke up right in the middle of Middle Earth. She spied her favourite elf, Marty Stu, in the distance. “I know you,” she said, “You’re Marty Stu, the unsung hero of the Fellowship of the Ring. The one who truly did defeat Sauran in Tolkien’s unwritten fourth book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.” “Oh my goodness,” said Marty Stu, instantly struck by her beauty and forgetting to ask why she wore strange clothes and carried a mobile phone which still had Wi-Fi access so she could ring her mum. “Who are you fair maiden? I have only known you three seconds yet already you are the most beautiful, gracious and intelligent woman I have ever met.” “I am Mary Sue and we were clearly meant to be together, on account of me getting hit by a truck on the way to my myths and legends tutorial and waking up here.” “Yes, my love,” said Marty Stu, “I think you are right. It is our destiny to be together. Of course I wi...

I’m always a bit wary of doing things like this because similar online articles become ‘rules’ and then writers start feeling they can’t do anything right. These are not rules, or things new writers should do. They’re just things to beware of when you first sit down to write. I’m not discussing grammar and spelling, because to be honest if someone has real problems with spelling and grammar only a course on basic literacy is going to help them. I just don’t have the space to deal with that here and also whilst I’ve learned to use fairly decent spelling and grammar, I couldn’t even begin to explain the technical terms. I just sort of ‘know’ if I’ve got it right. So now we’ve got the disclaimer out of the way, what are the most common mistakes made by new writers? We’re talking craft mistakes by the way, not how new writers behave publicly. Though reading a sample from a certain ebook much in the Internet news lately may have inspired some elements of this post.   Please n...

Of all my old blog posts, this was one of the most popular. It also appeared in The New Writer Magazine.   Having written two whole western romances – Bella’s Vineyard and Just Like Jesse James   – I feel I’m in a position now to share my experience of writing cowboy love stories with the world. And when I say cowboy love stories, I’m not talking about Brokeback Mountain here. I’m talking about a man with a big Stetson and a girl in a gingham dress. What’s most amazing about my success in selling a western romance is that I was born in Pontypool, South Wales, and have lived in Chesterfield for over thirty years.   What’s more, I have never set foot on American soil. One of the librarians at Chesterfield Library has also written dozens of westerns. I’m guessing he probably got out more. But here are my tips on how a British woman – or man – can write a western romance without ever having visited the United States. Watch classic westerns – Most peoples...

I’ve been looking for an old blog post I’d written about behaving professionally as a writer. It’s there, somewhere, amongst my zillion files and folders on Dropbox, but I can’t find it. And maybe it’s time for an update, because since I wrote that, the Internet has become even bigger and more unforgiving of anyone who makes a mistake.   As the popular meme says, ‘Thank God I made all my mistakes before the Internet’. Mind you, I made a few myself when I first got online. I was naïve and believed that everyone would be as nice as I am. I soon learned the error of my ways, and what the word ‘troll’ really means. If you’re a writer, your behaviour online, and professionally, is even more important. There have been some notable meltdowns. Not least, Jacqueline Howett’s meltdown over a reasonably kind review of her novel, The Greek Seaman. I actually felt sorry for Jacqueline at the time, as although she had behaved inappropriately in her response to the review, the ensuing ‘p...

Previously published in The New Writer Magazine The supernatural romance is big business in publishing. This is partly as a result of Stephanie Meyer’s phenomenally successful Twilight series, which charts the lives and loves of middle-class, teenage vampires. A sort of Beverley Hills 90210 - with teeth. I suspect that Meyer’s success was built upon the interest in the occult that was created in the wake of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Best-selling novelist Marian Keyes new novel, The Brightest Star in the Sky also touches on the supernatural, as does Sophie Kinsella’s Twenties Girl . Now major romance publishers like Mills & Boon are getting in on the act, with their Nocturne imprint; a world away from the fluffy romances that made M&B successful. The world famous ‘punishing kisses’ have been replaced by white-hot vampire love bites. Though, they tell prospective writers, the favoured hero still must be an alpha male.   I spoke to two rising stars of the...

Previously published in The New Writer Magazine The Cheat’s Guide to writing Science Fiction   I decided a while ago that I enjoy writing science fiction (SF), or speculative fiction as many SF writers prefer to call it nowadays, more than any other genre. There was one major drawback. I know nothing about science. I can’t tell you what’s on the periodic table, or why it’s only on there periodically. I don’t know how the positronic brain works, but I know that Data on Star Trek The Next Generation had one and it got him into all sorts of trouble. And I’ve no idea how to get someone from one era to another, except that it usually involves people going all wobbly or flying off into the distance in a DeLorean before killing their grandfather and stopping themselves from being born. Despite all that I still want to write SF. It really came home to me how ill-equipped I was when I decided to write a novel set on a space ship. Not just any old spaceship; one about eight...