Writing a character personality for your story, novel, or script is a key part of bringing your words to life. It’s the protagonist at the heart of the story that will make your readers want to keep going, to follow them to the end point. Think about a book you’ve read or film you’ve seen…
Tag: caroline Hardaker poet
Little Quakes Every Day – release date confirmed for 2020
I’ve been SO EXCITED to share this – and as my poetry publisher knows – I can get pretty darn excitable when I have news to share. So here goes… I can officially confirm that my next fully poetry collection, Little Quakes Every Day, will be released on 9th November this year (2020, for retrospective…
How I feel about 2020
I’m loving reading people’s decade in review blogs. It’s lovely to see how people have changed and grown, but of course they’re not all happy stories. Over the last few weeks I was debating doing one myself, but decided against it. Too much has changed, and it’s better to focus on today than yesterday or…
Why it’s ok to stop
This month’s blog is late, but for good reason. When something happens, something deep and changing, it’s difficult to focus. Difficult to concentrate. As someone that writes for a living every day, writes for pleasure, writes for the sheer love of it – I’ve barely set a word down in a month. And that’s ok….
Mindfulness for writers | How to try mindful writing
I’m a huge advocate for mindfulness in all walks of life, not just writing. Everyone can benefit from the sense of calm instigated by yoga, or the self-awareness prompted by meditation. But what’s the relationship between mindfulness and writing? And how can we start to produce mindful writing? What is mindfulness? Mindfulness is the awareness…
How long should you wait between writing new drafts of your novel?
When looking up advice about drafting and redrafting your novel, you’ll frequently see writers and editors suggesting that you wait between clicking the cap on your pen after your first draft and reloading the typewriter for your second draft (yes I live in the 1940s). But how long does this wait have to be? How…
Why I write (writing vs philosophy)
PRE-BLOG WARNING: Hold on tight. Reading this post might feel like sailing a punctured life-raft along a stream of consciousness. Don’t worry. It’ll be over soon. I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about how authors label themselves. Authors. Artists. Creatives. Content Creators. Storytellers. Novellists. Poets. But I suppose the label that sticks to…
How setting affects a story
I haven’t posted too much about this yet, but this month I officially started writing the first draft of my second novel. I’m right back in the throes of working out where, when, why, and how – and refreshing my memory with the basics of how to write a first draft. Flipping from the final…
What a year. And what’s ahead in 2019?
Hopefully you’re cosied up somewhere suitably blankety and mulled wine-y. I’m currently wrapped up in 4 layers of fleece and drinking pots and pots of tea. For us, New Year is spent inside, waiting for the bells to ring and for there to be another new beginning. It’s just that this time I’m pretty flippin’…
How to get published (and some free writers’ resources)
Whether you’ve been trying to find a publisher for a while, you’re trying to publish your own book, or you just fancy giving a single poetry submission a go – the question stands: What can I do to stand a better chance of getting published? There are LOTS of routes to getting published from digital-only…
