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Honest, useful critique is a vital part of being a writer. Writing is so internalised that we can lose track of our words, and what we meant to say isn’t actually on the page. It’s difficult to look objectively at your own work, and every piece of writing eventually needs a fresh set of eyes. If you can’t find a suitable workshop group in your area, then set one up yourself! This is easier if you already have some writer-friends…

‘World-building’ is usually used to describe fantasy or science fiction stories, but all stories happen somewhere. Narratives set in the real world are created by the writer too: smells, colours and temperatures can vary wildly depending whether your story is set in Ghana or Liverpool or New York, the present day or ten years ago or the late 1800s. Writers must build a strong sense of place without dumping paragraphs of rambling description into the story, and there are lots…

1. Point-of-view shift. ” ‘Will you?’ he asked, feeling nervous as he held out the ring box he’d secretly been carrying for weeks. ‘I love you,’ she lied, thinking about her plot to marry him and steal his money.” Point of view means who is telling the story. Often, fictional stories use third person limited, which means that ‘he’ or ‘she’ is used (as opposed to ‘I’), but the reader only knows the thoughts and feelings of the main character….

Your writing voice can’t be forced, but it’s a vital part of creating stories that could only be written by you. It’s your fingerprint, and it’s tricky to define. Voice is that unique combination of language, syntax, theme, tone and plot that immediately tells us the difference between a story by Cormac McCarthy, Sarah Waters, Stephen King or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here are some exercises to help develop your voice: Free-writing or automatic writing can help you to see the…

Most writers, when asked where they get their ideas, say something glib like “from the idea shop”. They’re not saying this to be difficult – well, maybe some of them are – but because getting ideas is both the simplest and most mysterious part of the creative process. Most stories start from a tiny seed, like an unusual phrase or a snippet of history, which takes root in the writer’s imagination and grows into a full story. It’s vital that…

It’s been a slightly slower reading month for me (due to several launch events for The Gloaming and writing the final few stories for my forthcoming horror collection, The Night Tender), but I’ve still read some absolute gems. Here are the ten best books I’ve read over the past two months – and by coincidence, it’s an all-female list, and almost entirely short stories… The Language of Thorns, Leigh Bardugo – I found Bardugo’s Grisha trilogy only so-so, but this…