A Decade of Discoveries as a Fiction Writer

A decade is a beautifully fulsome length of time, as evidenced by our fascination with looking at the 1900s in ten-year blocks, juxtaposing historical events and fashion trends and pop culture!

Back in 2014, I had already been writing for over ten years, off and on, but I knew I was nowhere close to knowing all I needed to know about fiction writing, and furthermore that I could never possibly reach that level of knowledge - I'd never want to! Discoveries, often made by diving deeper rather than wider, are one of the joys of being creative, and the past ten years have given me plenty of those.

While I've shared a number of my creative explorations and innovations before on Something Delicious, some of them never made it into any blog posts, either because they just didn't quite fit or weren't enough to make up a whole post on their own.

This is the last post I'll likely share on Something Delicious (more about that at the end 😉✨), and so this seemed like the perfect time to tumble this medley of discoveries onto the page.

First Steps for New Fiction Writers

Setting off on a fiction writing journey can overwhelm even the most excited, steadfast new writers. How does one make that very first step?

What follows here is not the only way to begin, but it's one particular way, and one of the best things we can do when we're new to something is just decide to start. So now that you're here, on this page, I hope you'll give it a try! The world always needs more creative souls to nurture their imaginative inclinations. ✨

Think of the ideas that follow as guidelines rather than a step-by-step list to be strictly adhered to. The aim here is to help you set off on your journey, not load you down with a cartful of baggage right here in the prologue! Bound lightly along these stepping stones, try the ones that feel right, and before you know it, you'll have taken your first steps on a lifelong creative adventure.

Now, where to begin?

Writing Letters: a Marvellous Way to Understand Characters

As a child of the '90s, I'm no stranger to epistolary stories. They were everywhere when I was growing up: Jaclyn Moriarty's Feeling Sorry for Celia, Meg Cabot's Princess Diaries, the enthrallingly haunting Griffin & Sabine; and many, many more.

Stories written in diary and letter form, and all their modern equivalents, consistently come back into style (a trend that goes back centuries), and it's not hard to see why.

These aren't the words of a distant narrator, high in the sky. These are the words of the characters themselves, right in front of us on the page, in all their intimacy.

Naturally, this still leaves plenty of room for drama and suspense. In an epistolary story, we're completely dependent on what the characters choose to share with others and how honest they're prepared to be, even for an audience of one in the pages of a journal.

There are few better ways to hear a character's voice than to observe the letters they write. If you're struggling to truly know them, or how they interact with others, have them write a letter.

Cowriting a Novella as a Mother-Daughter Team

Cowriting a story is a beautiful sort of alchemy – taking the best instincts of two creative minds and sifting out the less helpful elements to create something uniquely wonderful.

It's a process not entirely unlike writing a story by yourself. You still have to keep the hallmarks of a good story in mind, crafting enjoyable characters, plot twists and turns, and settings. But embarking on this path with another writer brings its own set of challenges and joys.

For the past while, I've been cowriting a contemporary novella with my mum, Susan. Now that we're a good way into the rough draft, we thought we'd open the virtual door to our writing studio and give you a glimpse into the cowriting process!

One thing that's been interesting from the start about our cowriting journey is what we both brought to the table. Mum has a captivating sense of whimsy and an eye for sensory details that breathe life into otherwise bland settings. I have a knack for escalating tension and more experience generally with writing longform fiction.

Neither of us were certain how this journey would unfold, only that we were excited to find out!