It was great to see that so many members had made the effort to attend, especially since it was mid-morning on a working day. Thank you to everyone who came for making it such a fun occasion!

Louise gave an entertaining talk describing how she managed to break into the elite ranks of the published novelist. Refreshingly, she is a very down to Earth person, and I think that we all left with the impression that ordinary people CAN achieve success!

The main points that she covered were as follows:

Know your characters – know what they eat, how they speak, whether they smoke, etc. Even if you never use these details in your writing, the fact that you know so much about your characters will help you to make them rounded and believable.

Write something every day – your writing ability is like a muscle – it will get stronger if you exercise it and weaker if you don’t. Set yourself a daily word target...and stick to it! Don’t let yourself put it off – just get on with it! Find your best time for writing – some of us write best late at night and some in the early morning. Work out which time is your most productive and put it to good use.

Do enough research – but not so much that you spend years researching & no time writing! You need to do enough research for your work to ‘hang true’ but you don’t need to spill out every last technical detail into your writing. Write about something that interests you as if you choose a topic just because you think it will sell, the reader will be able to tell that your heart isn’t in it. And writing a 100,000 word novel is hard enough without being disinterested in it yourself.

Don’t give up – needs no explanation. If at first you don’t succeed...try again, and again, and again! Even Louise was rejected more than once, but she kept listening to what the publisher was telling her, and kept at it until she got there!

Even if we don’t all aspire to write romantic fiction, I think we can take away the essence of what Louise was conveying, and apply it to our own writing. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to have our very own published author within our ranks? So....who’s going to get there first??

Happy writing!!!