Hookline Books

The beginning

Authors need to set a strong scene in the opening sentence. Debut authors don’t have the luxury of beginning with a long and languorous description, such as a backstory, memory or reflections.

Your opening page needs to give the reader a sense of where, when and what is going on.

And you need to create some sense of dilemma.

Grab the reader as fast as you can and hold onto them.

Place your character in a specific setting (the reader needs to picture them).

Add something...

Character

The reader should always know what a character wants – otherwise the character is aimless.

Mission by Paul Forrester-O’Neill – John wants to find his father, the one his mother lied to.

The Jacobite Wife by Morag Edwards – Winifred wants her husband to stop running up debts.

The Takers and Keepers by Ivan Pope – Allen wants to know where the missing women go.

What motivates your characters?

It could be:

Money – greed, need, coercion, blackmail 

Ideology – pow...

Sub-plots:

The sub-plot is dependent on the main plot, although it may not seem so at the time – it might provide twists, shows us how the main character reacts in other settings, provides depth to the story.

They often involve minor characters.

They move the story along toward an apt ending and help the reader get to know the characters better.

Very few novels can survive on one plot alone. Only two come to mind:

My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal - a boy is put into foster care but miss...

The truth is there is no simple answer, no easy template, no cookie cutter plan to follow. I wish there were. Instead, every novel charts its own course, heads in its own ship through mostly unknown waters. Often writers are surprised where they end up. ‘I thought I was writing about love,’ they say, after the romantic lead dies. ‘I wanted it to be a happy story.’ But where do you take happiness? Does happy ever after make a good story?
With this in mind I’ve decided to blog on what...

I’m not a fan of Leonard Cohen but I am a fan of the Greek island connected to his early fame. Hydra is where Leonard went as a young poet with little money but an earnest zeal to work on his art. Most of us know the rest of the story. Hydra’s calm gave him the peace to write Flowers for Hitler and Beautiful Losers, and it is where he met his most famous muse Marianne.

I probably know more than the average non-fan about Cohen. Primarily, because I edited The Water and the Wine by Tamar H...

What kind of life do we have after menopause? It’s a question that’s been much debated recently. I don’t want to go into hormonal issues, that varies so much from woman to woman. However, life after we reach our fifties oftentimes comes down to how we look at our future.

We can look backwards to all that’s passed and grow quite wistful because that time is over – our own childhood, parents, the teenage years, romance, marriage, kids. However, if we’re only going to look back at ...

We see a lot of manuscripts and sometimes, just sometimes, the opening paragraphs draw you in and immerse in the story almost immediately. When this happens, it is nothing but joy – just as it was in the ancient days of storytelling when the art began with ‘Let me tell you a story,’ or ‘Once upon a time’.

I do not know any editor who would disagree that an easy entry into a story is critical. First and foremost, we are readers, and it is the writers’ job to draw us in. If you do ...

I love audio books. However, I didn’t start out liking them. In the early days of listening to an 80,000+ plot, my mind would wander to other stories or events before eventually coming back to the novel and I would wonder what had happened while I’d been mentally absent.

However, a few years ago I found my eyes were often tired at the end of the work day, and I started listening to short Podcasts, then moved onto abridged novels on BBC Sounds. Lying on the sofa, eyes closed and listenin...

Many of our authors are lovely people. They care about their family and friends; they would help the elderly cross the street and many have a good sense of humour.

So why are their novels not on the best seller lists?

I ask because of the rise of celebrity authors. I’m not talking about memoirs, that’s a whole different genre and who better to write a life than the person who lived it. I’m talking fiction – and so many of them are at it – Dawn French, David Walliams, Graham Norton...