Ask the Author: James Kemp
Answered Questions (4)
James Kemp
Just write stuff down. The first draft will always be rubbish. Don't worry about that. Tell yourself the story as you write it down. This might be an outline, it might be a full blown draft, either way is good.
Once you have the story down you need to keep on re-reading it and editing it. Read the dialogue out loud and change it to fit the voice you want from the characters. Change the tell you write in the first draft so that you show readers what is going on.
Lastly find some honest but helpful beta readers and try out your stories on them. No matter how good you get you still need people that haven't lived and breathed the story to tell you how it is for them.
Once you have the story down you need to keep on re-reading it and editing it. Read the dialogue out loud and change it to fit the voice you want from the characters. Change the tell you write in the first draft so that you show readers what is going on.
Lastly find some honest but helpful beta readers and try out your stories on them. No matter how good you get you still need people that haven't lived and breathed the story to tell you how it is for them.
James Kemp
Write something just for myself. Mostly the thing that stops me writing is the inner editor that tells me it isn't good enough. Frankly you need to bludgeon the inner editor until it keeps quiet.
James Kemp
I've just finished a university level creative writing course, so I've got a lot of unpublished material. I'm editing several pieces with a view to producing an anthology of geek poetry (with other people's work as well as mine); finishing a novel (Perfects, which is a combination of two previously published novellas and a load of new material expanding the world and giving it a satisfying ending); and probably sending some of the shorter works off to magazines.
James Kemp
I've written stories since I was a boy, but only for my own enjoyment. What made me want to write more was a comment on Charlie Stross's blog about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I thought that this was an intriguing approach, and gave it a go in November 2012. I didn't quite manage the whole 50k words by 30th Nov, I was 2 days late. The edit became Mike's Thread, and a second edit after I'd had feedback was re-titled Crisis Point.
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