It turned into an
amazing, busy event, exhausting and exhilarating all at the same time. We’d had
34 pieces in to critique and planned two mini tutorials. From there the event
blossomed with discussions and comments threads springing up everywhere. I
don’t know if there’s an official unit of measurement for Facebook events but
our final timeline was ENORMOUS. This is a summary with links
to most useful bits. Please browse. Please comment.
The links here are mostly to Facebook and require you to be logged in to a Facebook account.
The links here are mostly to Facebook and require you to be logged in to a Facebook account.
The mini-tutorials.
- Creating a focused pitch: part 1, part 2 and part 3.
- Writing believable dialogue: part 1, part 2 and part 3.
As luck would have it, writing coach Linda Acaster posted a review of the Writers’ Toolkit on Goodreads on the morning of day one, which was a great lead into the first tutorial because her review included the words, 'THE INSTRUCTIONS FOR PREPARING A TWO-SENTENCE PITCH ALONE WAS WORTH THE COST OF THE BOOK.' Thanks, Linda, that was perfect timing!
Some of the advice and
tips that popped up during the two days
- The balance between intriguing and irritating a reader.
- Milking the action and emotion: never summarise the
dramatic moments.
- A word about grammar.
- To plan or not to plan.
Some of the discussions
- The value of exchanging ideas.
- When is a manuscript ready to send out?
- The pros and cons of using different points of view.
Charity donation
Fantastic Books
Publishing donated £1 to the World Cancer Research Fund for every book bought during the launch. Thanks, FBP. You Rock!
The critiques and the
winning extracts
Each critique was posted
in two parts with people commenting on the work, the critique and on writing in
general. We worried beforehand about what we’d do if we had a completely dire
extract – we certainly didn’t want to castigate a fellow writer on a public
forum. However, we were determined to be both honest and constructive because
otherwise what would be the point? And we dodged that particular bullet because
everything we read had merit and potential. And some extracts were truly
outstanding. We shortlisted six. You can see them on the results link below.
I’m afraid you’ll have
to explore the timeline to get at all the critiques, but there
are a few links below. And what an ‘interesting’ slant that FB timeline gave to
the whole event! With people popping in and out from all over the world, early
posts were being liked or commented hours after first posting. And as soon as
someone commented, that post would shoot to the top of the timeline. It made
finding things incredibly difficult. I resorted to ctrl+f and searching for key
words, which is one of the reasons for this blog with its permalinks. I only
learnt about FB permalinks through doing this event.
An open poll was held
where people could vote for their favourite extract. In addition, Danuta Reah
and I (as the Writers’ Toolkit authors) drew up a shortlist of extracts we
thought the best and chose a winner from this list. The results were posted at the end of the launch.
- The winner of the poll was A Moment when the World was Silent by Kasie Whitener: extract and part 1 critique – part 2 critique.
- The piece chosen by us was BILLY by GK Parker: extract and part 1 critique – part 2 critique.
What's the best place for a novel
to start?
