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Category: How I write

The lost pleasure of handwriting

‘I have found that when I am writing something emotional, I must write it the first time directly with hand on paper. Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.’ So wrote Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones, and I quite agree. For me, handwriting has such soul.

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Writing Romantic heroes

An individual, a maverick, a self-made man; introspective, a thinker; drawn to nature; driven by emotion and deeply impassioned… the heroes of my novels are not just romantic, they’re Romantic in the sense of the literary archetype.

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rules romance writers

Five golden rules for romance writers

A question I’m commonly asked is: ‘What advice would you give an aspiring romance writer?’ I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject – really, who is? – but the following outlines some of the lessons I’ve learned on my journey from being a little girl who dreamed of writing romance to being a grown woman who really does write romance, every day.

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Fiction: ‘the triumph over chaos’

‘To write fiction, to express oneself eloquently and with passion, to set down the words in order – that requires triumph over chaos. But more than that, I think writing demands finding a harmonious way of being with chaos…’

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On writing ‘drunk’ and editing sober

There is a very simple reason I am a writer: I love writing. I love the experience of taking ideas in my imagination and realising them on the page; I love the sense of magic that unfolds as the muse guides the pen; I love to be immersed in a fictional world and to create.

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Originality in writing: an impossible ideal?

Back in Shakespeare’s day, a writer was expected to copy a classical work; ‘unnecessary invention’ was frowned upon. According to Jack Lynch, in his article ‘The Perfectly Acceptable Practice of Literary Theft: Plagiarism, Copyright, and the Eighteenth Century’, it was only in the 18th century that originality became an ideal. But is this an impossible ideal?

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