Saturday meeting

I went to a SE/London RNA meeting on Saturday which I always enjoy. I do like meeting other people who experience the highs and lows of writing, and especially if they are like me and are still not published and are still trying through the NWS. Quite a few of them who went on Saturday were at the conference so we had a quick chat about that. I heard that a complaint has been made about the M&B editors who went and it has been taken to M&B highers themselves. The talk was by Marina Oliver who writes fiction, how-to books, runs a critique service which incorporates a major writing prize. She talked about how she got into running the appraisal service and then the prize and what they do and what they have seen, giving us tips on how to make our mss good. The one thing that remains in my memory of what she said was that someone (I can't remember who) asked about storytelling. I can't remember if it was the same person but someone selected the first few pages of a Jilly Cooper book and commented why she is a good storyteller. The answer was that on the first page you got a question so the reader keeps reading to find the answer, when the answer is there, another question is posed so the reader keeps reading until they are half way through the book and want to carry on reading it. I wrote this bit of advice down and must remember to use it when I write any of my books. I know that I tried to pose a question to the reader at the end of each chapter in Stay to try to keep the reader reading it. I don't know how good it was until I get the report back and that won't be for several weeks because this time of the year it's the NWS organiser's busiest time to get mss from writers. The next meeting is in October and is on writing short stories which interests me as that's one of the other projects I am doing. Be it for small press, e-zines or trying for womens' weeklies such as Woman's Weekly.

Well, must get on with work and lock everything up. Probably try to post more on Bug at the weekend, if it doesn't chuck me out again.