• Writing Advice

    Writing Advice: Pitching to Agents in Person

    Hello, everyone and welcome to a special writing advice post today. I recently got back from YALC, where there was an agent arena that allowed people to pitch to agents, and it got me thinking that now would be a good time to post about the mechanics of that, and how to improve your book’s chances of getting noticed. What is pitching? It’s where you either meet an agent face to face or you do a social media event where you get to discuss your book for a limited amount of time. Face to face pitching is very like a job interview [but with less questions from the interviewer]. The…

  • Writing Advice

    Wednesday Writing: Kill Your Darlings

    So last Saturday I went to a fortnightly coffeeshop critique session with the university creative writing society. It’s always a great time, ideas flying around, caffeine being inhaled, cakes everywhere, and after a while discussion turned to the idea of killing your darlings [or, as someone rather alarmingly put it ‘smothering your babies’]. If you haven’t heard the term before, it means editing or cutting a piece of your writing that you love, in order to improve the overall piece. It can include wonderful lines of description, certain scenes you love which don’t match with the pacing or people think are irrelevant, or sometimes even whole characters. It’s a thing…