Joseph O'Connor wrote the best novel I've read this or last year - Ghost Light - and his tips for writing fiction are absolutely terrific:

http://www.blakefriedmann.co.uk/news/_386/

Highly recommended. I'm going to trot off and lay hands on his other novels forthwith.

Emma

Well, it's all right. But there's nothing new under the sun with this stuff, really, is there. Not sure he's telling me stuff I didn't know. Some of it is down right bloody annoying too. Read a book in another language. That's okay if you read other languages. Natural monolingual storytellers need not apply. Harrumph!

Sure, but it's not aimed at you, Jem, it's aimed at the aspirers, who'll lap it up, and the wannabes who hopefully will realise this game ain't as easy as you'd think.

I recently did a trawl of blogs which talk about technical stuff, since I'm trying to develop my own Resources section. And I was really shocked by just how poor much of the advice was, either because it's just plain wrong, or it started out as right but is simplified to the point of being just plain wrong, or because the examples were such weak writing it was quite embarrassing. Or frequently all three.

So it's good to have an intelligent, well-written and thoughtful piece like this, to point people towards. There will always be someone for whom one or two or more such things light the lightbulb for them.

Although one thing I've noticed is that the more advanced a writer or a group of writers is, the less general you can make the advice, even within the group, let alone out there online: you can't generalise about problems, and you can't generalise about techniques without specific texts in front of you. So there's less advanced stuff out there because there's less you can sensibly or usefully say.

Emma

12. Show don't Tell - Uh? I was expecting it to be followed by 13. How to Tell not Show.

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Fannie Flagg's Standing in the Rainbow is a mastery of Tell.

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And after 'Read like a Writer' I think he missed a trick by not having 'Write like a Reader'.