What are the personal qualities you need, not only keep you writing but to help you improve in your craft? Andrew shares his views on why perseverance, humility, and imagination are the fundamental character traits you need to develop as a writer.

In the last episode we looked at character integrity and how this is founded on 1.Believability/plausibility and 2. The character as an individual. In this episode I'm going to start to look at how a character can become an individual, focusing on descriptive markers and character weaknesses.

This episode introduces the core requirements for good character development: character integrity and individuality. We will look at individuality next time, but in this episode we look at how making a character believable, and keeping them consistent are the keys to successful characterisation.

In this episode I cover two issues, using precise and powerful verbs, and also using the active rather than passive voice to energise and drive your story

Grabbing the reader's attention immediately is a vital part of storytelling. Often writers will start a story too early, or fill the first critical paragraphs with backstory and infodump. In this podcast we explore techniques to make sure your writing grabs the reader right from the first sentence.

In this podcast I explore some of the mistakes that editors look out for. Here are ten things to think about before you submit your work - get them right and make your manuscript shine!

This is the last of the five techniques for showing not telling - and arguably it's the hardest one to do. Humour is a serious business and requires precision and integrity in its execution. Precision in terms of timing and editing, and integrity in terms of keeping the characters and scene believable.

In this episode we look at another dimension of showing not telling, and that's the potential for hinting, suggesting or implying something rather than telling the reader outright. One of the most powerful tools we have as creative writers is derived from the fact that a hint or suggestion, well understood, will always have more power than something said explicitly.

In this episode I will explain how you can use sensory language to show rather than tell your story

How to use a small number of very specific descriptive cues to show your reader both scene and character