The next meeting of West Lothian Writers will be on Tuesday 18th of October from 7-9 pm at the usual location: South Barn Nether Dechmont Farm Fells Rigg Carmondean Livingston EH54 8AX If you are not sure where you are going either type the above post code into your sat nav or follow the map [...]

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As all writers know an idea for a story can hit at any minute but what do you do if you don’t have a pen and/or paper? Well here at WLW here is a list of ten ‘apps’ for iPhone’s and Android phones. Please remember that some of these will cost money so think before [...]

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One of the most successful writers ever was Stephen King and here are his Seven Top Tips for Becoming a Better Writer. Get to the point - Don’t waste your reader’s time with too much back-story, long intros or longer anecdotes about your life. Get to your point quickly too before your reader loses patience and [...]

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Probably one of the most famous sounds in modern culture is Homer Simpsons’ D’oh. This sound is one of hundreds of interjections. Wonderful wee words that can be used to display the kind of everyday noises we all make in our writing. With this in mind, I thought it would be useful to highlight a [...]

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Perhaps the most important part of the writing process is self-editing. That horrible process of going back over your work and discovering how much of your story works, needs working on or just plain rubbish. Lucky Valerie Douglas over at Indie Author Community has put together a list of Basic Self-Editing and Polishing tips. They [...]

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Bob Burke, author of The Third Pig Detective Agency, explains his Bluffers Guide To Crime Writing for Children over at Writing.ie. His guide narrows down to six rules: You Must Be Fair. The clues and the evidence must point to a suspect identified somewhere else in the book. The Butler Isn’t Always Responsible. Don’t make the murder [...]

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We all love to debate what if questions like ‘What if the Nazis had won World War 2?‘ Many choose such questions as a basis for their fiction. However, what if you are wanting to write about an alternative history about a place that very few of your readers know about. For example would you [...]

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To finish tonight’s updates let’s talk about endings. They can be very hard. Thankfully Cat Rambo is here to help with a short article – and exercise – about Three Things That End A Story Well. Circularity is a big help. It provides a sense that the reader has returned to the beginning, but now everything [...]

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Tonight’s meeting was a small turn out with just four of us. However, it allowed us to look at the three pieces that were read in a greater amount of detail. The pieces in question were: Atholl Brose – an extract from the novel Jenifer is currently working on. The Drop – A 100 word short story [...]

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The subject of infodumps came up at tonight’s meeting so I thought it was a good time to put up this article from io9.com. Back in March last year they looked at the 20 Great Infodumps From Science Fiction Novels, which is a list of twenty examples of great ways of explaining a lot of [...]

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