Perth Words… exploring possibilities.

Does your book start at the most interesting point in your character’s life? It should. 

The number one problem I see with sample material, and even client material sometimes, is that the book doesn’t start in the right place. If you are starting with the beginning of the day (waking up or eating breakfast) I don’t trust it’s starting in the right place. If you take 50 pages to introduce the conflict there is no way you’re starting in the right place.

HOW TO START YOUR NOVEL IN THE RIGHT PLACE:

1. At the end, go back and rewrite your beginning. There is no way by the end of your novel you should have the same opening when you started the draft. Characters change, plot trajectories change. You don’t know what your novel is going to fully become until it’s over. So why keep the same opening? Revise to make sure…

A brand new poster has dropped for Kriv Stenders’ Red Dog prequel Red Dog: True Blue.

The new poster marks our first official look at the new film which stars Levi Miller, Jason Isaacs, Justine Clarke, Bryan Brown and Hanna Mangan Lawrence. A teaser trailer is also due soon.

Red Dog: True Blue explores the early events leading up to Red Dog’s discovery on the road to Dampier, and his ultimate rise from ordinary dog to Australian legend.

Red Dog: True Blue hits cinemas on Boxing Day but Cinema Australia has a feeling WA audiences may be seeing the film a little earlier… more to come.

In publishing rules are just guidelines. We give you these guidelines to help you (believe it or not). We’re not trying to make your life harder; we are trying to show you how to succeed. These guidelines are what you should generally follow, but there are times you can break the rules.

A great skill for a writer to have is to know which you can bend and adapt, and which needs must be met. Read on…

4 RULES YOU CAN BREAK

• Anything that is contradicted by multiple people at top levels – Have your go-to sources (Writer’s Digest, ME!, KidLit411, Debutante Ball, Writers in the Storm, Pub Crawl Blog, Query Shark, Jane Friedman, Girl Friday Productions, Susan Spann etc) and trust those who have years of industry experience at the top levels–we all agree on the important things. However, there will be things we don’t agree on. Therefore, trust your…

Love & Friendship should be an easy sell.

It’s Whit Stillman’s version of Jane Austen.

That alone should get you into the cinema.

It’s a wonderful film; witty, warm and generous-hearted, but also spiky and tart and filled with a plethora of zingers.

It’s also cinematically an undiscovered Austen and after so many versions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and Emma that have, it’s refreshing to see something new.

Love & Friendship is an adaptation of young Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan, believed to have been written in the mid 1790s but revised up to a fair copy prepared in 1805 and finally published by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, in 1871.

Set in the 1790s, earlier than most Austen tales, Love and Friendship concerns beautiful young widow Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) who has come to Churchill, the estate of her in-laws, to wait out colourful rumours about her dalliances…