WORKSHOPS AT WRITING FESTIVALS

The Winchester Writers' Festival offers a great selection of workshops.


 At last year's Festival I was fortunate enough to get onto a Masters Course, 'How to Write an Award-Winning YA Novel',  by Sarah Mussi.  It was brilliant.  She explained a 'green light' system that flags up the key components to get your novel noticed.  It gave an extremely insightful look at the how to make your work stand out from the rest.

Title was the first thing.  Think about buying a book and how an intriguing and provocative title will catch your eye and imagination. We each read out the title of our WIP and then voted whether we liked it or not.  Then we made some simple changes to the titles and the results were impressive.  Small changes can make a huge difference.

 
I tend to use a 'working' title when I first start a book and quite often this becomes so lodged in my brain that I struggle to come up with an alternative.  My latest book has the working title MARBLES.  I know it needs changing and am keeping this in mind as I write hoping something much better will spring to mind.

It's a good idea to write down some current titles that particularly catch your imagination, think about why they do that and use it as a guide to find the right title for your novel.  To help choose my last book title I got out a dozen YA novels and spread them out to get a feel for current trends.  They tended to be short and vague which led me to opt for Cheese Boy.  Fingers crossed I will have some title inspiration for my WIP by my next blog post.