YALC's back - Tracy Darnton

YALC's back! 

Last weekend saw the return of the Young Adult Literary Convention after an absence of three years. Set up in 2014 by then Children's Laureate,  Malorie Blackman to celebrate teen and young adult books, and tap into the fandom overlap with London Film and Comic Con attendees, it has an atmosphere all of its own.

Olympia

For those who've never shared a lift with Chewbacca, Wonder Woman and a Dr Who enthusiast, or wondered if they should buy an inflatable Jabba the Hutt outfit or a replica sword, or contemplated joining in with Cosplay, prepare to be surprised. 

YA authors can struggle to get on the bill at children's lit festivals unless they're already incredibly successful so it's great to have a packed festival where the big American and British names in YA appear alongside debuts and mid-list authors on panels,

as well as deliver workshops and have signings with ticketed queues. 

Obviously a welcome marketing opportunity but also a time to socialise and meet up with all your Twitter author friends, and interact with the bloggers and readers who support your books. 

UKYA thriller writers assemble

In the space of five minutes in my signing queue there were readers from Brazil, the Netherlands and Spain.  Publishers have stalls with their latest books, activities and competitions:

and Waterstones sell the books of all the speakers.  

Many of the attendees are writers so there's also a popular Agent Arena running 1-2-1s, sessions on working with editors or how to get into publishing.  Workshops I attended this year included an Escape Room experience with Bryony Pearce; how to write a thriller with Sophie McKenzie; a mindful creative session with Sita Brahmachari and illustrator Natalie Sirett based on their book When Shadows Fall; and my own Release your inner teen with free curly wurlies where I was very grateful to the man with the white beard that I was not the oldest in the room. 

In addition to YALC royalty of Juno Dawson and Holly Bourne, this year had highlights of an in-depth interview of Jacqueline Wilson by Non Pratt, and the mega fandom around Heartstopper and Alice Oseman. It was fabulous to see a UKYA book attracting so much attention. I spoke to fans who queued from 5 am to get their place in her signing queue. 

So, what didn't work so well at this YALC compared to the others I've been part of? 

The usual part of the Olympia conference centre for YALC has been knocked down for redevelopment so we were on the balcony area around the LFCC hall. It was crowded and noisy! For anyone who struggles with constant background noise like me, it was a challenge to hear all participants, especially in workshops. I missed the usual quiet zone of beanbags and people reading their books. YALC used to have its own much quieter entrance - with no queue in the heat so that was much trickier for attendees this time. 

And I missed the merch or previous years, but then I'm a tote bag fanatic. (And yes, inevitably I did come back with Covid). 

So there you have it - the world of YALC. If you're reading YA, writing YA or just want a dose of popular culture, put it in your diary for next year. 

Tracy Darnton is the author of YA thrillers Ready or Not, The Rules and The Truth About Lies. She is having a well-earned lie down. 

Tom Ripley, Campari and how technology can ruin a good plot by Tracy Darnton

Tom Ripley and I got reacquainted on a sun lounger in Italy this summer. Patricia Highsmith’s book written and set in the 1950s describes a time when an affluent American could decamp to beautiful villas in Italy for the price of a waffle and soda back in the U.S. and swan around collecting antiques and bohemian artist friends. And, *major spoiler alert*, Tom Ripley can pass himself off as the American he murders on the basis of a slight resemblance to a grainy passport photo.

I got to thinking over a Campari and a bowl of olives about how this could be made to work in the present day. Answer – it couldn’t. A five second look at Facebook and Instagram would have shown the Italian police exactly what Dickie Greenleaf looked like. His bank card would reveal what he’d spent and where. And mobile telephones would ruin the way Tom evades Greenleaf’s friends and family.

I should add that one of my sons kindly provided some impromptu research on how Ripley could exist in modern Italy by managing to break his phone, not remember our mobile numbers, have his wallet and bank card pickpocketed in Rome and still blag his way to the North of Italy with seven Euros and a half-remembered B&B name for our rendezvous. But somehow it didn’t seem very realistic. Too far-fetched to put in a book.

I’m currently editing my next novel – a contemporary psychological YA thriller – and, like my last one, I have to grapple with the omnipresence of tech and social media in the world in which my young characters live.

Thriller writers are already battling the annoying realities of forensics and police investigations. As a YA writer, I want my 17-year-old main character to have agency so must also side-line any pesky adults in positions of authority. The list of things to tackle and exclude is long and growing.

Short of setting everything back in the day of a temperamental telephone with a cord that could be cut, or in the middle of the ocean, I’m forced to tread a fine line between reality and plot to make the latter believable and current. All this needs to be achieved in a subtle and original way as we’ve all read books where we can too easily spot the moment that the author gets rid of the mobile phone to keep the plot going. 

As I gazed out of many train windows in Northern Italy visiting places like Trento and Bolzano half-hoping for a glimpse of Tom Ripley, I pondered another classic: Murder on the Orient Express. Poirot would be able to use the train Wi-Fi to check up on his carriage full of suspects and spot the link between them all. Since batteries have a longer life or a portable power bank to keep them running even longer, a mobile phone out of charge now seems hopelessly unrealistic, especially as even the train has charging points.

It’s not just the curse of the smart phone, all those plots involving actual letters would have to go as no one writes letters anymore. Like Tess of the D’Urbervilles where Tess’s letter to Angel gets caught under the doormat with disastrous consequences.  

Or the use of traffic cameras in The Great Gatsby would have shown exactly who was driving the car that killed Myrtle.

Books where characters get lost would be ruined by Google Maps,  and ditto for plots where people go missing and could be easily found by a track my phone App.  

Any dodgy hotels would be ruled out by a quick flick through TripAdvisor. Marion would never stay at the Bates Motel in Psycho. No one would move to 112 Ocean Avenue after a brief look at Zoopla’s neighbourhood guide and thus avoid The Amityville Horror.

But, surrounded by kids on trains watching cartoons or adults taking endless selfies of themselves, I was struck more than previous years about the need for all of us to unplug from our phones for a while. And when I read a book – the ultimate unplugging experience – I want to get away from all that. I don’t want Google or Facebook or Apps intruding on the story. I need a plot given time to evolve and breathe. 

I still hope for random meetings of strangers, letters written in ink, puzzles to work out for myself – and teenage kids to find their parents come what may. 

And I want characters like Tom Ripley to be reading newspapers and sipping cocktails in the sunshine, unplugged.

Tracy Darnton is the author of The Truth About Lies, shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2019. She has an MA in Writing for Young People.

You can follow Tracy on Twitter @TracyDarnton and on Instagram tracydarnton

Barmier & barmier: our Kafkaesque approach to fiction & teens - by Rowena House

Trawling through online teaching advice for the now-defunct A-level course in creative writing (with the intention of scavenging the best bits to help design my own fiction writing lessons) is a sad and salutary experience.

England’s last A-level creative writing students will re-sit their exams this summer and then that’s it. All over. 16-to-18 year olds who want to write their own original stories now have to be satisfied with a short module in another course.

Meanwhile, 16-18 year olds who fluffed their first English language GCSE still have to write an original story as part of their re-sit regardless of how difficult they find it.

My heart goes out to both groups of young people.

During its brief years of existence, the exam board which offered the creative writing A-level, AQA, said this about it: “Creative writing is a distinct discipline in higher education. It encourages the development of skills that are essential for further study and a range of professional careers. This A-level enables aspiring writers to start on the path to professional practice and is equally useful for anyone interested in improving their creative and critical thinking and communication skills.”

Amen to that!

Thousands of teachers and students signed a petition to stop it being axed.

In the past few weeks I, too, have seen for myself how well-thought out the course was, and how different to English language and literature, despite the Department for Education insisting it overlapped both.

Back in my day, creative writing wasn’t an option at school or sixth-form. But then, nor were Netflix, YouTube, Snapchat, What’s App etc. Instead, by 16, I had devoured hundreds of books. The local public library had been my bolt-hole as a child - as for so many writers. Then, collectively, my teenage friends and I discovered Tolkien and Middle Earth became our escape, our go-to safe space when being a teen got too tough.

Today, with the Harry Potter generation grown up, I can’t find a contemporary book that is shared in that same, immerse way.

For films, there are the Marvel franchises. The Twilight series and The Hunger Games also still seem widely known among teens. But a novel? By a contemporary author? So far, whenever I’ve asked, all I’ve drawn are blanks.

Now, back at that defunct A-level, among the many excellent bits of advice I found in its study programme was a recommendation that students follow authors on Twitter, and discover through them the immense wealth of blogs about creative writing written by professional writers.

In recent weeks, any student who’d followed that advice might well have stumbled across a fascinating discussion initiated by journalist Charlotte Eyre, of The Bookseller, involving two top literary agents, Joanna Moult and the founder of the Skylark agency, Amber Caraveo, along with Waterstones, Piccadilly, and various published and pre-published writers. The subject: a 21.5% drop in Young Adult novel sales last year, and associated issues surrounding  the younger teen book market.

This exchange included one tweet from Waterstones complaining about the dearth of books for the early teen market (!?!). Amber, in reply, suggested that Waterstones could make these books more visible by having a dedicated space for teen readers, which (rather surprisingly, imho) drew a positive response from the Piccadilly branch.

This whole chicken-and-egg discussion (are there too few books written for early teens or not enough exposure to generate a viable market?) reminded me of a debate I heard years ago about motor bikes in the USA. (This is from memory so please take the details with a pinch of salt.) The USA had, apparently, banned imports of smaller Japanese bikes to protect sales of the bigger US models like their famous Harley Davidsons. The trouble was, younger riders couldn’t afford big Harleys, and without access to cheaper Japanese bikes, fewer people became bikers so demand for Harleys fell over time.

Something similar is, presumably, happening with young people’s fiction.

Parents and grandparents still buy middle-grade books for children, while primary schools also actively promote reading for pleasure to these age groups. But then keen readers, who want to make their own choices at 11-to-12 years old, can’t find books to suit them. By that age, too, secondary school is demanding more and more of their time, and the manifold digital lures of our age are increasingly tempting as well.

Little wonder, then, if many of them stop reading for pleasure entirely. Like the USA bikers who never bought a Harley, even when they were old and rich enough to afford one, so these once keen readers are lost to the world of fiction. They aren’t around to discover YA, except if it’s linked to a Hollywood film, profits for which seem to have peaked with Twilight and The Hunger Games, hence we haven’t seen a really big YA novel for years.

I know this isn’t a new or an original argument, not by a long way. But given the well-documented drop-off in reading among teens, plus recent evidence of weak YA sales, it does seem to me that trends in the publishing world have ramifications for young people’s education, and therefore their job prospects.

If, for example, decisions about the content of English language exams rest on outdated assumptions about teens’ reading habits, then GCSEs are in fact far harder than they might appear to adults who come from a reading-for-pleasure generation.

As adults, we might bemoan this lost art of reading; we might even be right to do so. But to demand that young people write 500-word stories under exam conditions (and condemn them to try again and again if they can’t) when we couldn’t dream of flying a drone via our smart phones, let alone how to make a YouTube video out of our drone footage, then rig our phones to relay that film to a PS4 while simultaneously playing music, smacks to me of a highly blinkered mind set.

Kill your darlings. No but really. - Kelly McCaughrain

Things that were in the first (50,000) word draft of my YA novel, Flying Tips for Flightless Birds, that didn’t make it to the final version:

• Ghosts
• A teenage girl main character and her best friend
• An older sister who died in New York
• A suicide
• A falsely accused murderer
• A literal mad woman in the attic
• A jilted bride
• Old letters and diaries
• A ghost hunting expedition
• A fire
• A missing uncle
• Separated parents

Anyone who’s read Flying Tips will be like, ‘WHAT!’ None of this is remotely connected to the final version.

Things that did survive to the final version:

• About 1000 words
• Lou
• The circus family history

And that’s it. I ditched the rest. 

I know a lot of writers who are at the point of sending out manuscripts and getting feedback from agents and editors and being told they need big revisions. And they’re bravely getting on with it but it takes guts to make big changes and of course everyone complains about how hard it is. To which I want to reply ‘1000 words. Out of 50,000!’ But that’s not helpful. 

Every writer knows about killing your darlings but I’m not sure we really get it. In theory, we know it means, ‘if there’s a bit you really love, it should probably go’ but in practice we think it means, ‘if there’s a bit you really love but you secretly know it’s flawed, it should go.’

But how often do you cut a bit that isn’t flawed? That was actually quite good. How often have you deleted an entire character you really liked? A plotline that was interesting, a subplot that was working perfectly well, a chapter everyone said was great, a whole novel you’ve been working on for ten years? 

The current issue of Mslexia has a whole article on when you should admit defeat and give up. We’re so used to giving each other encouraging pep talks about keeping going, this seems like heresy, but sometimes it really is the right thing to do. Not only for your own sanity but for the books and characters that will never exist if you don’t give up and move on. Either temporarily or completely.

The very first document saved in my Flying Tips folder is dated 2005. I wrote 50,000 words and I could have finished it, I knew where it was going, the plot was all worked out. And then I just stopped. No big reason, all I can say is that I just wasn’t interested enough to go on. I put it away forever and wrote something else. I finished my second attempt at a novel and it got me onto the Times/Chickenhouse shortlist and it got me an agent but it never got published. My third was abandoned halfway through, as was my forth. I was starting to panic at this point, imagining my agent sitting at her desk in London tapping her fingernails and staring at her phone (which she wasn’t, of course. She’s a very busy woman with better things to do.) 

In desperation I went back to the abandoned Flying Tips and started making notes for how I could change it. But it had been so long I barely remembered writing it and I knew that I didn’t want to just continue from where I’d left off. I was basically scouting around for a new main character when Finch came along. And he came via a typo (‘he’ instead of ‘she’). It was that easy. Suddenly he was there and the rest of the book fell into place like dominos and was written within a year.

I know loads of writers who have struggled on with the same novel for ten, fifteen years, or even longer. The more time and effort you put into it, the harder it becomes to quit because you’ll have ‘wasted’ so much more (though nothing’s ever wasted really). They drag themselves to their desks day after day, dreading it. I half admire these writers because I am really not the self-punishing type. I give it a good shot and I’m by no means lazy, but if I’m not happy, I quit. I’m like a very mild-mannered hedonist. I’ll complain bitterly for a while, but the instant I hit the point of not sleeping, not eating or crying at weekends, that’s it, I’m out. Life’s too short. I do wonder what keeps these very persistent writers at it? Is it about failure? Not being a quitter? 

I’m quite proud to be a quitter. I’ve had so many hobbies I’ve lost count and I’ve quit most of them. But the other way of looking at it is, I’ve tried everything. Photography, book-binding, pottery, ballet, paper-making, jewellery-making, soap-making, gardening, a post-grad in library management, knitting, crochet, guitar, keyboards, ukulele, dressmaking, yoga, poi dancing, Hawaiian dancing, juggling, drawing, psychology, sign language, Italian, Icelandic, I was a professional belly dancer FFS. The last time I went to enrol at the local college the woman pulled up my file and said, ‘Whoa. You’ve done a lot.’ 

I have. I’ve got an amazing amount of random information and experience under my belt from which to someday write stories. But I couldn’t have done half of it if I hadn’t quit the other half. I highly recommend quitting.

 

There are other projects to be written. While you’ve been nursing your ailing WIP for ten years, how many other ideas have passed you by? And maybe all that WIP needed was some distance.

I often want to say to writers, ‘My God, you wrote this and it’s really good and you’re only 25, if you can do this now then in ten years, you’re going to be freaking amazing!’ And I genuinely mean it and it’s a lot more than you could say to many writers, but of course if you actually said that to them, their faces would fall through the floor. If someone had said it to me, I’d have collapsed. Because you want it to happen NOW. Ten years? It’s going to take ten years before I can write something publishable?!? Or twenty? Or thirty?

Yeah, it might. The final version of Flying Tips was actually a breeze to write (don’t throw things at me). Once I ditched my main character for a new one, it went like clockwork. But let’s just examine that sentence. I ditched my main character. That was probably the hardest bit of the rewrite and I think a lot of people will tinker at the sentence level forever rather than face big changes like that. And it took me ten years to get to that point, but it’s a much better book and I’m very glad I waited for it.

Since Flying Tips, I’ve abandoned one full, and one half novel and yet another 30,000 word draft. Which itself was a rewrite of a 30,000 word draft that was a rewrite of a 30,000 word draft.

I think quite often, if we have a workable idea, we cling to it like limpets because we’re terrified there won’t ever be another one. We’re afraid to sit back and wait for a better one to come along because that feels like time wasting. Especially if you’ve got an agent/publisher/contract waiting. But I’ve done that thing where you press on through with a workable idea because you feel like it should work, and it’s resulted in several complete but not very good novels. I learned a lot from writing them. Mainly I’ve learned to be patient. And to cut and run. 

 

Kelly McCaughrain is the author of the YA novel Flying Tips for Flightless Birds. 

She blogs about Writing, Gardening and VW Campervanning at weewideworld.blogspot.co.uk 

@KMcCaughrain 

On Finding 'The One' - Kelly McCaughrain

By which I mean, Critique Group, natch.

I’ve been dipping in and out of writing groups since I was 23 and it’s taken almost 20 years to find one that works for me, so, much like Carrie Bradshaw, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned over the course of 20 years of bad relationships* so you can avoid similar mistakes.

(*Disclaimer – these writing groups were entirely populated by lovely people who I genuinely liked and I know people got a lot out of them. They just didn’t work for me personally, for various reasons.)

So many groups are formed because someone puts a vague ad on Facebook, or because a bunch of writers vaguely know each other or are in a class together etc. It usually starts with ‘Let’s form a writing group! We’ll give feedback! Everyone’s welcome!’ To which I want to narrow my eyes and say, ‘What kind of writing group? What kind of feedback? Everyone?’  

This spirit of openness and inclusivity is all very commendable, but the more groups I’ve been to the more I think this is a terrible way to form a group. In fact, my inner secretary kinda wants there to be interviews and questionnaires and contracts and downright discrimination. This is like Match.com but much more important.

 

Because:

1. People have to be in the same place. This doesn’t mean that they all have to be published, or all writing YA or all ready to submit. It just means they have to have a similar level of commitment or interest in writing. I’ve been to several writing groups where the 2 hours was broken up thusly:

• 0-90 mins – chatting about kids, childcare, the school run, jobs, holidays, kids, the price of cheese, the new restaurant in town, kids again. (I’m not even exaggerating, I timed it.
• 90-120 mins – people reading their work out, sometimes running out of time for everyone.

I’ve even been in groups where people brought their toddlers along. I totally get that childcare can be a problem, but seriously, no one in the history of the world has ever had a focused conversation with a two-year-old in the room.

Just ask this guy

Worse than that, when a dad brings his toddler along, the women spend the entire meeting cooing, then when the dad gets up to go, leaving a mess of plates, toys and spilled apple juice, the women happily volunteer to clear it up for him. I’d like to see a mum get away with that.

The problem with these groups is not merely time management. It’s that you meet up and say, ‘How’s life?’ and they tell you. And for them, ‘life’ means kids, childcare, the school run… etc. In my new group, when I say, ‘How’s life?’ the answer is usually, ‘Oh God, it’s awful, I’ve only got two chapters done this month and I got four rejections and…’ because for them ‘life’ means ‘writing.’ We have two hours and even if we let ourselves chat for most of that time, we’d be chatting about writing.

In fact, we do this. Every other month we have a ‘social’ where we don’t critique, but somehow we end up spending the whole time talking about writing anyway. No one makes us, no one steers the conversation, we’re just all in the same place.

2. It actually does help if you all write in a similar genre. I’ve been in too many groups dominated by poets who look disgusted when you take up their time with your rambly prose (and their feedback consists entirely of telling you to cut words like ‘of’ and ‘the’).

I’ve also been in groups with crime and sci fi writers. It’s not that you can’t, on some level, usefully critique a genre you don’t read, but you can only go so far with it. In our group we’re all children’s writers. A bit of diversity can be nice, but I’ve found the most useful feedback for me comes from people who write for older kids and teens.

3. Never assume people want the same things out of the group that you do. This is hugely important if you’re going to give feedback.

I’ve been in lots of groups with people for whom writing was a hobby, therapy, a social activity etc. And there is nothing wrong with that. But I need to know what kind of writer you are before I critique your work, because otherwise me telling you that your heartfelt story about the death of your granny is unpublishable mush may be not just hurtful but pointless (I would never actually do this btw).

The different species of writer inhabiting the Critique Group Savannah seem to include the following:

• There are people who take writing very seriously and it means a lot to them, but they have no ambitions to be ‘good’ at it in the publishable sense, and they really don’t need to be told that their cat poetry is never going to be accepted by Granta. Actually I greatly envy these writers. They seem to be people who have life sussed and they don't crave your approval anyway.
• There are writers who dash off a paragraph on the way to the meeting, are convinced it’s brilliant and have no interest in editing it.
• There are writers for whom writing is the only way they can deal with terrible issues in their lives and it’s messy because it has to be.
• There are writers who are starting out and have zero confidence and very thin skins and the smallest critique will put them off forever.
• There are writers who will simply not see the twenty compliments you paid their work but get obsessed with the three negatives you mentioned (I think this is most people actually) and run home crying.
• There are writers who ask you for feedback but what they really mean is ‘I want my work to be read. And I want you to tell me it’s brilliant’.

Nothing wrong with any of this.

But if you find yourself in a group with these people, you still have to sit there and give ‘feedback’, which involves struggling to come up with compliments, eventually giving up and asking how the cat is and then wasting another hour talking about cats. 

So. Find a group where everyone wants the same kind of critique you do. And be upfront about this in your first meeting. ‘Hi, I’m Kelly, I’m in the early stages of a YA novel and I’d like you to point out the crap bits because if you don’t, my editor will, and frankly I’d rather hear it from you.’ 

In my new group, we send pieces round for critique and attach a note to say, ‘I know the timescale is wrong but I’d like to know what you think of the main character/the dialogue/the pace’ etc so people know what to focus their critique on. We are of course always nice but we wouldn’t be doing anyone any favours if we weren’t also honest about the improvements.

4. In most groups that I’ve been to, people read their work aloud at the meeting. There is lots that I hate about this.

• It’s usually done in a noisy café. 

 

• The pieces have to be short. I can’t seem to write a short story that’s less than 4000 words so this doesn’t work for me.

• I find it easier to process something I’ve read than something I’ve listened to. Asking me for feedback on something I’ve heard once is pointless. You’ll get a superficial first impression and that’s it. ‘I really liked the last sentence’ (because that’s all I can remember). 

In my new group we choose three or four people for each meeting and they send their pieces out by email in advance. Everyone reads them at home and writes feedback which they bring to the meeting to discuss. (I actually think the entire process could be done by email, but I’ve promised my mother I will leave the house sometimes.)

5. Most groups only allow you to read/critique very short pieces. This works on one level – the sentence level. A page is perfectly adequate for you to tell if someone needs to tighten up their sentences, use fewer adverbs, lose the dialogue tags, vary the sentence length, stop repeating words etc. You can tell if someone is capable of producing quality prose. 

But what it will never tell you is if they’re capable of structuring a whole story or novel. Can they make the character’s personality consistent over 60,000 words while still making their internal development believable? Can they maintain a reader’s interest for a whole book? Does the ending answer the questions posed in the beginning? Does the pace of their thriller gradually ramp up? Are the characters’ goals relatable? Are the themes hackneyed? There is so much more to writing a novel than putting good sentences together.

And I suspect that lots of writers go through years of perfectly good critique group membership and yet the first time they ever get feedback like this is when they start sending whole manuscripts out to agents and editors. And probably those agents and editors won’t bother with feedback but if they do, it’s likely to say that the writing is great (that’s why they bothered reading it, that’s why they’re writing to you) but there are problems with the structure/themes/pace/characters etc. *cue writer collapsing in despair because they’ve never before had feedback that involved such big and integral changes*

I think most writers very quickly get beyond the point where they need someone to point out their typos and overuse of adjectives, and yet this is all most groups and classes seem to focus on.

Time is of course the limiting factor, but there are ways round it. In our group, the three people up for critique only send 2000 words out, but we also have a shared Google Drive where you can post longer pieces (whole novels if you want) and people have the option of critiquing those if they have the time. This has been hugely helpful for me.

Feedback is a big deal. I’ve considered signing up as a mentor or editor, offering critiques for fellow YA writers and one of the things that puts me off is the idea that these would be complete strangers who, even if you ask them in advance, ‘How honest do you want me to be?’, might not tell you honestly how honest they want you to be and you could end up really destroying someone. I’ve had major projects just die on me because of one line of criticism that I felt was insurmountable. I don’t want to do that to anyone.

So I don’t take critiquing lightly, I think a lot about any feedback I give. I think a lot of heartache could be avoided if we just chose our critique groups wisely and had actual discussions about how we want them to go and not just how much cake* we should consume.

*There should, of course, be cake.

If you have any other tips for running successful critique groups, or avoiding bad ones, please do share them!

Kelly McCaughrain is the author of the YA novel Flying Tips for Flightless Birds. 

She blogs about Writing, Gardening and VW Campervanning at weewideworld.blogspot.co.uk 

@KMcCaughrain