The graceful and successful Della Galton managed to raise lots of questions from our #AskSwanwick followers on May 5th and shared some secrets of her writing success!
A popular Swanwick tutor, Della Galton has had over a thousand short stories published in the UK alone and she's run out of fingers to count her books on. She’s also agony aunt for Writers' Forum. When she is not writing, she enjoys walking her dogs around the beautiful Dorset countryside and beaches.
A popular Swanwick tutor, Della Galton has had over a thousand short stories published in the UK alone and she's run out of fingers to count her books on. She’s also agony aunt for Writers' Forum. When she is not writing, she enjoys walking her dogs around the beautiful Dorset countryside and beaches.
When one tweeter was struggling to think of what to write, Della revealed that she often found herself stuck as well. She recommended using a timer (set to around 20 minutes) as a useful way to ‘force’ oneself to get writing. Finding a writing friend to set a deadline with was also very effective (and then swopping the work when the deadline is met). She also finds teaching immensely inspiring. For her, writing is a process of discovery about ‘ourselves, our emotions and others’, particularly in fiction. She describes herself in one word: “passionate”.
As a prolific short story writer, Della had a few things to say about the common mistakes that let down short fiction. ‘Predictability’ in writing style, plotting and characterisation were huge issues that were easy to fix. What was harder to work on was to bring the ‘magic’ to competent writing – it’s important to add ‘sparkle’ to a story. She recommends at least 2 or 4 days between writing and editing a story – for Della, if she’s pushed, 1 day is her absolute minimum gap. For a novel, you need nothing less than a month before moving onto editing, but she found that “six months is more effective”.
Once again we’d like to extend our thanks to Della Galton - please follower her (and us!) on Twitter - and to all the tweeters who took part in the discussions. We hope you can join us for our next #AskSwanwick session. We hope our Twitter chats offer a sweet morsel of the tasty goodies in store for us in August!
As a prolific short story writer, Della had a few things to say about the common mistakes that let down short fiction. ‘Predictability’ in writing style, plotting and characterisation were huge issues that were easy to fix. What was harder to work on was to bring the ‘magic’ to competent writing – it’s important to add ‘sparkle’ to a story. She recommends at least 2 or 4 days between writing and editing a story – for Della, if she’s pushed, 1 day is her absolute minimum gap. For a novel, you need nothing less than a month before moving onto editing, but she found that “six months is more effective”.
Once again we’d like to extend our thanks to Della Galton - please follower her (and us!) on Twitter - and to all the tweeters who took part in the discussions. We hope you can join us for our next #AskSwanwick session. We hope our Twitter chats offer a sweet morsel of the tasty goodies in store for us in August!
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