Happy Birthday, Alex van Tonder, born 8 July 1983.
Six Tips For Writers (taken from our Writers Write Interview)
- Write the book you want to read and the one your friends want to read. Because then even if it’s not published, it’s still rewarding for you.
- Set yourself a goal of writing and finishing a bad first draft. That’s not intimidating. Once you have that you can make it better.
- Learn the rules before you break them. You need to be writing while you’re learning the rules. It’s difficult to understand them if you haven’t written.
- Stay physically fit. I have a day job and it helps me with my mental endurance.
- I start with a plot. I am advertising trained. Everything needs to have a point. Once this has been done and the boundaries have been set, I have to find the characters who will serve the plot. The characters have to be a certain way to do this and I have to find out from them why they are there and how they got there.
- Writing every day is important. Time passes anyway. If you do 500 words every day, you will inevitably have a book.
Alex van Tonder is a South African author. She published This One Time in 2015. Her latest novel is A Walk at Midnight.
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