He said, she said…

I was delighted when a friend got in touch to congratulate me on my latest book, Radwinter; she said it was the best thing I’ve written, it was a real page-turner, and the surprise at the end was a real surprise! I value her opinion so I was thrilled to hear her comments; I asked her why she thought it was better than my other novels which she had also enjoyed. She replied, that yes, she had loved my other stories, and had even re-read a couple of them but Radwinter was now her favourite.

I pressed her to expand her comments and she replied that in this book the conversations were nice and tight, realistic and moved the story on. I know I do tend to write speech too literally; my stories are so vivid in my head that I can hear the characters conversations… fine… but it doesn’t always make good reading to have every last little word of conversation included. Maybe it was because Radwinter is almost like a diary, and if it really was a diary the content would read very differently from a third person narrative.

I am beginning to play around with editing a story I wrote previously, and thanks to Judith’s helpful comments,, I am paying particular attention to the conversations and direct speech… The Slasher is at work again, ripping out all the unnecessary ‘he saids, she saids’!

Radwinter is available as an e-book on Amazon