Today, I’m thrilled to welcome Tania Chandler to the First Draft hot seat.
TANIA CHANDLER is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. Her work was awarded a special commendation in the 2013 Writers Victoria Crime Writing competition. Please Don’t Leave Me Here is her first novel, and she is currently working on a sequel.
When you decide to write something new, what is the first thing you do?
I start by scribbling copious notes in exercise books (or on napkins in cafes, or scraps of paper while waiting at traffic lights — ideas have an annoying habit of transpiring at the most inopportune times). I try to capture things about character, setting, backstory, images and other sensory elements.
Before I start writing, I try to have a plot outline, which I map loosely to a narrative framework (I find Nigel Watts’s ‘Eight-point story arc’ and Syd Field’s ‘Paradigm’ helpful), knowing that most of it…
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B. Shaun Smith 