Male and female serialists differ in many ways. By the end of this post, you decide who’s more ruthless.

The media attaches cutesy nicknames to female serial killers, like Giggling Granny, Jolly Jane, or Tiger Woman.

For males they use epithets that beget terror, such as Night Stalker, Flint Serial Slasher, and Jack the Ripper.

With female serialists, however, the victims never view her as a threat until it’s too late. Thus, it’s a mistake to underestimate a woman hellbent on murder.

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As a writer, we have the craft to create worlds, characters, and their stories. Inside our heads, those stories run like an all-singing, all-dancing movie. (Well, they do in mine…) but do our words convey this same effect for a reader?

Often, we are so close to the story we have created, it is hard to spot where we may need to make changes, add or remove items, spot crutch words (Oh, I have compiled a list, a mile long, of mine).

This is where editing comes in.

And as an Indie author, I remember the mind boggling at the different aspects of editing; the different stages that your book baby goes through, to become a polished piece of prose, ready to be presented to the world.

With this in mind, I am delighted to invite professional editor, Claire Jennison of Penning and Planning to step up and give us…

Writers Helping Writers:

Not sure how much brainstorming needs to go into each character? You’re not alone.

It’s a struggle for many, and unfortunately, there’s no single “right” answer. It really depends on the character’s importance in the story, their function or role, and the writer’s own process.

A rule of thumb might be to dig as deep as you need to in order to understand what is motivating them in the story.

But honestly, what does that look like?

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Writers Helping Writers:

As I mentioned in my last post, knowing exactly how much to brainstorm when it comes to character building can be a question mark.

How deeply you need to plan depends on the character’s roleand importance, and the writer’s own comfort zone.

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AS WRITERS WE NEED people to do bad things: they create story. They may not be the heart of your writing, the central core, but they kickstart action and reaction. We need light and dark on the page, we need the shadows.

We don’t write (or read) stories about happy, well-balanced folk brought up in nice families who meet and marry the love of their life and die a peaceful death at a great age after an economically and spiritually rewarding life…and we don’t write them for a very good reason, the best possible reason, we don’t live lives like that.

Bad things happen and sometimes it’s by chance or a force of nature and sometimes it’s because of what people do. Deliberately. Or because of what people are. The words of the great comedian Spike Milligan spring to mind:

The rain falls on the…