How we can help you

The saying is that everyone has a book in them.  Some people are happy to leave it forever dormant while others put pen to paper, mouth to dictaphone, and fingers to keyboard.  Should you decide to write that book, then that’s where we can assist.

The contribution The Fine Line can make to your writing is twofold.

How our site can help

First, just browse the site.  See what other writers say about how they write: heed their advice; disagree with them; see what people who make a living (and a life) from writing have got to say about technique, inspiration, routine, rejection, love, loathing, work, how they got there and why they stay.  They are all out there doing it – exploring language; winning awards; seeing their work on shelves in anthologies, novels, and collections; acquiring rejection slips; and, most importantly, working at their craft.

Basic advice to get you started

The Blank Page is there to diffuse the myth of the white sheet as something to be feared and replace it with a perception of a page devoid of type as a thing of potential.  A canvas, if you like.  It will give you things to get you thinking, lifting your head from your laptop and, hopefully, realising that writing isn’t just a matter of putting words on a page.  It is far more interesting, complex, infuriating, gratifying, and curious than that.  Even in all its complexity, though, with enough will, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t pen your thoughts.  The creative urge can be an unruly beast – obstinate, unreliable, sometimes unfathomable.  The Blank Page will give you some pointers for commanding and putting it to good use.

Sharp views on classic texts

Bored of academics’ unfailing ability to render even the most vital of writers and works inert, The Criticess decided to revive them.  In her periodic columns, you will find books and ladies you thought you knew (and some you’d never heard of but really ought to have).  Her subjects are women whose backstory to their work was at least as dramatic as what they produced and whose creativity was of such an urgent, consuming, arduous nature that, where it didn’t cost them their lives, it did lose them husbands, their sanity and livers.

The second way in which The Fine Line can contribute to your writing is through the editorial consultancy service, details of which can be found under Our Service.