Imogen Cooper of The Golden Egg Academy with a clever visulation exercise to test if your novel is strong enough to get
published:
It often helps an author to see his or her novel as a living creature with a strong backbone.
Try visualising it in this way, ask yourself whether you can distill into three sentences the essence of your novel, the backbone of the creature you have created.
In other words, can you identify the main concept and through-line that drives the narrative? The second question is do each of the muscles, the organs and sinews adhere to that central backbone?
I can not emphasise how important it is to focus your work in order to make your novel strong enough to appeal to an agent or publisher. There are so many brilliant writers out there, but a brilliant writer with a strong and original core concept, who is able to bind to it most of the components of their novel, is more likely to get published.
The Golden Egg Academy provides high quality workshops and editor’s surgeries for writers of children’s fiction. For more info: www.goldeneggacademy.co.uk
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