Sample work

See the writing before you write anything.

Each of these began as a single sentence and a short brief. The openings below are unedited first drafts.

Find something close to your book

Genre

Age group

Length

Showing 4 of 4 samples.

Children's fiction · Ages 7–9 · 6 chapters · 4,200 words

The Lantern Under Maple Street

When the streetlamp outside Nell's window starts blinking in a pattern, she discovers it is being used to send messages by someone who has been waiting a very long time to be heard.

“The lamp blinked twice, then once, then twice again. Nell counted it on her fingers under the blanket, the way she counted thunder, and decided it was not a broken bulb. Broken bulbs did not wait politely between flashes. She got out of bed, put her cold feet on the colder floor, and wrote the pattern down on the back of a shopping list, because a thing written down is a thing you are allowed to take seriously.”

Write one like this

Memoir · Adult · 12 chapters · 24,000 words

Everything We Did Not Say

A family history reconstructed from three shoeboxes of letters, a hospital bracelet and one argument that nobody ever finished.

“My mother kept the letters in a shoebox that had never held shoes. I know this because the box still smelled of the oranges it was made for, forty years later, in a loft in Derby. There were three boxes in the end, and it took me a winter to read them, and by February I understood that the family I had been told about and the family in the letters were only distantly related.”

Write one like this

Business · Adult · 10 chapters · 18,000 words

The Quiet Quarter

Why the slowest ninety days of the year decide the other two hundred and seventy-five, and how small teams use them deliberately.

“Every business has a quiet quarter. Most treat it as a problem to be survived. The teams I studied treated it as the only time of year they were able to think. The difference between the two groups was not resources, and it was not luck; it was whether anyone had decided, in advance, what the quiet was for.”

Write one like this

Science fiction · Teen · 16 chapters · 38,000 words

Salt and Signal

A coastal town receives a radio signal that repeats the tide table three days before the tide changes, and only one person is willing to check whether it is right.

“The signal arrived at 04:12, the way it always did, and said the sea would be wrong on Thursday. Mara wrote it down anyway. Being ignored had never stopped her from being accurate. By the time the harbour woke up she had three days of notes, one theory she disliked, and the beginnings of a plan that required a boat she did not own.”

Write one like this

Your book starts the same way.

One sentence, a short conversation, and a plan you approve.

Start writing free