fiction guidelines

We are looking for novels that have:

A good title; an engaging story with a beginning, middle and end; vivid, memorable characters whom one cares about; superb dialogue; a transporting sense of time and place; accuracy of detailing; psychological plausibility; an intriguing beginning and memorable ending.

In addition, what fills us with joy is the writer who has a palpable love of language, who always chooses precisely the right words, eschews clichés, handles pacing with the skill of a dancer and musician, conjures up moods and atmospheres with an apparently invisible wand, and whose spelling, punctuation and grammar are immaculate.

On the practical side, we’re only interested in finished novels, which are of publishable length (minimum 70,000 words, maximum 120,000 words).

In addition, the finished novel needs to be ‘polished’, a process that typically takes more than four times the length of time you devoted to writing the first draft, involving numerous revision techniques.

The classic signs of an ‘unpolished’ novel are as follows:
you haven’t actually finished it
you haven’t revised it
you’re still at the first or second draft stage
you haven’t read it out aloud and improved it in the light of that experience
you haven’t given the novel to test readers (i.e both men and women of different ages and from varying backgrounds) and acted on their detailed feedback.

First novels are positively welcomed at CDLA, but only if they fit all the requirements above.

We’re not interested in individual short stories, but cleverly themed or interlinked collections can be great.

There are various forms of formulaic, genre fiction in which we never have any interest. These include: crime, detective stories, erotica, fantasy, murder mysteries, occult, romance, science fiction, thrillers. Please don’t send them in hoping that we will change our minds.