Last evening, the Royal Writers Secret Society – don’t bother Googling, you won’t find it; it’s secret – gave me feedback on chapters 5 and 6 of The Mark of the Spider, my adventure-thriller manuscript.

In a nutshell, their observations:

• Is protagonist likable enough?
• More reflection and feelings
• Show, don’t tell
• Digressions, excessive detail
• Cliches

If I committed any other sins of fiction writing, they ran out of time cataloguing them.

This is why every writer needs an editor, every story teller needs a caring audience, and every keyboard has a delete key.