Helpline
Your writing problems solved with advice from Diana Cambridge
Diana Cambridge
Email your queries to Diana (please include hometown details) at: diana@dianacambridge.co.uk or send them to: Helpline, Writing Magazine, Warners Group Publications plc, 5th Floor, 31-32 Park Row, Leeds LS1 5JD. She will answer as many letters as she can on the page, but regrets that she cannot enter into individual correspondence. Publication of answers may take several months. Helpline cannot personally answer queries such as where to offer work, or comment on manuscripts, which you are asked not to send.
Q I am in a terrible quandary with my writing commitments. I work full time, but in the evenings and at weekends, I do try to write. I am never short of ideas and this is my problem. There are so many projects on the go in my head and on scraps of paper – anything from letters to magazines to work on my novel. I am at bursting point! Then there are the competitions with their deadlines as well as the writing course I started four years ago. I am so overwhelmed. I have even structured a timetable with set times for different jobs and have a schedule with deadlines and traffic-light coded priorities, but it just doesn’t seem to be working for me. As a result, I am rushing my work, not properly editing the content and sending it off feeling very dissatisfied with what I have produced. How do I overcome this?