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Today it's the turn of last year's Times/Chicken House Children's Fiction Competition winner (and now published author of The Secret Cooking Club!): Laurel Remington!

What would be your five top tips to budding writers?

1. Turn off the inner critic and focus on getting the words down on the page.

2. Write a brief synopsis or short outline of your story idea before you start – it does make it easier. If you get stuck and can’t get from point A to point B in your story, skip to point C and try to keep moving forward.

3. Join a NaNoWriMo ‘support’ group online – it makes it much more fun, and you can help each other keep going.

4. Once you have a beginning, a middle, and an end, then congratulations! – you’ve written a novel! All the rest is ‘just’ editing.

5. Try to enjoy the process – keep it fun and rewarding. You don’t have to be JK Rowling overnight (fortunately!) – and everyone has to start somewhere.

For those hoping to take part in NaNoWriMo or enter the Times/Chicken House Children's Fiction Competition, what would be your best tip for writing something every day?

Set a realistic weekly word count, and try to set aside time each day to achieve it. But don’t beat yourself up if you don’t – writing a novel, especially a first novel, takes as long as it takes. I’ve done NaNoWriMo before, and I found the main benefit to be the fact that there isn’t time to overthink things – you just have to keep writing and not worry about whether it’s ‘good’ or not. The more you write, the more you improve. By the time you get to 50,000 words, you will be a much better writer than when you started. And you’ll probably have connected with lots of other writers, and hopefully had some fun as well. Best of luck to all participants!

Enter the Times/Chicken House Children's Fiction Competition to be in with a chance of winning a £10,000 publishing contract!