The Question In the final workshop of last term I was asked The Question. It was one of the Birkbeck Creative Writing MA students, Alex Petropoulos, who asked it. Come on, tell us what we really want to know – tell us The Secret. I was really on the spot. Did I know The Secret? […]
You may have heard that common piece of advice from Creative Writing workshops ‘Show, don’t tell’, and you have have wondered what it meant. Or you may know. Here is an example of telling – Sara was born in May 1996. Ten years later her mother published her first novel. It was called Jumping Jumping. There […]
Welcome back. You have three characters you’ve been writing about – the child, the grown-up and the person in disguise. Perhaps you based them on people you know. Or maybe you made them up from scratch but have been getting to know them better just through writing about them. In this Lesson I’m going to […]
In this Lesson we’re going to look at how suspense works. This isn’t because you’re going to be writing super-tense genre fiction – although perhaps you will be. This is because suspense of some sort is useful in all storytelling, and it’s best to have an idea how it works. Most stories play with different […]
Welcome back. I have already given you my definition of a story – A story is about someone who is somewhere they shouldn’t be. Or: A story is about something that is somewhere it shouldn’t be. And you have begun writing the nothing draft of a story. You have two characters who have found something. […]
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