I don’t usually post about readings, but as I am doing *three* this week – and they’re standing in for a Patience launch party – I thought I’d let you know: Monday 2nd December, I am reading with a load of exciting new writers as part of MIRLive at the Harrison Pub, near King’s Cross, […]
EVERYTHING IS DIALOGUE I don’t just mean two people in a book talking, and it being received in written down form. By ‘Everything is dialogue’, I mean that if your writing has the sense of different voices intruding on one another – not always monologuing, not always singing in the same key – it will […]
ALL BY YOURSELF One of the biggest faults in stories by less experienced writers is that they are about extremely isolated people – people who start off by being isolated and don’t end up making much contact with others. This is not, in itself, a bad idea. There have been many wonderful stories about people […]
We’re now going to look at some ways you can work on making the people you write about feel real and, if it’s what you need, likeable. PEOPLE? It might be easier to start referring to them as characters, but I’m going to stick with people, so as to keep them on the same level […]
STORIES VS TALES Warning: The picture I am about to draw is in crayon rather than in single hair brushstrokes. However, the overall picture is the important thing, and even more so where you appear in it. (And Mr But will have plenty of opportunities to speak up.) When I say ‘story’, in this context, […]
Most of the examples I have given so far have been quite straightforward, unsubtle. The idea of the runaway bride, although something you might be happy to gossip about, may be the kind of on-the-surface, twisty story that you would never allow yourself to write. But I think that the idea of Story-Time, and of […]
I’d like to move on from my two definitions of a story, but do keep your marked up story-start because we’ll be going back to it. I have tried very hard to find another way to talk about this next bit that avoids the phrase ‘Story-Time’. It has associations – not bad associations – of […]
You are a Starter, a Middler or a Finisher. There are others you might be – the Dreamer, the Planner, the Diarist, the Angry Person, the Wanderer-Around-the-Soul, the Cynic, the Copyist, the Poet-Semi-Converted. All of you, this blog is for you. I have written it out of my experience as a creative writing tutor, out […]
Either/Or/Or I am guessing you are one of three sorts of writer. Does this sound like you? You have hundreds of ideas. You have dozens of opening sentences. You have lots and lots of half-stories. You have a few stories that have even reached what you once hoped was the end, but which turned out merely […]
