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When is a novelist’s job complete?
Yes, when is a novelist’s job complete? That’s a tricky, almost unanswerable question, up there with ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ or Bishop Berkeley’s old chestnut about the tree falling and no one being around to hear it. It’s an important question and doubly important for collaborators because you need to know…
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The Pros and Cons of Collaborative Editing
Pro #1 – Four eyes are better than two In the editing and rewriting stages of a novel, there are distinct advantages and disadvantages to working with a collaborative partner. In many ways, two heads are better than one. More specifically, four eyes are better than two. One of the key qualities of a…
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Four and a half things a good self-editor needs to do
So, one day, after lots of ideas have been passed around and plans drawn up and several chapters written and hacked about, the collaborative writers wake up to the realisation that they’ve written a novel. Or at least something that looks like a novel. But just as a pile of organs and limbs does not…
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Communication Tools
It is probably worth considering how much of a debt collaborative writing of the type we’ve been discussing owes to modern communications technology. Heide and I live twenty-three miles apart. Without word processing, e-mail, video conferencing and web-based file sharing, we would not be able to collaborate on fiction in the way we have. That…
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Novel writing processes
You and your collaborator(s) may have devised a setting, some characters and the plot of your story but this represents only the beginning of the creative process for collaborative writers. At some point, you are going to need to tackle the meat of your writing project, that is, the actual writing of chapters, scenes or…
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Plotting your novel collaboratively
Before being written down, all stories are plotted out. Some writers plot in enormous detail, generating more words in plans and background text than in the finished work of fiction. PG Wodehouse wrote pages and pages of preparatory notes, sometimes greater in length than the novel he was to later write. Others plan lightly, perhaps…
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Know Your Characters – Mr & Mrs
Canada has given many great gifts to the world, lacrosse, instant mashed potato, the pacemaker, the electric wheelchair… and Mr & Mrs. Created in 1963, Mr & Mrs was a TV show in which married couples were tested on their knowledge of each other through a series of questions. The questions were put to both…
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Know Your Characters
Writers, both solo and collaborative, need to get to know their central characters well before writing a novel about them. And the first question is not ‘how well?’ because the writer needs to know the central characters very well. The first question is which characters do they need to know a lot about and which…
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Clovenhoof – book launch party info
Clovenhoof by Heide Goody and Iain Grant Have some sympathy for the devil… Charged with gross incompetence, Satan is fired from his job as Prince of Hell and exiled to that most terrible of places: English suburbia. Forced to live as human under the name of Jeremy Clovenhoof, the dark lord not only…
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Creating Characters Collaboratively
In terms of creating interesting and viable characters, the first thing collaborators need to decide is how many central characters there are in the story. There are tracts on creative writing that say that any story has only one central character. It’s an interesting notion but an unhelpful one. Your novel will most likely feature…