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Mythic Story Structure
I’m only going to mention this briefly because there is far more information available on this elsewhere on the web and written by far more lucid writers than myself. The three act structure, with its origins arguably found in theatre also resonates with the mythic story structure suggested by Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell, particularly in…
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Theme tunes for our characters
Another way that we can make sure that the characters inside our heads are as similar as possible is to give them a soundtrack. The 1990’s TV show Ally McBeal exploited this, and I have borrowed from that the idea that the characters will have different theme tunes for different moods. Writers using music to…
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Plotting Our Story: Movie, TV Series or Novel
Yeah, I’m going to write about plotting again because, although I’ve laid out my interpretation of the three act structure, how we use that in plotting a whole piece depends upon what kind of piece it’s going to be. I’m going to consider three options: the movie, the TV series and the novel. Now, Heide…
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Collaboration Tools
The internet is a wonderful thing. It makes collaboration possible in a way that we really couldn’t have imagined a few short years ago. Emailing documents backwards and forwards is bound to end in tears, so we’ve taken a look at the software that might help. Google Docs I had high hopes that this would be…
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Plot Structure
As I have mentioned in a previous blog, I am a big planner when it comes to writing and I believe that almost any decent story beyond a certain length has to follow certain rules of story. Most of us write stories following these rules without even knowing they are there. We can also consciously…
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The Adventures of Mr Clovenhoof Part 2
As well as the neat categories mentioned below, we had plenty of other ideas from the members of Birmingham Writers Group. Index cards, and if you look carefully you can see yesterday’s credit card bill – for £666 Self contained chapter headings Here are the entries that are irresistible as chapter headings by themselves. If…
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The Adventures of Mr Clovenhoof
After the Birmingham Writer’s Group meeting last night, we sat in the pub and played the index card game again. We asked everyone around the table to write a chapter heading from our novel beginning with the words, “Mr Clovenhoof…” Once again, the results were brilliant. Heide and I gathered them together and tried to…
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Archangels
Inspired by Iain’s question below, I’ve become more and more intrigued by Archangel Michael. Archangel Gabriel is the one I grew up with. He’d be there every year in the nativity. If you said St Michael to me, I’d automatically think of M+S. It’s only latterly that I’ve come to realise some of the fascinating detail…
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Andy Hamilton’s Search for Satan
Just finished watching the BBC4 documentary “Andy Hamilton’s Search for Satan” Click here (only available until 7th November 2011): http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b016ptr6/Andy_Hamiltons_Search_for_Satan/ There were some really interesting nuggets in there about Satan’s qualities and his role. The most interesting to me was that Satan gives evil a public face and that, for a monotheistic religion like Christianity,…
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Hell’s Vision & Mission statement
Every organisation worth its salt has a vision and a mission statement. The vision is how they’d like to see themselves, and the mission statement should say, at the highest level how they plan to get there. Here’s a couple of possibilities for Hell: VISION To be the provider of choice for corrective torment. To…