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Sewing the pieces together
Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, 1931 Charles Dickens died in 1870, leaving his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. His readers, who had followed the story of Drood, his Uncle Jasper and the Landless siblings, were left with an unfinished story abounding with unanswered questions. Who killed Edwin Drood? Who was the Dick Datchery…
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How did we avoid these collaborative writing pitfalls?
Empirical Study on Collaborative Writing: What do co-authors do, use, and like? Sylvie Noël & Jean-Marc Robert I came across this interesting paper about the co-authoring of documents. Most of the research is about collaborative writing in the workplace or in academia, but it’s full of interesting things. I’m not going to reproduce what it says, you…
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I read because I write
All readers read for different reasons. All writers write for different reasons. The reasons I read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for my GCSE English Literature were different to the reasons I re-read it three or four years later. The reasons I wrote my first full-length novel, Blue Angel, were different to the reasons for which I…
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Dating Advice from Satan
Heide and I have now spent nearly six months and approximately 50,000 words in the company of Jeremy Clovenhoof, Satan’s earthbound alter ego and we feel we’ve got to know him quite well. He’s not the character we perhaps initially envisaged. He’s more human, earthier than either of us expected. He’s like the child we…
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Beginning Paragraphs
Douglas Adams knew a thing or two about great openings I thought for a while that Iain would need to come round and maybe administer drugs, in the way that the A-Team used to ambush Mr T to get him on a plane. Why? To make me stop tinkering with the opening paragraph of the…
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Collaboration: Can two people write with one voice?
A writing collaboration can take many forms. One partner might be the ideas person and the other the writer. Or one might be the writer and the other the editor. Or each author might write separate story strands which are then woven together once complete. These are perfectly fine methods of collaboration but, in them,…
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Vote for your favourite book title
As of this week, our collaborative ‘Clovenhoof’ novel is half completed and we still don’t have a proper name for it. But not for much longer! We’d like YOU to pick the title of our novel. We’ve been given a plethora of possible titles by people who’ve read sample chapters of the novel and we’d…
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Heaven: A Visitor’s Guide
Back in November, I blogged about Hell because the central character of our collaborative novel has spent a lot of time there and I wanted to get a feel for the place. Well, now, as we start to think about some of the celestial beings we will ultimately be pitting him against, my thoughts are…
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Feedback from Birmingham Writers’ Group
We had feedback this week on two of the chapters we’ve written for the Clovenhoof novel. To make life interesting, these were chapters three and six, as we decided it made more sense to start in the middle. We’re still happy with that decision, as Iain has just written the beginning, and felt it came…
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Judging a book by its cover: The title
Names are important. They shouldn’t be but they are. In their brilliant book, Freakonomics, US authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner compile top ten lists of children’s names that are most likely to indicate low income backgrounds and low academic achievement. For example, the top five boy’s names that indicate low income and…