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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…
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Know Your World
At a recent writing convention, I saw a panel entitled “Not Another F***ing Elf” in which four authors discussed the tropes of fantasy writing. There was an interesting moment in the discussion when it was suggested that many twentieth century fantasy writers copied the basic elements of JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth without fully understanding them. …
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Building Worlds and Making Rules
What is world building? Any act of creative writing is an act of world building. The moment we begin to tell a story, we are inviting our audience into a world that is not theirs. It may have enormous similarities to that of the audience but it is not theirs. Even when I meet…
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Editors v Beta-Readers
SCENE: Flat 2a, four-hundred-and-something Chester Road, Sutton Coldfield. Ben Kitchen sits at the table, painting war-gaming miniatures (Seleucid soldiers from Antiochus’s Indian campaign if you must know) and trying to ignore Nerys Thomas who has come downstairs to get Ben’s opinion on her latest lingerie purchases. In walks Jeremy Clovenhoof (Satan) clutching a lulu.com package…
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Curtain Calls and the Chuck Cunningham Syndrome
Now, I’m not a big theatregoer but I have a huge and perverse love for that most British of traditions, the Christmas pantomime. To explain the essence of pantomime to anyone who has never seen one is almost impossible but, roughly speaking, it’s a retelling of a famous fairytale through drama, slapstick and song in…
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Index Card Games
I’ve used index cards (or file cards or postcards) as part of my fiction planning for at least the last ten years. They serve a number of really useful functions. Firstly, I can jot down on them ideas that I’ve no idea what to do with. I could be out and about and suddenly have…
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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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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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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,…