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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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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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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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Tell me what you think. Be honest. I can take it.
Consider… Scenario A: My wife comes into the house, fresh from the hairdressers and says, “What do you think?” Scenario B: My wife shows me a hairstyle in a magazine that she is thinking of getting herself and says, “What do you think?” Or perhaps consider… Scenario A: My six-year-old daughter brings me a page…
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Doing it in Public
How much privacy do we need or want? When we started using Dropbox our productivity soared. Instead of emailing ideas back and forth, we could easily create and share them in documents. Once we started writing in earnest, it raised a question. Writers are nosey people, it’s a given. To be a creator…
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From Ideas to Planning to Prose
We’ve been blogging at Idle Hands for exactly one month, one week and one day, charting our attempts to write a collaborative comic fantasy novel about Satan’s days in retirements on earth. We’re now in the process of writing some actual prose. This comes as a bit of a surprise to me because I usually…
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It’s not a Writing Group, it’s Therapy
I have a number of books on my shelf about the art of writing. Some of them are great reads, usually because they’re funny and enable me to laugh at negative writing traits I see in myself. ‘How not to write a novel’ was particularly entertaining in that regard. Some of the best aren’t intended…
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Research: It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.
I’m writing the “dating” chapter. All of our characters are embroiled in the world of finding a partner. Iain wrote the synopsis for this, and as soon as I saw what he had in mind I couldn’t wait to start. The opening scene made me hoot with laughter when I realised what I had to…