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…
Blog Archives
Know Your Characters – Mr & Mrs
Posted in 2012, How-to's, Writing Tagged with: building characters, Canada's cultural contributions, Collaborative writing, Mr & Mrs, writing games
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…
Posted in 2012 Tagged with: building characters, character biographies, Collaborative writing, GK Chesterton, writing cliche
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,…
Posted in 2012, How-to's, Writing Tagged with: building characters, Chuck Cunningham syndrome, curtain calls, finishing a novel, Frankenstein, pantomime, plot
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…
Posted in 2012, How-to's, Writing Tagged with: artsfest, Birmingham Writers Group, building characters, collaboration tools, Collaborative writing, index cards, planning, plot
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…
