Anniversaries can be hazy and imprecise and I don’t just mean in that my wife and I can’t remember when we got married (we can’t; when we had to put our wedding date down on a passport application we didn’t…
Blog Archives
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…
Posted in 2012, How-to's, Writing Tagged with: Bishop Berkeley, creativity, development of ideas, Diana Wynne Jones, genre, imagination, rules, setting, world building
Judging a book by its cover: The title (2)
Back in January, Heide and I, still in search of a title for our novel gathered all the suggested title together – the good, the bad, the mad, the inspired – and put them to our blog followers in a…
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…
Posted in 2012, Books, Reflections Tagged with: creativity, hymns, index cards, inspiration, judging a book by its cover, Milton, selling your work, Titles, William Blake
Research: It’s a damn odd job but someone’s got to do it.
Writing requires research. The adage ‘write what you know’ holds very true but I agree with those who say that, in this day and age when information is so easy to find, the adage ‘know what you write’ is truer.…
Posted in 2012, Books, Reflections Tagged with: Collaborative writing, creativity, Hercule Poirot, research
Creativity in the Christmas Carnage.
Elf sorts his baubles At this time of year, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with a million things other than writing. If you get a break from over-eating, over-drinking and over-preparing for Christmas then how do you make the best…
Your Satan Song Titles Needed!
So, here’s Satan, alone in his crumby flat (literally; Satan likes biscuits and does not do hoovers). He’s at his desk, the floor around him littered with dozens of screwed up pieces of paper like a flock of crap origami…
Goregrinder by Terminal Panda
We’re absolutely on the brink of writing some prose. In fact, I had the chance to view part of Heide’s first draft for the “Dating” chapter which made me laugh out loud in a public place (always a good sign).…
Starting to create characters
Thinking up the characters led to one of the most riotous evening’s fun I’ve had in a long time. We’d planned to talk about this after the fortnightly meeting of Birmingham Writers Group, when several of the group routinely go…
