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Demonic index card games
Heide and I are big fans of index cards as collaborative writing tools. Not only can we use index cards (or file cards or postcards or whatever) to jot down story ideas and arrange them as we wish, kind of like a lo-tech version of those drag and drop touchscreens that they seem so fond…
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Five habits of successful writing partners
Iain and I have been writing collaboratively for nearly a year now. We’ve written fiction and non fiction. We’ve planned, plotted and edited a LOT of words during that time. Clovenhoof, our novel is now very close to publication. We’ve learned a thing or two about how to play nicely together. Here are some top…
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Plotting your novel collaboratively
Before being written down, all stories are plotted out. Some writers plot in enormous detail, generating more words in plans and background text than in the finished work of fiction. PG Wodehouse wrote pages and pages of preparatory notes, sometimes greater in length than the novel he was to later write. Others plan lightly, perhaps…
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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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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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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…
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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 sheep. His pen is poised above a fresh sheet of paper. Yes, Satan is writing…
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Planning in more detail
Sharpies at the ready In order to do some more detailed planning, we met up to have a chat in a pub. Most of the discussion so far has been by email, or in the company of the rest of Birmingham Writers Group. We met in a Wetherspoons , one of the cheerful chain of…
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The Adventures of Mr Clovenhoof
After the Birmingham Writer’s Group meeting last night, we sat in the pub and played the index card game again. We asked everyone around the table to write a chapter heading from our novel beginning with the words, “Mr Clovenhoof…” Once again, the results were brilliant. Heide and I gathered them together and tried to…
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Approaches to Writing
I want to write a number of blog posts about how we might go about plotting this story of Satan’s life as a mere mortal. However, that requires me to explain (to myself, if no one else) what my approach to writing is. This is particularly important because it does stand in stark contrast to…