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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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Mythic Story Structure
I’m only going to mention this briefly because there is far more information available on this elsewhere on the web and written by far more lucid writers than myself. The three act structure, with its origins arguably found in theatre also resonates with the mythic story structure suggested by Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell, particularly in…
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Plotting Our Story: Movie, TV Series or Novel
Yeah, I’m going to write about plotting again because, although I’ve laid out my interpretation of the three act structure, how we use that in plotting a whole piece depends upon what kind of piece it’s going to be. I’m going to consider three options: the movie, the TV series and the novel. Now, Heide…
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Plot Structure
As I have mentioned in a previous blog, I am a big planner when it comes to writing and I believe that almost any decent story beyond a certain length has to follow certain rules of story. Most of us write stories following these rules without even knowing they are there. We can also consciously…
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The Adventures of Mr Clovenhoof Part 2
As well as the neat categories mentioned below, we had plenty of other ideas from the members of Birmingham Writers Group. Index cards, and if you look carefully you can see yesterday’s credit card bill – for £666 Self contained chapter headings Here are the entries that are irresistible as chapter headings by themselves. If…
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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…