First and Third Person Point of View
Point of view in fiction: what is the difference between first and third person? Why does it matter?
Craft
The writing process from idea through to marketing
How Aristotle’s Poetics Can Improve Y...
I am very bad at plot. At my best, I can turn out a pretty good sentence. I can iron out most point of view and tense issues in the edit. But plot just doe...
What is plot?
What is the difference between plot and story? Why does it matter? Knowing the answer might take your writing to the next level.
Character, Argument and Story Structure
Craig Mazin argues that main characters shape a satisfying plot by testing a central dramatic argument, not by following a rote story structure.
The Take Away: Cathy Yardley’s Writin...
To kick off our new strand, The Take Away, let’s take a look at an excellent piece over on Writer Unboxed in which Cathy Yardley describes her writing proces...
Site News: The Take Away
The Take Away is a new blog strand that builds on the Essential Craft Books series, but widens it to take in podcasts, articles, tweets, in fact anything t...
Essential Books: Story Maps: TV Drama
If you’re planning a TV pilot episode then this book, Story Maps: TV Drama. The Structure of the One-Hour Television Pilot by Danial P. Calvisi packs a far g...
Essential Books: The Last Draft
How do you get from a sloppy first (or second or third) draft to something approaching a publishable manuscript?
After the Draft #1 – Make a Master Map
After your first draft, let your manuscript breathe for a week or so then properly assess your work. You need to know where you truly are to determine where ...
Image of the Week #2
This might make a good prompt for the journey and for the people in the boat – their relationships, their stories. In truth, on a day of chill and rainy murk...
Image of the Week #1
When this image came up in my morning free write, the sudden chill that shivered through me had nothing to do with the miserable November weather. What’s goi...
Last edits on your novel? Record an a...
An audio-draft is essentially a scratch audiobook. An audio-draft does not require professional recording kit or access to acting talent. You can (and abso...
Introducing Pressmonkey – WordPress T...
I’m very proud of Pressmonkey – and lots of its code lives on in another commercial guise. But I have moved on from WordPress on a day to day basis. This has...
How to revive blog content and keep i...
Seven techniques you can use to revive great content in your archive. And an early announcement about Pressmonkey - our new Wordpress plugin for integrating ...
How to win NaNoWriMo
If you want to get through NaNoWriMo month and fall into an untroubled sleep almost every night, here are some tricks I picked up on my last couple of NaNo...
14 Questions the BBC have used to ass...
Poking through some old files this week, I came across some notes I put together from the 2010 Everyword festival at the Liverpool Everyman. Aimed at scrip...
Turn your example code into a pantomi...
Have you ever been called out on a code example because it just wouldn’t work in the real world? It’s happened to me a few times and gradually I’ve learned...
Origin Story
One of the straplines I’ve been using for this site is: what’s your tech story? That implies a story about you. And that’s deliberate. But a piece of tech wr...
A little failure. A little doubt. Not...
Two articles this week got me thinking about the balancing act we need to perform between confidence and self-criticism.
Larry Brooks’ story structure diagram
In preparation for NaNoWriMo, I have been reading Story Engineering by Larry Brooks. It’s a useful book, especially when it comes to pinning down story struc...
Make it matter
Over a year ago and in another country, I printed the phrase make it matter on a sheet of A4 paper and stuck it to my wall. I still have the sheet but I&#...
Story sprawling? Try making it a cart...
The Story From Hell (TSFH) still bothers me. Though I’m on the road now, and I get very little done in hotel rooms for some reason. It’s not as if I do...
Note Share: Writing For Radio. A Prac...
by Annie Caulfield, Crowood 2009 Here in the UK, radio drama is alive and well, and living on the BBC. Thanks to the license fee, the BBC is able to subsidi...
Fiction Pattern: the payoff switcheroo
Name The payoff switcheroo Purpose With two characters each approaching crisis in a story, you can increase impact by unexpectedly substituting a second cha...
Obligatory NaNo advice post
I know everyone is peddling advice right now, but with my Inflatable Ink co-writer poised to throw herself into NaNoWriMo for the very first time I reckon I’...
Hatching a fiction pattern: The Plot ...
About a hundred years ago I posted here about patterns in fiction. A quick recap: A pattern, then, is first a problem defined, and then a potential solut...
Pattern languages and fiction
In my last post I blathered about some similarities between software and fiction. Or something. If you made it through to the end you may have noticed ...
Machines in your head: software and f...
In another life, I’m a coder, and I write books about code. As I’ve become more serious about fiction in recent years, I’v...
Get to a character’s core with this R...
There are many character questionnaires and exercises out there. I like to interview my characters when I’m stuck, and I have a list of questions I ...
Runner up in BBC Writers’ Room play c...
Always the bridesmaid I may be, but once again, I’m more than delighted to have made it that far. Actually I’m kind of ecstatic. I heard about the Fiv...
Everyword: Rhetoric and language in t...
On Friday I attended the last workshop of Everyword. Jeanie O’Hare, the RSC’s Company Dramaturg, presented a session on rhetoric in drama. Rhetoric is ...
14 questions BBC readers will use to ...
The BBC Writers’ Room workshop at EVERYWORD was given by Paul Hardy. The BBC encourage unsolicited scripts. In fact 25% of their radio plays are writte...
Everyword at the Liverpool Everyman
I’ve been in Liverpool for three months now, and it’s about time I began to get involved in writers’ events. The Everyword new writing festival has bee...
How I learned to relax and enjoy a St...
I’m nine stories into StoryADay.org. A challenge to write a story a day in May. Actually, I haven’t written a single story. Unlike some of the challen...
Nurse Jackie and the Oblique Pay Off
After a while it becomes second nature to work a scene, or at least a sequence of scenes, to a climax. I find myself thinking in those terms. Marshalli...
A Rebellious Character
My boy Ben had been through a bad few days, and he was feeling pretty low. What’s more it was all his fault. He’d not behaved well, he conceded, and he...
500 Words
I’m not blocked. I’m not sure I believe in being blocked. I’ve just been outside of writing for a while. Despite my 10 minute writer trick, something a...
Stripping down an SF story (Part 3)
I’m returning to this after a short break (sorry about that – turns out that preparing to relocate to another continent is something of a timesuck). I...
Stripping down an SF story (Part 2)
In the last post I summarized a story by Robert Reed by breaking it down into scenes. That seems a useful way to start, because at once we get a sense ...
Stripping down an SF story (Part 1)
For a while my submission policy has been completely crazy. It goes a little like this. I write a story. I make it as good as I can. Then I submit it....
Sympathy for the devil
I have spent the last week working on the same scene, and I have been finding it hard to lift it beyond the realm of cartoon. Admittedly my story is an...
Needed: a new time management strategy
I’ve just taken a sneaky extra couple of days off after the break. After being on the road on and off, and having children on a p...
It’s not Revision. It’s Prevision
So after the writing mania of the last month of so, and before the forced march of NaNoWriMo it may be time to focus again on the editing process. Although I...
Where do you think you’re going?
Over at LifeHacker a recent post by Kevin Purdy relates perfectly to my 10 Minute Writer experience. Although anecdotal, some of the conclusions are si...
The spam machine
Vern Emery sounds to me like the kind of man who might drive a pocket Audi sports car. He’s cut and pressed in clean lines and he sits three inches fro...
Bzzzt! Ding! Write
I was discussing my ten minute technique with some friends last week. One of them asked whether it was hard to get into the right state of mind to write for...
The ten minute writer
For some reason, the prospect of writing often fills me with mild panic. It’s the way I want to spend my time, and I whine and I beg and I steal to get...
The Scene Book
When I was working on my first draft I jumped into a scene by starting to write. Then I watched with interest as a scene or a chapter took shape. Sometimes t...
Stripped down to gesture
I’m writing again. Covering about 1000 words a day. Of which I’ll probably throw away most. I allow myself to digress shamelessly, my dialogue stalls or gabb...
Please report to the transporter room
Have you ever been convinced you invented a term, only to find that it’s been in circulation for years? I received some constructive criticism today about my...