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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). I, unlike Heide, am afraid to just start with a cool idea and hit the…
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The Clovenhoof Bible
At this point in time, Heide and I are knee-deep in planning individual chapters of the Clovenhoof novel (have I mentioned we still need a cool title?). We’re perhaps even only days away from writing some actual prose. However, the more detailed our planning and plotting has become, the more we need to co-ordinate our…
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Being Flexible
We’ve learned an interesting lesson in the last week. We came away from our last planning session with a firm idea of what we would do next. We’d plotted how things would go for Clovenhoof during each month of our timeline. We’d decided on a theme for each of these chapters, so we each took half of them. We would…
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Why are the film adaptations of Harry Potter good but the novelisations of the Star Wars films not?
I have this theory which has almost no justification or evidence to support it but which I hold to be almost inviolably true. Adaptations of stories from one media to another can be an improvement or a degradation of the story and whether the story is elevated or degenerated by adaptation is almost wholly dependent…
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Hell: A Visitor’s Guide
In our story, Satan has been fired from his diabolical management position and evicted from hell. In our current plans, one possible reason for his removal from office is that some other fiendish individual wishes to seize the reins of power in hell. But why would they do that? What kind of real estate are…
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A work in progress
I had never realised that drawing pretty lines on a roll of wallpaper could be such a useful plotting tool. With the wallpaper activity, Heide and I were able to visualise and share our vision of Satan’s ups and downs in his story. I, because I’m a geek, went home and turned it into a…
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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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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 that the characters will have different theme tunes for different moods. Writers using music to…
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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…