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Collaboration Tools
The internet is a wonderful thing. It makes collaboration possible in a way that we really couldn’t have imagined a few short years ago. Emailing documents backwards and forwards is bound to end in tears, so we’ve taken a look at the software that might help. Google Docs I had high hopes that this would be…
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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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Archangels
Inspired by Iain’s question below, I’ve become more and more intrigued by Archangel Michael. Archangel Gabriel is the one I grew up with. He’d be there every year in the nativity. If you said St Michael to me, I’d automatically think of M+S. It’s only latterly that I’ve come to realise some of the fascinating detail…
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Andy Hamilton’s Search for Satan
Just finished watching the BBC4 documentary “Andy Hamilton’s Search for Satan” Click here (only available until 7th November 2011): http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b016ptr6/Andy_Hamiltons_Search_for_Satan/ There were some really interesting nuggets in there about Satan’s qualities and his role. The most interesting to me was that Satan gives evil a public face and that, for a monotheistic religion like Christianity,…
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Hell’s Vision & Mission statement
Every organisation worth its salt has a vision and a mission statement. The vision is how they’d like to see themselves, and the mission statement should say, at the highest level how they plan to get there. Here’s a couple of possibilities for Hell: VISION To be the provider of choice for corrective torment. 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…
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How did Satan lose his job?
So, Satan’s lost his job, has he? Well, how would that happen? By day, I’m a secondary school teacher. Actually, by night, I’m also a secondary school teacher, merely asleep. My experiences of people losing their jobs comes from my own industry so, let’s think, if Hell was run like British state education, what events…
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Who would be Mr Clovenhoof?
So that we can both write about Satan in a consistent way, we need to agree on what exactly he looks like. We thought it might be helpful to imagine who we’d get to play him in a film of our story. The above pics, Robert de Niro, Gary Oldman, Simon Callow, Tommy Lee Jones, Mickey…