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Beginning Paragraphs
Douglas Adams knew a thing or two about great openings I thought for a while that Iain would need to come round and maybe administer drugs, in the way that the A-Team used to ambush Mr T to get him on a plane. Why? To make me stop tinkering with the opening paragraph of the…
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Collaboration: Can two people write with one voice?
A writing collaboration can take many forms. One partner might be the ideas person and the other the writer. Or one might be the writer and the other the editor. Or each author might write separate story strands which are then woven together once complete. These are perfectly fine methods of collaboration but, in them,…
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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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Research: It’s a damn odd job but someone’s got to do it.
Writing requires research. The adage ‘write what you know’ holds very true but I agree with those who say that, in this day and age when information is so easy to find, the adage ‘know what you write’ is truer. It is perfectly possible to write short stories, articles and novels without any research. The…
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If Heaven was a corporation
In our novel, Satan loses his job and is given ‘indefinite leave’ which he is forced to spend on Earth. Such a premise requires that the realm of the afterlife, perhaps both heaven and hell, is run rather like a private company or a large public corporation. The afterlife story arc that runs through…
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A Writer’s Year
Okay, it’s post-Christmas and I’m considering my accomplishments as a writer in 2011. In fact, as it’s the season for lists, I listed them. Now, this is not a bragging list. I’m actually going to make a point here. Here’s the list. Iain’s List Of Writery Things He Did In 2011 1. I began writing…
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The Devil and the W.I.
What links the devil with the Women’s Institute? Or, more precisely, who? Go on. I’ll give you ten seconds to work it out. I got thinking about this person whilst doing a spot of research for a chapter of our Clovenhoof novel which features a children’s choir (and animal slaughter, fake blood and credit card…
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The Story of Job
I am currently plotting chapter 4 of our novel for Heide to write. This chapter has the working title of “Clovenhoof Needs People” and deals with Clovenhoof’s (aka Satan’s) being subjected to the most misery-inducing illness known to science: man-flu. It occurred to me whilst beginning to plot this, that I could make some analogies…
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Doing it in Public
How much privacy do we need or want? When we started using Dropbox our productivity soared. Instead of emailing ideas back and forth, we could easily create and share them in documents. Once we started writing in earnest, it raised a question. Writers are nosey people, it’s a given. To be a creator…
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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…