There are loads of exercises you can do that use acrostics to give your writing brain a work out. These kind of word games rarely produce anything useful but they can help you to get unstuck if you don’t know what to write. They’re also good for encouraging you to think of a variety of… Continue reading Writing Exercise: Fun with Acrostics!
The Euroscript development process was coming to an end and I received my final report from Fenella Greenfield in March 2009. So far in this series I’ve been focusing on the problems I had with the screenplay, but it’s important to mention the positive feedback too. Alongside the notes written into the script were brief… Continue reading How to Develop a Screenplay: Part 4 – Final Notes
The Euroscript development process was going well and the second report from Fenella Greenfield arrived in November 2008. This was when things started to get tricky. Second Rewrite Many of the problems of the previous draft had been addressed. Calum’s character arc was now clearer, well written and more intriguing; the central relationship between the… Continue reading How to Develop a Screenplay: Part 3 – Tone and Theme
Winning the Euroscript Competition was the easy part. Next came a string of rewrites and learning how to deal with an intensive development process which made me feel challenged, elated, baffled, and conflicted by turns. The first script report from Fenella Greenfield arrived in August 2008 and was a shattering experience. It consisted of a… Continue reading How to Develop a Screenplay: Part 2 – Deconstruction
Creating dialogue is one of the most enjoyable and the most challenging parts of writing. Dialogue isn’t like real speech. If you write dialogue to resemble real speech you’ll end up with something unreadable. If you don’t believe me, record a conversation between your friends or family, then transcribe it word for word. It’s a… Continue reading How to Write Dialogue
At the heart of every successful novel are good characters. And by ‘good’ I don’t mean a character who never does anything bad, is kind to small animals and children, and never swears. Well written characters bring a story to life and give the reader someone to care about, root for, or even love to… Continue reading How to Write Characters
Before you begin to write a story there’s one crucial choice to make: who is the narrator? The narrator is the character(s) telling the story, whether that’s the protagonist, multiple characters, or an observer. The point of view (POV) taken by the narrator is the reader’s way in to the story – it’s how they… Continue reading How to Write Point of View
The hardest part of writing a novel is the opening. As attention spans shrink and a million distractions pull at our minds, it’s harder than ever to get people to sit still long enough to read to the end of the first page, let alone the first paragraph. An average novel is between 80,000 to… Continue reading How to Write Opening Lines
