Some advice and an exercise from Paul for 15-01-2021 Dialogue is good for expanding both character and plot Publishers often say novels need more if it! It draws the reader in and can move the action if the story along quickly Good dialogue is real… but not too real Listen to real conversations. It’s full of pauses and unfinished senrtances …
Some Free Tools for Writers
https://itsfoss.com/open-source-tools-writers lists some free “open source” tools to help authors be both creative and productive. They include character creation & analysis, an outlining tool for creating your novel, a specialist screenwriting tool, and distraction free writing tools as well as other software for markup, as well as either desktop and professional publishing. So if MS Word or LibreOffice are not …
Lessons from UCLA Film School
We had one of our best sessions with Gary Sutton, a graduate of the School of Theater, Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Following his graduation, he forged a career in Hollywood acquiring film, video and TV rights for the territory of South Korea before returning to mid-Sussex and taking up copywriting. So what, for …
Re-writes
Old stories are the best, as Shakespeare knew. You cannot copy them directly, of course, but you can re-work, re-version and re-invigorate them. Exercise • re-create a scene from a TV drama • choose any mass-market novel at random, read the opening, decide what the writer was trying to achieve and improve it • write your own version of a …
Points of view
• Authors once acted as story overseers, choosing to withhold or reveal any character’s thoughts, as well as telling readers the truth as they saw it. In modern fiction, this is usually avoided, because it denies the readers the opportunity to decide for themselves. So you might two characters who will have different points of view and cannot reveal anything …
Characters
‘Strong, well-rounded characters who spring from the page fully formed are the most valuable currency for every writer.’ How you find characters varies from writer to writer: – you collect details as you go along – you collate details from people you know – some emerge fully formed from the sub-conscious (like Dracula in a dream to Bram Stoker) ‘The …
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