New Year always seems a little repetitive. With each New Year that comes around it’s the same old things, the same promises and for about a week it’s something that we all manage to do – sometimes even a little longer than that. With 2021 now in the swing of things, I’ve forgotten what most …
A day in the life …
Ever wondered what would happen if you let your characters lose to write a journal entry about their experiences with you at the helm of their story, or their life in your heads? Well, I thought I’d give it a go … “Dear Diary Day … 10091812 actually, forget that I’ve lost count. I’m not …
A little magic …
There are times that we hate our characters. And sometimes, we really hate them. They do what they want. You want them to do one thing, they tell you where to go and do what they want, and in the process change the entirety of the story that you had plotted out. Then, there’s that …
Blank Pages
Words are hard. They shouldn’t be. They should come easy, pouring out of us as readily as a stream flows through it’s bed, dripping over a cascading waterfall and into the pool below. That’s how we imagine writing to be, that it’s a never ending flow or words … we just never stop to think …
Endless Possibilities
Sometimes the weather is brilliant for inspiration. We have another storm hitting, and for the fourth weekend in a row we’re going to be battering down the hatches and staying in doors. Ordinarily, it would start to drive me up the walls wondering when the end will come and if we’ll ever escape. If we’ll …
Expect the unexpected …
There’s a romance associated with the ocean; the rolling in of the waves, the lonely lighthouse or the abandoned house that sits on top of the clifftop as the mist rolls in early morning or at dusk and captures the ghosts of a time long since past. There are days when it’s tempestuous and violent …
Back in the Game!
So, I think it’s fair to say that for the past year Charlotte and I have been struggling. Our writing was suffering and more importantly so were our characters. Not for any particular reason, mainly because we weren’t realising what we were doing to our writing but also because of various things going on in …
Keep calm and write on!
As it stands, between Charlotte and I we have over 300 characters. Not all of these are main characters and a fair few will be NPC or secondary characters by the time we’re actually done with things. Some of these characters have been with us since day one and others are only a matter of …
Lessons
Writing is hard. There’s no two ways about it, sometimes you even question why you put yourself through the trauma of doing it. Not only do you have to put words on the page, but you have characters to contest with … and sometimes those characters are the best and the worst. Sometimes they act …
Challenges
Sometimes, when writing it’s very easy to forget that there are heroes and that there are villains. I’ll be the first to admit that I can wax lyrical about villains and how they deserve the same treatment as heroes in a story; but I’m also very bad at practicing what I preach. It’s easy to …
