Anna

Ah another person in search of their murderer. I wrote 90% of my first draft before I identified mine!

I too found it fairly alien until recently but it works for me in a weird way, nudging my unconscious to sort problems out if that makes sense.

I am absolutely loving doing the character questionnaires, using the characters from the splurgy and shapeless first draft of my current WIP. Like @squidge though, I am not sure if I would get so much out of doing it before I had written extensively about them. It would feel like inventing a character rather than discovering one. Has anybody tried…[Read more]

Ditto from me @katemachon . Another quote from, I think, later in the chapter is ‘There’s nothing generic about fiction’- probably misquoted as I didn’t write it down. And also from The Art of Character – ‘It’s through character that we bring the general down to earth.’I am feeling both inspired and daunted!

Or choose a character you’ve developed already and see if the character questionnaire sheds any new light. Like you, I tend to discover who they are as I write.

Yes! I think that is what the MA is all about.

I hope I’ve understood what is required/suggested for this part of the course. My overall aim is to expand my range in terms of writing habits and the type of writing I do which up to now has been very focussed on writing one novel after another.

I write every day already unless I am away from home or it is really impossible.

My plan t…[Read more]

Thanks WB!

Am looking forward to Class 2 and glad it’s working out for everybody.

Going to jump in now because time and access to internet are going to be in short supply over the next week.

I am happy with how it’s going. I have no wish for it to be any quicker than it is.

I adored this @KazG. Nothing else to say.

Love you all XXXX

Ha ha The smell of Immac. Never forgotten!

This is a bit of a cursory ‘reflections’ because I forgot to make notes of my thoughts as I read the chapters and did the exercises. Plus I’m away without the books so I can have a quick look to jog my memory.

The main thing I got out of Chapter One of the Burrows book was how useful a tool freewriting/freedrafting can be for all sorts of…[Read more]

When I’ve done courses in the past on other things as well as writing, we’ve often either kept a diary or shared ‘reflections’ on each section and what we thought we learned from it. I’ve found this very helpful both to clarify my own thoughts and to see what others gained. Plus it was interesting to see what different things people got from the…[Read more]