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That’s great Alan, well done. The courses sound superb

AAARRRGGHHH! (as it used to say in my comics)

Up with the count. Resisted the temptation to count the 2500 “seed” words that I had before the start. I think I’ll have a couple of hundred more to do before I give up tonight. Remarkable difference in the way I feel about making myself write at this pace which, honestly, isn’t that high a word…[Read more]

@kazg, thanks so much for that link.

And you’ve expressed above so beautifully my exact thoughts on story structure – including the necessity of balancing all our technical knowledge with room for the subconscious to speak.

I’m not sure what fascinates me more – the list of items you came up with or the fact you came up with them when you were caught by surprise…🤔

Thank you all for taking the time to post an entry, especially Sandra, who kicked things off (phew!), but later withdrew by reason of unavailability to set the next comp should she win.

Anyway, as most of you know, I’m rubbish at any kind of feedback so I’ll keep this short.

Sandra – strong voice. And some perfect turns of phrase – ‘Like a…[Read more]

@KazG & @emmad – oooh, I like the phrase ‘thinker on paper’! That sounds a lot closer to what I do. For all my love of graphs and themes and character outlines, and more graphs, very little of the detail gets decided until I’m in the story. I think it’s a little like my old self’s data analysis process – first you gather all the plethora of…[Read more]

Last day to put in an entry for the Den monthly competition, people… 🙂

Well, I’m feeling a tad more apprehensive than in previous years. There’s a certain investment in succeeding this time – for me. Well, succeeding in writing the requisite number of words anyway. My record is one complete children’s story, one block of 50K words that I eventually deleted, two failures.

I often think “getting” story structure is like one of those damn magic eye puzzles. All these people around you are like “oh yeah! It’s dolphins!!” while you’re staring at it like, “whaaa?”

And then, you glimpse it (maybe in a CM Taylor workshop), but then it’s gone again. You glimpse it, it disappears, you glimpse it, you go…[Read more]

I think we all did that with our first book Raine! And some of us, with our second…

I know what you mean, Hilary. And FWIW I try now not to worry too much about the minutiae of all the different (with a lot of similarities) theories of story structure. That way lies madness for me. I read them and enjoy them and sometimes I get a light bulb moment and often some part of them sticks in my mind and comes to the fore when I’m trying…[Read more]

Very interesting blog. I, too, have listened, enthralled, to Craig’s lectures on this, and have read an enormous amount of stuff about structure. I’m struggling rather with it now, at the almost-finished-the-second-draft-of-my-novel-stage. I don’t know if my struggle is because I’ve read too many different models/descriptions and have become…[Read more]

Good article, Daeds. I might try to hunt down the Twitter thread to see what else was said.

I saw someone (Hellie Ogden I think) say that 60% of her submissions either fail to meet the submission criteria (format, genre, basic spell checks etc) or are clearly at way too early a draft to be sent out. I was so guilty of this last with my first…[Read more]

Hi L,

I think you could trim most of the paragraphs in the first half of the story, really. The Physics thing (tight pants) early on could go, you use this analogy later on anyway. Watching a film at the cinema, that paragraph could be less wordy I think.
And towards the end – “zipped her hoodie and pulled the hood over her head” etc. I know…[Read more]

Still missing three quarters of the story….

Ah, yes. Planning. It’s going…um…