Barry Walsh

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]

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

I’m pretty sure I’ll get the words down. But right now I have only the vaguest plan and I can’t think of even a working title.

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.

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]

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]

Ah, yes. Planning. It’s going…um…

That’s the most important bit done.

Thanks Raine. I’ve seen the film numerous times over the years (the first being as a very small child) and have got different things from it each time. One reading would definitely be a clash between rival alpha males. And it’s definitely in the ‘high adventure’ tradition, but I do think there’s more to it than that. Not least as ultimatel…[Read more]

I think “Spotting an opening…” needs a new para. The lipstick thing is a little over complicated, I think you could shorten it without losing anything.
The “pills like skittles” analogy doesn’t work for me.
“Small-to-medium-time” seems a cop-out, he’s a small-time crook, I think.
“Anticipated to sit..” should be “anticipated sitting”.

I’d take…[Read more]

I was watching the film The Flight of the Phoenix earlier today, and this ‘arc’ kept occuring to me, so for the sake of curiosity I decided to have a look to see if it fit this structure, and if so, how. It’s a bit of an interesting case as it’s an ensemble piece with multiple ‘main’ characters, each with their own arc. I’ll consider it for the…[Read more]

Yeah, I tend to consider matters of formal structure far more in the edit than in the initial draft

Lots of interesting stuff here. I’ve never been much of a planner, and am inherently sceptical of the idea of story structure as something fixed and immutable for many of the reasons Libby raises. As structures go, however, I like this one more than most as it’s fixed to the inner life of the main character rather than something that risks being…[Read more]

I feel much the same way, Squidge. I never have been able to get on with charts, graphs, grids or any other kind of science-ish analysis. I’m not knocking it for those who find it useful, but my eyes start to glaze over when faced with such stuff, and it seems to place a barrier between me and my creativity (if any). I suppose I might conceivably…[Read more]

I remember doing these sessions at York…it all seemed to make perfect sense when CMT was explaining it, but I can’t put it into practise. I don’t think I have the kind of logical and structural mind that can break a story down into these kind of segments. Which is annoying, because I know it’s all good stuff and very useful – I just can’t apply…[Read more]

Very nice… There were a couple of points only that tripped me up in the reading:
‘Tasha and she nicked the lipstick’. Didn’t sound right. I wondered about ‘She’d nicked the lipstick when she was with Tasha’, but wasn’t sure how that’d affect your word count.
‘The salty scent of sweaty skin trapped in every pore’. I read this first as the sweaty…[Read more]