Exercises
Walking around a scene
Whenever you write a scene it’s a good idea to rewrite it – perhaps in note form – using a different…
Melanie McGrath
By: Ross Raisin
Tips / Fiction / Plot
Try to resist the urge to plan out your idea extensively by working out every eventuality before you start to draft the narrative.
When you begin the writing of a novel, you may have a notion of certain plot events, maybe even a potential ending, but it is likely that there will be large gaps in the narrative that you do not yet know.
Trust your idea enough to leave them there.
Write towards them, and when you get to these spaces, listen to what your interest and your instinct is telling you at that moment. The plot should always have the capacity to surprise you, the writer, just as you hope that it will your reader.
Trust in the fact that if you understand your characters intimately enough – their relationships, their history, their motivations – then most of the work of ‘plot’ will be done through characterisation. Because what is interesting is not so much how events lead characters, but how characters lead events.
And if, on reading back the narrative you developed using your instinct, the plot doesn’t yet feel quite right, that is what redrafting and editing is for.
The plot should always have the capacity to surprise you, the writer, just as you hope that it will your reader.
Exercises
Whenever you write a scene it’s a good idea to rewrite it – perhaps in note form – using a different…
Tips
Each line must carry at least one unit of sense either in the line itself or across several lines.
To make…
Tips
Objects have immense power to help us to tell stories.
I have found that an entire storyline can be found in…
Exercises
PART ONE: Documentary or Research Exercise for Screenwriters
Using a still camera and or a tape recorder (or video recorder), follow…
Tips
After the giddy rush of a first draft, how you edit and refine your work is of equal, if not more…
Exercises
Start with a scenario – this might be a random picture, a very short scene from a novel, a few lines…
Tips
Before you begin to write your story ask yourself what is it about, what do you want it to say, what…
Exercises
Think about your favourite novel or short story, or if not your favourite, then the novel or short story you are…
