Graham Edwards's Blog, page 21

Ghostwriter Diaries – How Many Words a Minute?

I don’t do numbers. I preferwords. All the same, numbers can occasionally be relied upon to do some funky things.

For example, this morning I finished chapter eightof the current novel, keeping me on schedule to complete the finaltwo chapters of the first act by 30 September– the first of my three incremental delivery deadlines.

It also means I’ve been working onthis latest manuscript for almost exactly one month – 32 days to be precise. With acurrent word-count ofjust over 28,400, that mean...

When will it ever end?

Most stories share a common structure derived from just three component parts:

Premise Conflict Resolution

Or, if you prefer:

“Where the hell am I and what the hell’s going on?” “Aw jeez – can you make this any more difficult?” “Wow – who’d have thought we’d end up here?”

One of the seminal works on classic story structure is Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”

Think of any story and there’s a good chance it’ll fit this mould, whether it’s a traditional folk tale, a modern...

What is story?

What is story?

That’s one of the prickly questions tackled by screenwriting guru Robert McKee in his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, which does a remarkable job of both dissecting the craft of the storyteller, and inspiring the reader to stop shirking and get to work.

At the heart of the book is McKee’s core thinking about what constitutes the basic building block of story. He’s in no doubt that such a thing exists, but before revealing it he make...

Ghostwriter Diaries – Outlines

I want to talk about outlines. For the ghostwriter of novels, the outline represents the brief, the whole brief, and nothing but the brief. It contains everything you need to know about the book you’ve been hired to write.

The outline for my current project runs to nearly 23,000 words. My finished manuscript will run to between 65,000–75,000 words. The reason the outline is so long is that it contains the entire story from beginning to end, broken into chapters, with all the major action blo...

Ghostwriter Diaries – The First Draft of Anything …

Ernest Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.”

Therein lies the eternal dilemma of the ghostwriter. Tight project schedules mean there’s very little time to write anything other than a first draft, before you submit it to the editing team.

That’s fine. The nature of the beast, really. Everyone on the team understands that myfirst submission isgoing to have some rough edges.Butno writer with any pridewants to submitanything to anyone unless it’s word-perfect (an impossible goal...

Ghostwriter Diaries – One Last Time Around

It’s landed! The outline for book three, the final volume of the middle-grade fantasy trilogy is here. Thanks to some judicious schedule-juggling by my awesome editorial team, its arrival is a whole fortnight early. That’s great news, since it gives me two extra weeks to play with. Thanks, guys!

Early this morning, as birds celebratedthe dawn and I downed my first strong coffee of the day, I created what will become my working document for the novel I’m about to ghostwrite – a Scrivener proj...

“Harbinger Down” Theatrical Release

A little over two year have passed since indie horror movieHarbinger Down, the brainchild of agang ofindependent filmmakers led by the film’s director Alec Gillis, reached its Kickstarter funding goal and went into production. This week, from 7 August 2015, the “Harbies” have reached the amazing milestone of achieving theatrical release for the finished feature.

It’s a limited release, so if you live outside the U.S. you’re out of luck. All the same, it’s a monumental achievement. Here are t...

Stone & Sky Timelapse – “The Push”

Today’s sketch is a scene from my 1999 novel Stone & Sky. It shows the moment where, having survived both the eruption of Krakatoa and his unexpected relocation to a strange and inexplicably vertiginous alienworld, Victorian explorer Jonah Lightfoot finds that his new companion Annie West is not all she seems. If the drawing isn’t enough for you,here’sthe scene on whichit’sbased.

I’ve always enjoyed drawing the weird realmof Stone. Theentire world is one gigantic wall, whichposes a few chall...

“We Are Stars” – Fulldome Show Review

Scientists like to categorise things. “This is howthe universe began,” they say, or,“This is howatoms work,” or, “Here’s how humans developed from their apelike ancestors.”

But science isn’t just studying the individual dots. It’s working outhow they join up. Becauseeverything is connected. After all, that’s whatthe word “universe” reallymeans: turned into one.

This connectivity is the theme of We Are Stars, a newfulldome science documentary from award-winning computer animation studio NSC C...

Cinefex Looks at the Digital Makeup of “Maggie”

Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger, visual effects aren’t just about action and spectacle.

In Henry Hobson’s melancholy zombie film Maggie, Schwarzenegger plays Wade Vogel, a devoted father who cares for his daughter, Maggie (Abigail Breslin), after she contracts a dreadful disease which gradually turns its victims into flesh-eating monsters.

For my latest article on the Cinefex blog, I spoke to Aymeric Perceval of Cinesite, whose team delivered over 80 VFX shots in which they applied subtle di...