Emma Darwin's Blog, page 23

What does your character say about him/herself?

When Jessica Chastaine is working on a part, she says, she makes two lists: "One: everything my character says about herself, and Two: everything everyone else says about her." It's a good technique, and I'm sure she's not unique in using it: it sounds like a classic Drama School exercise....

Composting, dreaming and other hard work

I'm contemplating going back to an earlier project. Not, heaven forbid, re-working the text, but writing a new text built on the same ideas and situations. And one of the advantages of doing things this way is that the researched material has mulched down nicely in the back of my...

6 questions to ask your descriptions

In How Would You Describe It? I was talking about this thing called Description, which seems to get so many beginner-writers worried, and how you can get better at it. But I don't myself have a mental category of writing called Description at all; I just think in terms of...

Jerusha Cowless, agony aunt: "Am I single-handedly ruining my career by not talking personally?"

Dear Jerusha: I read Emma's blog Too Much Meringue and wondered if you could help me with a different facet of coping with the media? I hate all this stuff anyway, so would much rather refuse to do it all, though I have got used to it. But my new...

But can you teach Creative Writing?

I get asked this amazingly often, considering that no one ever asks if you can teach the doing of other arts, but, just as I took ages to get on to that other old chestnut, "What is literary fiction?" and my own personal Ancestral Elephant, it's taken me till now...

Forgiveness, chocolate, and why enough is ... satisfactory

If you're a writer, then you're never really happy just to experience something in its moment: there's always a restlessness, a frustration-in-waiting, until you can get it out of your self and onto paper. And you know the phenomenon I was talking about in Opening the Doors, where you've been...

From candyfloss to flesh-eating monsters

A friend - let's call her Peta - who writes successfully at the lighter end of women's fiction, including short stories for the womags, has just had one of the more baffling rejections: that her characters lack emotional depth. Her natural writing voice is light and lively, as she is...

Flying blind, just for a moment

A friend of mine had her novel picked up by an agent at a writing festival, and the agent sold it to a major publisher as the first of a two-book deal. The book was published a few months ago, it's doing well, and everything's wonderful ... except that now...

An answer worth the journey: plot and story

One of the perennial questions is "What's the difference between plot, and story?", and I've just come across the best definition I've ever heard. It's by Paul Ashton, who's the Development Producer at the BBC's Writers Room: Plot is the route you take; story is the journey you make. What...

Who wants to be a writer? Not your agent.

A survey a couple of years ago found that the job most people wanted to have was being a writer, presumably because we all know it only takes a bit of sitting down and a good idea or two, don't...