Robert C. Day's Blog, page 22

Scenes

Scenes in a storyare shaped by time and place, just like life (surprise, surprise). We’re told thatthe followingtechniquescan be usedto make a scene interesting – conflict, tension, the desires of the characters and strong images.

I invite you now to stop for a moment and think back to one of your earliest memoriesand then reflect on why this stuck with you. Perhaps you will find that these techniques come into play.

I remember the night when my sister was born. I was four. My dad dressed me...

Sharing

My parents don’t know about this. Actually, I never told anyone about it. We were just kids. You know how children are.

When the builders were donerenovating the houses on our road, they dumped a lot of stuff in a vacant lot on the corner. We claimed everything in those days – neighbour’s overgrown hedges that we stalked through like a hurricane, fires that we fed with plastic bags and soggy paper, long tree branches that made us into Zulu warriors, and the half rotten vinyl tiles left on a h...

Alphabet Love

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Being an alphabetical journey throughthe nature of love.

A-Agriculture
Plant a seed of love andhelp it grow by giving the sunlight of sweet thoughts, the rich soil of kind acts and the water ofwarm words. B-Biography
On writing the story of my life I found that the best times were those in which I loved what I did with true abandon. C-Chemistry
Some say love is dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine and some say that the moon is made of cheese. D-Dictionaries
I looked up love in the...

Getting Back Home Safely

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If you want to write about something, it pays to organise your writing somehow. People like things that are in some order or another. It gives them a sense of familiarity. It makes them feel safe. It gives them a path to guide them there and back again.

A dictionary is only useful because it is organised. Imagine getting, for Christmas, the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary containing entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. Imagine further that these words were...

Digression

Digression is something that writers do when they want to give extra information about a subject when that info would not normally fit into the main subject area. It is akin to setting off from New York to drive to Memphis, but stopping off to take in the Grand Canyon on the way, not to mention every stall by the side of the road that sells watermelons.

It’s worth digressing when the extra thing you have to say is interesting to your reader. For example, if I set out to tell you about my favo...

Merry Christmas 2016

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Merry Christmas 2016!

Organising Principles

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When you write a book about something, and it could be anything – the body, birds, cheese, the moon, the senses, the home or your favourite writer / musician / actor, then the are various ways to organise that book.

On a simplistic level, you could look at the history of the subject, or the parts and composition of it, the similarities to other things, the subject’s naturalenemies or friends, the processes it goes through on a daily basis or the spread of the populations by region.

Getting a...

Marian Keyes

[image error]There’s a logic to how Marian organises her latest book – Making It Up As I Go Along, which I think goes something like this – blow the logic, let’s just write some stuff down and send it off to the publisher. Actually, no – that’s not really fair. I’m sure that alot of thought went into this book. The charm of it is that it just appears to be off the top of her head and thoughtless.

I only realised that the book was Creative Nonfiction (CNF) yesterday. I’ve been listening to it on audiobook...

How to Love

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I keep catching myself hating people, or being irritated by them, or being in some other negative state of mind when I see them or think about them.

As soon as I become aware of this, I try to turn myfeelingsto love, or somethingequally positive, but I’m worried that people are slipping through thisnetand arefalling into my hate bag.

I don’t wantto even have such a bag– what can I do to love people in advance?

Desperate of York.

As If Love Never Ended

Why shouldn’t he talk to himself? He’s a grown man and has earned the right, purely by breathing his way through the years, to talk to whoever he wants. Just because he chooses not to talk to you and me, doesn’t make him less of a character.

He has yellow hair. I guess you would call it blond, but it’s more like yellow. It goes well with his red jumper – the kind made famous by, or perhaps the one that escaped from and is still in the style forsaken by Woodstock. But his bleached-blond-yellow...