Robert C. Day's Blog, page 57

Proper

When Larry was ten he received a cape, mask and gloves for his birthday. He thought that he looked like a proper superhero, but when he posted a picture of himself, wearing his new outfit, on Facebook, his friends didn’t quite share his enthusiasm.

He had a hard time explaining to his parents wherethe costume had disappeared to but, had they been more perceptive, the smell of burnt rubber in his hair would have told them the whole story.

Although it had seemed easy enough to climb up the sh...

Ghosts

Did it ever strike you how similar characters from stories and characters from history are?

I mean – you read about people likeLawrence of Arabia and James Bond, Hamlet and Rasputin, Norman Bates and Jack the Ripper, Spartacus and Robin Hood and you probably know that some of them are real and others are just made up, and you perhaps even know which is which – but for all intents and purposes, does it really matter?

They are all ghosts.

Oh, not in the classical sense – they are not disembodie...

Winemaking

To make wine: squash some grapes, add some yeast, leave it for a bit. People have been doing it for thousands of years – it’s not difficult. But here’s the thing – what should you do with the wine once you’ve made it? Here’s an idea: get your characters drunk.

It’s said that if you want to develop a proper character – one that lives and breathes, then you have to know a lot about him or her – way more than you will ever use in your story. What better way to do this than to get them drunk on w...

Human Sacrifice

So you’re thinking to yourself – we don’t do human sacrifice anymore – we’re far too civilised for that! Well buddy, maybe you need to think again. Okay – we may not do it in ‘real life’, but think of the television programmes and movies we watch; think of the books we read. How many of us haven’t thrilled to see the latest police procedural drama where the bad guy kills one or several people (and then the good guys work out how to catch them). What are we watching here? Yep – you guessed it...

Simple Machines

Take a look at this list of machines that you can use to make your writing easier (and don’t forget to look at the prices you can pay to make your finances more difficult):

WriteItNow (49.78) WriteWay Pro (28.46) Power Structure (71.12) Power Writer (71.12) Dramatica Pro (77.56) Contour (35.54) Writer’s Blocks (106.03) MasterWriter (71.12) StoryWeaver (21.31)

(retrieved 17 Mar 2016here)

I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand – what’s wrong with a free account on WordPress where yo...

Dyeing Cloth

Just as cloth and clothing can be made more interesting by adding colour, so too writing can be enhanced by using certain techniques to make it more vibrant.

Here are several such techniques to colour your writing:

Be passionate about what you write – convince yourself that there are no boring subjects by adjusting your mindset: think yourself into your reader’s shoes, think about how your subject relates to the real world, look at it from several different angles Copy the style of interesti...

Ale-Making

There are roughly four steps to ale-making:

Mashing – mixing a source of starch, e.g. malted barley, with hot water to make wort Kettling – boiling the wort in a copper kettle with hops and other ingredients such as herbs and sugars Fermenting – the cooled mixture is put into a fermentation tank and yeast is added Conditioning – the liquid is stored in a keg and allowed to age before being imbibed. It strikes me that writing follows a similar process: Preparation – deciding what kind of st...

Agriculture

When you ask writers where they get their ideas from, they usually reply ‘mind your own blooming business’ (or words to that effect) or if they are feeling especially generous they might reply along the lines of Ursula K. Le Guin and say something like: “The more I think about the word “idea,” the less idea I have what it means. … I think this is a kind of shorthand use of “idea” to stand for the complicated, obscure, un-understood process of the conception and formation of what is going to b...

Slavery

Writing is nice, but writing can stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to.

Check the following list of symptoms; if you have more than your fair share then you could possibly be addicted to writing:

You have tried to stop writing, but find that you cannot You experience bad temper, moods, anxiety, depression etc. when someone tries to take away your writing time The only voices you have in your head are the characters in your next piece of writing, demanding that you write ab...

Mesolithic Sculpted Figurines

You’re digging out a pond in your back garden and you discover the remains of a Mesolithic temple dating from around 10,000 BCE. Inside it are figurines depicting headless humans togetherwith effigies of fawns, foxes, snakes, birds and wolves.

Later that evening, after you’ve washed all the muck from these priceless artefacts in the kitchen sink and have laid them to dry in the living-room in front of the gas fire, the doorbell rings and it’s your sister and her husband with their three littl...