Tag archives for Writers Resources - Page 8
Book Review – Story Design: Storyteller’s Handbook for Writers and Dream Merchants by SEAM
Story Design: Storyteller's Handbook for Writers and Dream Merchants by Shared Experience Art Machine My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is an awesome resource for writers, providing a concentrated source of helpful advice and a thoroughly worked example of how to design stories and produce a good pitch to sell them. The book is born from the experience of a group of script writers, who recognised that it was better to sell lots of pitches and then write the accompanying scripts than trying to do write the scripts first. After all, if you want to earn your living by writing it is best to be sure you're going to be paid for it before doing it. The core of the book is an approach to designing your story before trying to write it. There is a 8 step approach…
Five Reasons for Establishing a Colony
In looking through my notes from previous story and game design ideas I came across some notes about the reasons why a colony might be set up. This was primarily for a set of scenarios for science fiction games. A group of us have been playing games set in Jim Wallman's Universe around the Full Moon each month since 1996. That said, they are based on actual historical reasons why people left the UK to live elsewhere. Not always to establish a colony on an uncertain and dangerous frontier. 1. Religious/Ascetic Freedom This covers people leaving to avoid discrimination as well as those that might want to live in a place where the temptations and 'polluitng influences' of modern life are not present. Examples of this include Amish and similar sects that avoid advanced technology (although quite why they'd get in a spaceship…
A215 Short Fiction – Planting the Past
Art journal ideas1 - give away (Photo credit: ewian) This is a piece of short fiction written for the first online tutorial of A215 Creative Writing. It followed on from three exercises intended to spur some creativity. The exercises centred around thinking of a place that you love being and then asked questions about that place. The first was some descriptive writing about the place, things you could see, smell, hear etc. The second was to write about a flash memory in the present tense and the last was to list some facts about the place and then spin off some 'what ' questions related to those facts. This last one was what really got my 400 word piece of fiction going. So here it is, all 400 words of it. Planting the Past Hands resting on her heavily pregnant…
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Writing Routines
This is inspired as a short piece from a question on the A215 (Creative writing) student forum about what discipline people apply to their writing. I write as part of my work, although mostly not for publication these days (I've had posts in the past where some of my output was made public). The last public work I did was a guest blog entry for the Government Digital Service on Learning from Service Assessments. On the other hand I also write for my own enjoyment, and lots of that is made public, mainly blog entries here, although I also write fiction and have published some of the Exodus Series recently. I joined in National Novel Writing Month last year (it runs every November - affectionately known as NaNoWriMo to its participants). That challenge of writing 50k words in a month got me…
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Book Review – Fun as Hell by L.J. Kummer
Fun as Hell by Kummer My rating: 3 of 5 stars This was a featured kindle single a few weeks ago which is why I bought it. It is a rather strange piece of life writing about the development of the writer. I read it on the plane in rather less than an hour. It jumped around a narrative of an action day out (cars and guns) with his surgeon girlfriend while also retrospecting on his life and career as a writer. View all my reviews