Let’s talk about sex.
Who we are and how we feel about things drives what we write. Narrative perspective isn’t just about character point of view and verb construction, it’s about the author sees the world.
This is particularly important when we write about gender and sex. Our sexuality can empower our stories, creating vibrancy, passion and authenticity. But it can also lead to bad writing, dreadful stereotypes and hackneyed characterisation.
To show you what I mean I’m going to share a series of my own drawings, based on images from Frank Miller’s marvellous Sin City graphic novels. I will use them to demonstrate a technique that will help you to shake up your own biases, and energise your stories and characters.
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This article contains my submission for a screenwriting exercise from the Aaron Sorkin Screenplay Masterclass. The objective is to take a famous (public domain) short story and adapt it to the first ten pages of a screenplay. The story I chose from the list provided on the course was “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe.
I have tried to adapt the story so that a) Vincent Price could not possibly be envisaged playing a part and b) it wasn’t just another story about the protagonist fridging the only woman in the story and then experiencing a lot of man pain.[i] I’d really like to know if it worked out!
I have never written a screenplay before, so I’d appreciate feedback. Don’t feel you have to be nice or lie to spare my feelings, but do remember Bill and Ted’s maxim.[ii] Yeah. I’m dead nervous about sharing this. Here goes:
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“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”
With the first fifteen words of her novel The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood takes a vice-like grip on the reader. She doesn’t let you go until the last page. It is a powerful book, deeply emotive, and, for my money, has an opening line that rates right up there with Rebecca’s “last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” But what makes it so good? Why does it press all the buttons needed for an effective opening? And what can we do to evoke that sort of sympathy from the first page?
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Some stories touch us. A great story can make us laugh out loud, grieve for the death of someone who never existed, or even burst in to tears in the window seat of a train. But why does it happen? And, as a writer, how can you make it happen?
In this post, I will consider Peter Stockwell’s “Authenticity and Creativity in Reading Lamentation” and how to practically apply some of his ideas in your writing. Do you want to know what it takes to make your readers cry? Read on.
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It’s a good question. It’s usually the first thing people ask. So why did it fill me with dread? Why, if someone smiled encouragingly and say “Oh, you’re writing a book? What’s it about?” would I struggle to find a decent response? Was my book doomed?
I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about this over the last couple of months. After a fair amount of soul searching, this article explores the following questions: how do you answer “what is your story about?” and why is it important to find the answer?
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