Five hours he’d stood there, five. He’d moved around nonchalantly at first. Made tea for them both, albeit awkwardly. He’d successfully emptied the shopping bag after he’d decided bending down to remove the contents wasn’t going to work and he had heaved it on to the table in an ungainly
There’s an easy answer – anywhere you like. Sadly inspiration doesn’t come to us neatly packaged. We can’t open a box and find a set of instructions that will turn out to be a perfect, flat-pack novel. We must be prepared for a word or phrase, for a character in
‘I do I dooooo Iiiiiiii doo Mmmmmm I Arthur James Smethwick do take, hrmmmmm. I whatever do take Molly Rose Bimble. God I mustn’t laugh. Molly Rose Bimble as my lawful wedded wife.’ ‘Art, are you ready, what are you doing up there?’ ‘Nearly. Moll are you sure you want
‘Fuck off, you bastard.’ She screamed the words at him. She spat them. If they’d been bullets he would be dead. The Saturday traffic sped past. An island in the middle of a High Street thronged with shoppers wasn’t where she would have chosen to hurl her anger at him.
‘What are you doing?’ said Pooh. ‘I’m drawing a circle,’ said Eeyore. ‘I need to work out the diameter. What’s twice plus?’ ‘Plusplus,’ said Tigger and in a single boing found himself in a rose bush. ‘Ooh and OOWWWW.’ ‘It depends how big your plus is,’ said Pooh, ignoring the
While we are encouraged to ‘show, don’t tell’ and build pace and mood into our dialogue, sometimes there is just insufficient action and dialogue to satisfy the requirements. The narrator is then called upon to fulfil the obligation of creating an environment for the characters and building those characters by
Listen to the people around you and watch television. When we argue aggressively we tend to use short sentences. The words are thrown together in outbursts without a huge amount of consideration. When we are having a discussion, we build in more pauses so that we can assemble our thoughts
It was fog. It was a very, very dense fog. London had not experienced such a pea-souper since the 1950s when coal fires spewed forth their hearths into the lower atmosphere for it only to sink to street level and clog the roads as well as everyone’s lungs. So this
Of course, you can’t. Description gives a situation context. It locates your characters and story in a time and place. If you want it can describe the mood, what those characters are wearing, how they feel. It’s the typical scenario for the omniscient, third-person narrator. ‘He fumed. His eyes glared
The table was narrow. Two dinner plates would almost touch in its width. It was littered. A few bread crumbs, an ashtray, wine glasses, a box of wine, shreds of tobacco, rizlas, a lighter – the residue, the remainders, the late night, dawn-breaking survivors, like them, of a recently past
Would you mind?…. This is my raft… Oh don’t try and play that everlasting romance trick on me, and it’s not Rose, it’s Miss DeWitt Bukater… The water might be cold, that’s what you get when there are icebergs around. It’s not exactly toasty on this lump of wood, why
Unless you have the most massive ego, you will inevitably be displeased by some things you write, especially early in your apprenticeship. The first law of ‘Write Club’ (I honestly can’t believe I wrote that, hohum) is never throw anything away. There are a few very valid reasons for that.