Novel Kicks Fiction Friday: Genie in a Bottle
Friday 4th March 2016: Genie in a Bottle.
Fiction Friday is our weekly writing prompt. The aim is to write for a minimum of five minutes and then keep going for as long as you can. Once you’ve finished, don’t edit, just post in the comments box below.
Today’s Prompt: Your character finds a genie in a bottle. He is granted the usual three wishes. He can only spend the wishes on himself and he must make them. He can’t just decide to change his mind and put the genie back in the bottle. However, there is also a further catch. For every piece of fortune your character bestows upon himself, it means misfortune for someone else.
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Writing Room: Looking Back
Tuesday 1st March 2016: Looking Back.
Today’s workshop is going to be using dialogue. Pick one of your characters from your current work in progress. It doesn’t have to be the main character. It can be the villain. If you’d prefer, pick a character from one of your favourite novels. Using just dialogue, have this character have a conversation with their younger self. Think about the circumstance in which they meet – setting etc. What would they talk about?
If you feel like you want to share your work, post in the comments below.
by Writing Room: Betrayal
Tuesday 23rd February 2016: Betrayal.
Today’s prompt: There are two people sat at opposite sides of a table. The setting and whether there are people around them is up to you. One of them has betrayed the other. Write 300/500 words from the person who has been betrayed and then do the same but from the other persons point of view. Do the accounts differ in any way?
by Novel Kicks Fiction Friday: Overhearing
Friday 20th February 2016: Overhearing
Fiction Friday is our weekly writing prompt. The aim is to write for a minimum of five minutes and then keep going for as long as you can. Once you’ve finished, don’t edit, just post in the comments box below.
Today’s prompt:
Your character suffers severely from OCD. After hitting his/her head, he/she discovers that they can hear other people’s thoughts and they accidentally hear plans for an upcoming alien invasion.
by Writing Room: Introducing Your Characters
Tuesday 16th February 2016: Introducing your characters.
Today’s Prompt:
Something I am realising as a first time author is getting to know your characters is really important before sitting down to write. Today, write down five facts about your character and use these to write a bio about them. Write it in the first person as though they are telling someone about themselves. Make the facts go beyond their physical features. For example, what song do they like? What’s their earliest memory etc.
by Writing Room: Confessions Prompt
Tuesday 9th February 2015: Confessions.
Your character is shown into a room. There is a circular table in the middle the room with six chairs around it. Eventually, five other people are shown into the room. These five people along with your character are told to take a seat. They are each told that they are connected and they need to confess what they have done to the people around them. Carry on the story….
by Writing Room: Helping Out
Tuesday 1st December 2015:
Today’s prompt:
Your character works for a secret agency and has a secret identity to match. As a favour, they agree to pretend to be someone’s love interest to help them out at a family gathering and it all gets a little out of hand. What happens? Does the identity of your character get revealed?
by My Writing Ramblings: The Second Week Block
I’m nearly through the second week of NaNoWriMo 2015. It’s inevitable in a challenge like this that at some point, I was going to lose a little bit of motivation to carry on and eventually my will to live. It happens every year and usually around the halfway mark.
This is why I love the NaNo community. Everyone is so supportive and other people will be having the same thoughts as me (or similar thoughts; mine include locking my laptop in my car so I don’t have to see it and then retreating to my duvet, hiding and not coming out for a few days.)
It’s also usually around now that I begin to question why the hell I put myself through this every year. It’s not as though I am being forced to do this. I could just quit and not get myself stressed.
However, I do this because I love to write, I love the challenge. I love it because some of my best friends also take part and write ins are fun. I do it because I couldn’t imagine my November without it.
by Novel Kicks Fiction Friday: A Picture Paints…
Friday 6th November 2015: A Picture Paints….
Fiction Friday is our weekly writing prompt. The aim is to write for a minimum of five minutes and then keep going for as long as you can. Once you’ve finished, don’t edit, just post in the comments box below.
Today’s prompt:
Use the picture for a story. What does the picture inspire? Maybe your character is meeting someone?
Maybe whenever they take a step forward, the horizon seems to stay at the same distance and everything depends on them getting to the other end?
Where is this? Has your character travelled far to be here?
Have they just appeared here out of nowhere and people surrounding them think they are magic or are they scared of them?
Has your character travelled back in time?
What you choose is up to you. Just have fun.
by Writing Room: Changing the Tense
Tuesday 20th October 2015.
Today’s Prompt:
Today is all about changing the tense. Take a page out of your favourite fiction novel. Rewrite the first few paragraphs changing the tense as you go. If it’s past, change it to present and vice versa.
How was it? How has it changed the story. If you want to, try it with a section of a work in progress and see if it helps in any way?
by My Writing Ramblings: Creating Characters
I have been busying myself this week by going back to basics with planning my novel. One of the main pieces of feedback from both submissions to the RNA New Writers Scheme is that I don’t seem to know my characters very well. This feedback is completely fair especially as I am realising that I seriously get stuck if I have no idea where I am going or who I am talking about.
Planning has always scared me mostly because I feel guilty at the thought of it. I should be writing and I’ve previously seen planning as just another distraction or worrying that it would sap all of the spontaneity out of the plot. That is not true. Planning, for a writer like me is very important. I need that road map.
What I have found is that, instead of hating it, I have had serious fun getting to know my main characters. It’s like having a legitimate reason to have imaginary friends in adulthood and I think that is pretty cool.
Being a little new to the planning stage of a novel, I wanted to share some of the things I have been doing in my character building process; what I have been asking my characters for anyone who might find something like this helpful especially if, like me, you are trying to write your first book.
As I said, I have been trying to get to know them so I made a character list including all the small characters (mostly so a Daniel doesn’t suddenly become a Stephen halfway through.)
by Bella’s Scribblings: Dabbling in Different Genres
I understand it is quite common that writers like to have more than one project on the go or at the very least like to have an alternative writing outlet that they can indulge in. For example the lovely Miranda Dickinson, famed for her best-selling Romance novels, talks opening about The Mystical Wombat’s Guide to Life and the T-Cup spy network of tea ladies which are her other writing projects that she dives into when not writing romance.
I’ve heard it said that it’s a good thing to regularly flex your writing muscles and apparently Twitter and Facebook posts don’t count. Whilst writing Romance is my main writing focus, from time to time I do have a break and switch to a different genre. So I too have a pet project that I drift off to when not engrossed in a Romance story and it’s a children’s adventure.
This came about because my wonderful writing tutor, Gill Vickery, sets the class a variety of challenges and encourages us to try new things. One of the exercises she set had me scribbling merrily away and before I knew it I had a coupe of well-formed children’s characters. This combined with a story I wrote in my teens, that filled a whole exercise book and was dutifully marked by the ever accommodating Mr Bundy, produced a whole set of stories in my mind.
by My Writing Ramblings: Lost Motivation
Lost: One big dose of motivation. If found, please return.
I have been suffering from a serious lack of motivation this week. I was doing well . I have been planning. I have even decided on an idea for this November’s National Novel Writing Month.
Then towards the end of this week, it’s all screeched to a halt.
Where has it gone I wonder? It has stopped somewhere for coffee and chocolate I think.
I do get incredibly frustrated with myself when I am in this mood. It’s not just the writing that suffers. All of the things I am supposed to be doing somehow gets sidelined.
I make to-do lists (these usually do help,) that go undone. I find writing prompts but I can’t seem to get going.
I can’t explain why I do this every so often. It’s like my creativity stalls/runs out of steam and it decides to go on a holiday (I know the feeling and could do with one myself.)
Things that seem to suck out all my motivation:
by My Writing Ramblings: Can I Call Myself A Writer?
After starting off with a load of enthusiasm, this week has not been the best for me in terms of productivity. Netflix is partly to blame. The horrible weather is completely uninspiring too and the only thing I have wanted to do is curl up in a warm place and escape into a published novel (I blame you Penguin for sending me JoJo Moyes’ new book. Only kidding. I love you.)
I have this conversation inside my head a lot. It usually begins with me asking myself, can I be a writer if I’m not writing anything? I have been trying to plan my book (although I’ve not even managed a lot of that this week – work does tend to get in the way sometimes.) However, unless you count seven hundred and fifty words, I have not written a lot.
I can’t help but feel guilty about my lack of productivity. This book is not going to write itself after all. Being hard on myself isn’t going to help me in the long run though.
by Blog Tour: Marianne Kavanagh Talks About Writing Her Latest Novel, Don’t Get Me Wrong
I’d like to welcome author, Marianne Kavanagh to Novel Kicks today and her blog tour for her latest novel, Don’t Get Me Wrong which is due to be published by Text Publishing on 24th September 2015. Today, Marianne is talking about her writing process for her latest book, how it was different from writing her previous novel and that it was mostly down to one of her characters. Over to you, Marianne.
Writing DON’T GET ME WRONG was much harder than writing FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE. I blame Kim. Right from the beginning, there she was, angry and illogical. She resisted all attempts to soften her, although I did try to show how often she cried in private. As a result, the plot kept hitting a brick wall, as she simply refused to compromise. You or I would have gone in for some soul-searching. Where am I going wrong? Should I try to get to know Harry better? But Kim just blunders on, infuriating all those who love her, until she is faced with the one event she can’t control.
My second difficulty was that the central tragedy was based on personal experience. So writing the middle part of the novel was very painful. I felt angry and lost all over again. My husband Matt kept having to remind me it was fiction. I think now, looking back on it, that living through it a second time was a way of finally making peace with the past. But the end of 2013 was not a good time.
by Book Club
