Back sometime last year, the writer M.J. Starling approached and asked me to be involved with his podcast about inspiration and be the first creative to launch it. Of course I do love to gabble about writing to anyone who will listen, so I said yes. Writer Collider is all about the generation of concepts, where ideas come from. From a few randomly selected prompts thrown on the table by other people, narratives are formed on the spot and a discussion is opened about the process.
The particular writing prompt I plumped for was the following: “a boxer crying alone in his car on an overpass“
What I found refreshing about this idea of talking about the process, was the freedom to be able to sprawl across all decisions. Play, film, novel, you name it. And I am always telling people that it’s great to vocalise ideas or narratives out loud because you can hear them. Our brains are very clever and will disregard things before the mental sentence is even finished.
So here is the podcast with me murmuring about boxers and film: Katie McCullough on Writer Collider.
Keep an eye on M.J. Starling and the #writercollider series on his Twitter, website and on iTunes too.
Writer Collider with M.J. Starling February 16, 2013
Whiteboard Wisdom/Reminder June 3, 2012
Something so simple, but I’m prone to forgetting. Writing is written to be read. Someone’s taken the time to spill their head/heart/gut on the page. Give those words the credit they deserve, it’s not a race.
Kids Say The Most Important Things April 26, 2012
I’ve been teaching scriptwriting to children this week and they’ve also taught me a lot even though they were eight years old. Even from a young age we know when a story sucks. If it’s boring. If it’s not finished. If we’ve forgotten characters. If we’ve skipped a big chunk of the action. Somewhere along the line as we get older, we can forget it’s as simple as that. One of the exercises I did with the children was to collectively create a story. And they knew their stuff. Each of them added another twist to this story and racked up the tension, they knew they had to keep people interested and excited or scared by the story. I was amazed at their dedication to a plot that was still unfurling as we talked about it. I was also pleasantly surprised by their maturity and knowledge of how a story works.
Your audience are more important than you realise. Obvious I know. They’re the ones sitting through your words and if they have to wade they’ll get bored. Again, obvious but something to keep focused on. They’re also more clever than you remember. Bingo! The one that still escapes some people’s grasp. Let me put this into context with the beauty of children – they’ll tell you in no uncertain terms when you’re not doing the story justice. A vocabulary that is blunt as it is bold. Their silence on the other hand shows their engagement with the story at hand.
It’s reminded me that writing is not so much formulaic, it’s something simple that we try our best to make hard because we’re scared of being formulaic. Sometimes knowing exactly what happens at the beginning, middle and end of your story is just as exciting as writing it. It’s the most rewarding jigsaw puzzle ever.
A mentor of mine used Where The Wild Things Are to explore a character’s wants and needs. The Gruffalo (of which I’ve also been doing a workshop on this week) is perfect for igniting the imagination with it’s adjectives and rhyme. I’m a sucker for children’s books regardless, but a narrative that is meant for a child to enjoy is also the best blueprint of the basics. Go back to your childhood favourites and see where you learned about story. They have a beginning, middle and end. Does yours?
