Writing ~ The Very Beginning
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my writing journey – well, more than usual. When you get to a point in your “career”, and you’ve struggled to make a meaningful impact, you think about the choices you’ve made, and what makes you the writer you are – or perhaps a better way of putting that is not the writer you’d hoped to be. So I thought I’d chronologise my writing life, and be totally honest about it. In my head right now, that means some of it won’t be pretty. Growing up, one of my older brothers got me into reading. It started with Dennis the Menace and Peanuts comics. Three-…
Wonky World Building and JJ
All storytellers have different strengths and weaknesses. In telling a story, they’ll play to their strengths, and hopefully that compensates for their weaknesses. But what happens when a storyteller’s weakness is storytelling? I can’t fault director JJ Abrams’s ability to make visually stunning movies (lens flares and all). But his storytelling is terrible, which is born from his appalling world-building. Word-building is paramount to me. Get it right, and you can sell me anything. I’ll believe immortals are living among us who can only die if they lose their head; I’ll believe an eccentric inventor builds a time machine out of a DeLorean; I’ll believe an archaelogist is retained by…