Writing Course, Week 4

This week was all about places and how they affect the telling of a story. This is my adaptation of a group exercise to suit the imagery of a collage I created in class.

Yuri is a Gardener, he's gardened all his life. For 60 years he has tended the gardens of the Grand Palace in the former Soviet republic of Krippleblockistan and it is said that his cutting of the lawns is the only thing that has remained agreeable and constant in the turbulent life of this small and obscure country.

All is not how it seems however. With both his sons lost to tragic accidents in the now long departed Soviet army, cancer having taken his beloved wife from him and personal debts he knows he will never be able to repay Yuri's daily routine is the only part of his world that isn't slipping into the abyss.

As civil unrest grips the country and the disorder consumes his life's work Yuri decides that escape is his only option. The only question is escape to what? To life or to death.

Writing Course, Week 3

This week was an exercise in character-driven story telling. Here's a bullet-pointed summary of the plot we created.

• Three young people - Rob, Annie and James - stay in a cottage for a weekend.
• Annie is an aspiring journalist and wants to investigate claims of an illegal fox hunt for the university paper.
• James fancies Annie and is willing to fake an interest in journalism in order to pursue her. The cottage belongs to his family
• Rob is a friend of Annie and wants to keep an eye on her, concerned she'll get herself into trouble.
• James tries to come on to Annie, who really isn't interested
• The three of them go out and witness that the hunt is indeed illegal, and Annie's family are the organisers.
• Annie storms off into the woods, Rob follows her.
• Rob and Annie discover they have feelings for each other, James witnesses this.
• Annie confronts her family with the photos of the hunt.
• James, hoping to get back at Annie and Rob out of spite, publishes the story.
• Annie gets cut off from her family, but feels it's for the best.

Writing Course, Week 2

Here's this week's assignment. As a group exercise we created characters, outlining their... er... characters. Going on from that, we looked at character development.

Here's mine, and how he would develop:

Alessandro Cortez

Alessandro's problems all started with his father. His parents separated when he was still very young and although he now lives with his mother he spent a lot of his early life, into his late teens, around his father and his father's friends. This was where he acquired his charisma and comfortable attitude, qualities that would tend to attract to him whatever he wanted from life. Unfortunately when faced with such abundance he also found it easy to take these things for granted, as disposable; another inherited quality. He could have whatever he wanted, but he had no idea what he wanted.

Then he met her, the woman who would change everything. It wasn't as though she stood out physically from the crowd of one night stands, and yet there was just something about her that reached into him and touched parts of soul that had never been uncovered before. This scared him, and out of fear he ran, hurting her deeply in the process. She told him that he had turned out just like his father and disappeared from his life.

He looked everywhere but couldn't find her. Exhausted and feeling alone for the first time in his life he confronted his father. He was angry that his father could have taught him so much about life but not how to be happy; not how to be a man capable of making her happy.

He's changed. He's learned that in order to understand what some things are truly worth you have to experience losing them. Who knows if he'll ever find her again.

- < > -
This was quite fun. The group is predominantly female, so I chose the above character image just to see what the response would be. I'm intrigued by the very common female fantasy that whatever an attractive man's flaws are, meeting the right woman is always the solution. I guess it's what forms the basis of the romance genre.

Writing course, Week 1

Last night was my first time at a Novel Building evening class run by Megan Kerr in Oxford. This class was based around the differences between the premise for a novel and a plot. As an exercise for this a group of us took a premise and expanded on it. It was actually fascinating to see the structure of a plot starting to germinate in front of us.

Anyway, our homework assignment was to write the back cover blurb for the novel our concept would grow into, so here is my effort:

"Honoured and highly decorated Walden Hart has served for many years as a captain in the city watch, keeping the streets safe at night and administering the king's justice. Now he has fallen from grace, found guilty of a terrible crime for which he cannot plead innocent. Cast into prison to rot he has all but given up on life when, one stormy night, escape unexpectedly presents itself to him through the help of a mysterious stranger. The break of dawn finds him lost, unable to return home to the family he loves but with nowhere else to go. With the cold unsympathetic arm of the law close behind Walden must take refuge amongst the city's underworld, a place where he will soon learn that for some there are no laws, only actions and consequences."