Coffee Break

Crumbs, how can another week have gone by? Coffee time again. And biscuits of course, otherwise where would we find the crumbs I started this post with?

So. We're in the middle of January already. How many words have you written this year? Personally, not as many I would have wished. Like a few of the other Novel Racers, I'm currently busy learning about writing with the OU rather than *ahem* actually writing.

I confess. I've been moaning. Moaning about having to write plays and fill my weary brain with knowledge about film techniques. Learning how to shape a scene into an arc... building, building, reaching a peak of drama then pulling it back... tantalising the audience, flipping to something else, contrasting, juxtaposing, considering images when linked and how they show something without spelling it out, as it were. I've watched films in the name of research. Oh yes. Soaps too. They all use the same techniques but we don't notice, we're too busy being sucked along by the sneaky framework of it all.

Of course, no matter how brilliant a film, it can never probe the inner workings of a mind; never convey a powerful narrative voice in the way that a novel can.

But. I like the idea of shapely scenes. If we can think visually, our writing should become more sensual with supple, transitions between scenes and even sentences. I know this; I read it in The Coursebook. But actually, as I watch these films, I'm becoming more aware of how things should pull together in a novel.

I'm also enamoured with the concept of shapely writing. On my delightful tangent, I find myself considering that my next novel will be shaped like Diana Dors: it will be beautiful, desirable but not unobtainable. It will be real and thoroughly British; brash but charmingly so.

My dear Racers, the questions to which I wantonly crave your replies: which film/drama/series would you most like to have written? And if your WIP were shaped like a celebrity, which one would it resemble?