writing insights
God, the first has got to be how not to have crappy titles. I’m so bad at naming things, apart from dogs. I can’t do caption competitions or invent slogans.
We are four weeks into the MA and luckily I’ve not been asked to do any of the above. Everything I’m doing is aimed at finding out what my main character is like (plus family). I realise I’ve been thinking about Frankie, instead of thinking as him. I’ve written my way into thinking I know him, putting him in different situations and so on, but today Lesley Thomson, my tutor, gave me some great advice: walk the walk. She literally goes to places her protagonist knows and becomes him. She also takes photographs as him. I’m going to do this next week and walk round parts of Portsmouth as Frankie. This should stop everything happening to Frankie: even the author moving him about like a pawn. He should start to dictate the action. Can but hope.
It’s a kind of madness, though, and makes me leap back into the soft arms of erotic writing. I want to do some performance art with the erotica, too, so the plan is to try and do this without ending up in jail for giving inadvertant offence. My next blog may be at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. As it were.
