Launching The Final Curtain
30/07/10 21:30 Filed in: Writing
So I'm sitting at dinner with my sister-in-law,
brother-in-law and my two nieces, 14 and 10. And the
14-year-old tells me I should write a novel using the
names of her three "BiFFLes" (Best Friends For Life).
So I say, "Okay, tell me the plot and I'll do it."
She thinks for a minute and says something like, "There's this 14-year-old movie star whose name is X (she inserts her own Facebook pseudonym) and she's murdered during filming." Great start and we go from there. The 10-year-old wants a little sister to play a major role so we come up with not one but two little sisters with big parts to play. Within a half hour, we have the whole concept for the mystery laid out, including back story on the two major characters. We've developed motivations and even character traits.
And it's really pretty good. I set them the task of coming up with physical descriptions for the six or seven new characters in the book as well as, if possible, a quirk or behavioural quirk for each one. They've been working hard at it and I have been impressed with what they've developed.
So this morning, using the work that we'd done together and that they'd done on their own, I dashed off about 500 words of the opening of the novel. Wow. It works.
So now The Final Curtain, a new Phillip Gold Mystery, is off and running.
She thinks for a minute and says something like, "There's this 14-year-old movie star whose name is X (she inserts her own Facebook pseudonym) and she's murdered during filming." Great start and we go from there. The 10-year-old wants a little sister to play a major role so we come up with not one but two little sisters with big parts to play. Within a half hour, we have the whole concept for the mystery laid out, including back story on the two major characters. We've developed motivations and even character traits.
And it's really pretty good. I set them the task of coming up with physical descriptions for the six or seven new characters in the book as well as, if possible, a quirk or behavioural quirk for each one. They've been working hard at it and I have been impressed with what they've developed.
So this morning, using the work that we'd done together and that they'd done on their own, I dashed off about 500 words of the opening of the novel. Wow. It works.
So now The Final Curtain, a new Phillip Gold Mystery, is off and running.