Tips for novelists, from a Scriptwriters Tool Kit. Why learning the principles of scriptwriting is the best way of learning how to craft a novel.

Okay, so you are a novelist, and I can understand completely that you might think this will not apply to you. But wait just a cotton picking moment. I am a novelist, but I started out as a scriptwriter. That being the case, everything I ever learned about scriptwriting now applies to my novel writing.

Why is that, I hear you ask.

Well, I'll tell you.

Leap back a couple of thousand years ago. Bear with me; there's a purpose to this convolution. Okay, so we're sitting around our communal fire.

 Very few people can read or write, (probably no one, come to think of it), but one guy (or perhaps woman), is really good at storytelling. They have the ability to entrance their fellow tribe members with stories that help to explain the nature of life. These stories are handed down by word of mouth through the generations. The storytellers learn which stories work best at holding their audience's attention. They become experts in all the different aspects of storytelling. They hone their tales until eventually they form a collective conscience of myths and ancient folk tales.

These then, are archetypal stories and characters. The Greek myths of gods and goddesses are all stories like this. Theatre evolved from oral storytelling. Move forward in time and each generation reworks and retells the archetypes, often unknowingly. It's as if the best stories are encoded in our DNA. We just know when we have found something that resonates with us.

Then film comes along. At first, it's an adaptation of theatre, but with more scope for showing where and when. Film becomes adept at taking archetypal stories and spinning them round into those 'ah' moments; moments we experience when we know the story is all fitting together just right.

So, very early on in the history of film-making, scriptwriters learned how to put words on paper that could, not only be translated into a visual image, but tell the most perfect of archetypal stories. That's why, if you want to write novels, you might be best advised to learn first about all the tools and techniques in a scriptwriters tool kit.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my most favourite authors of all time. Here's a handy little infogram about how he saw archetypal stories - Btw, he was originally an anthropologist.


Here too is the mother of all archetypal stories

Read more on this here

A Very British Murder

The author of The Finish is pleased to have found A Very British Murder on the BBC by the inimitable Lucy Worsley, but so sad that it is no longer available to view. Although I missed it, both the first time round, and as a repeat in March, thankfully dear Lucy has written a book on the same subject, which I will have to go straight out and buy.

The Blackwall Yard

In The Surety, book two in the Venus Squared series, Kitty is called to attend the Blackwall Yard.
Here's the location - just to the East of the Isle of Dogs. The second map gives the yard in close up.

The Blackwall Yard was where the East India Company's ship went for refitting. The river would have been full of these ships.

St. Paul's Covent Garden - the real entrance

In an earlier blog post I showed the before and after of the 'front' of the Church, which is actually the back - although it 'front's the square of Covent Garden.

This picture shows the real front, accessed through a gate, between two rows of period houses and into the Churchyard.

This is a side entrance into the Churchyard, which is totally enclosed by high buildings. 

Shall I unwed to bed?

 What was it like to be a prostitute in London's Covent Garden? Read more here.

http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/shall-i-unpaid-to-bed.html

The Great Piazza - before and after

In the first picture we are under the Great Piazza arches. Kitty's house in The Finish is the one in the background on the corner. In real life this was occupied by John Bradley's gin shop (which features in The Finish) and above it by Mother Gould's brothel, which is the model for Mother's Shadbolt's brothel. In the second book in the series, The Surety, Kitty moves to a house in the Great Piazza, whose door would have been roughly where we are standing in this picture.

Here is that building in the background of the first picture, today. It's been rebuilt because in March of 1769 it burned to the ground (and we see that happening in The Finish). That said, they rebuilt it in the same style as the original. The buildings to the left of it in this picture are the original 18th century buildings.

The third picture shows the Great Piazza, Covent Garden as it is today - this too has been rebuilt.

Covent Garden before and after

At the end of the summer I took a walk around Covent Garden to take some photographs for the 'before and after' posts I'm going to make.

Here's the first - St. Paul's Covent Garden. The face that you see in the square is actually the back of the Church. There is no door here, although it looks as if there should be. The entrance is on the other side, in the Churchyard. Built by Inigo Jones for the 4th Earl of Bedford in 1631, it is also known as the 'Actors' Church'. Here's the 'before' by Hogarth.

And here's the after.