In this article, screenwriter, script consultant, and NCW Academy tutor Christabelle Dilks shares the aspects of creating compelling characters for film or television drama.
Links of the week January 1 2024 (01)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
1 January 2024
Screenwriting is all about character.
This is my conclusion from many years writing and editing scripts for feature films, television series and serials. However marvellous the story, if there's no compelling character at its heart it's not going to sing. I'm embarking on a new script at the moment, and I'm telling myself just what I tell my students. A strong character gives rise to their plot when they set out on a quest for something they want, long for, or need. This story couldn't happen to another person. It must fit the main character like a beautifully-made glove.
Eli Cranor talks with today's top crime writers about craft, routine, and what gets them through the writing day.
It's that time of the year again, and, no, I'm not talking about the holidays. I'm talking about year-end-list time.
Just like the holidays, year-end lists can be anxiety inducing, especially for authors.
So, as a reprieve from everybody and their Uncle Bob's "Favorite Books of 2023," I'd like to offer you something a little less stressful. Something that might help you become a better writer.
Over the course of this last year, I've had the pleasure of interviewing eleven outstanding crime writers for "Shop Talk." We've covered everything from haunted office spaces to the importance of daily naps.
If you happened to miss one of the entries, you're in luck.
Is a degree course the only option for someone who wants to be a professional author? No, would be my answer, in a word. It is however one of the many options available, and there's a lot to be gained from it. My tutors at university were the first real life authors I had ever had access to in person, and that alone was worth it. It was inspiring and informative, and my writing developed a lot during my three years on the undergraduate course.
However, there's a lot that can be left unsaid on these courses, in my experience. Things which, once I had that fabled publisher's acceptance letter in my hand (metaphorically speaking, as it was an email), I could have done with knowing.
The biggest lesson I never learned at university was the workflow from acceptance to publication. I said several times as I went through my first publishing experience that I'd been prepared more for failure than for success. The courses I'd been on had focused a lot on "trying to get published" but not on "being published" or the hinterlands between the two states. I'd thought, naively, that once my book was accepted it would be polished and perfected by a whole team of people - and that was true! But between every single step of that process, that book also comes back to me, for revisions and changes.
Learn how to use the Save the Cat Beat Sheet to outline your plot. Plus an example of Save the Cat used in Disney's "Zootopia."
What is the Save the Cat Story Structure?
The Save the Cat Beat Sheet is a term used to describe the framework popularized by novelist Blake Snyder that writers can use to craft stories with a unique structure and effective story pacing. Snyder's beat sheet uses fifteen "beats" (or steps) to lay out an entire narrative arc, from the introduction of characters to the resolution.
Each beat has descriptive tasks to be completed at each step, allowing writers to map out their narrative and create a satisfying movie-going experience. By using the beats, writers can easily flow from one scene and plot point to another, resulting in a fulfilling story with twists and turns!
This narrative arc allows writers to craft plots that resonate with readers in meaningful ways and creates an easy-to-follow outline for creative projects.
The appeal of the procedural is built upon a simple human desire: we love to solve problems, and we love to watch others solve them. Even better when solving a problem feels like revealing a hidden connection beneath the skin of the world.
In a class I teach on the procedural genre, we start with Poe and Doyle and Collins and Sayers and work our way to Mosley and French. We watch the Spielberg-directed pilot episode of Columbo, which is (apologies for the fifty-year-old spoiler) about a murderous mystery novelist. We watch the crass pilot of Law & Order: SVU, studded with homophobia and transphobia, and then we read Carmen Maria Machado's hallucinatory novella "Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU." We talk about the girls with bells for eyes who haunt Machado's Benson and the doppelgänger detectives Abler and Henson, whose lack of trauma renders them inhuman. We discuss the way viewers who have survived sexual violence, or those who fear it, speak of finding comfort in the show's promise of responsive law enforcement while recognizing it as brazen copaganda. We read Auden's "The Guilty Vicarage" and more recent criticism about crime fiction: the old theory of the genius detective as righter of wrongs and restorer of order, and newer interpretations that highlight the conservatism of the form. This is the darker side of the procedural's temptation: how seductively it can align us as readers or viewers with the moral cleansing the detective promises.
The New York Times this week filed suit against Open AI and Microsoft over the unauthorized use of its intellectual property in the training of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The suit, which the Times said is the first by a "major American media organization," was filed in the Southern District of New York and alleges that the AI services from both multi-billion dollar tech companies are "built on mass copyright infringement," with potentially massive implications for the future of journalism.
"Defendants' unlawful use of The Times' work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times's ability to provide that service," the complaint alleges. "Through Microsoft's Bing Chat (recently rebranded as "Copilot") and OpenAI's ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times's massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment."
Notably, the complaint states that until recently the Times was in talks with both companies but that negotiations broke down.
It's been just over a year since ChatGPT was introduced to a public mostly unfamiliar with artificial intelligence. It appeared initially to have no obvious relevance to book publishing. Since then everything has changed-and nothing has changed. Publishers are beginning to dive into the new AI tools, exploring the edges, engaging in tentative chats with ChatGPT. But there's no evidence of a revolution in the practice of publishing. It's just too soon.
Despite all of the commotion around ChatGPT, it's worth remembering that AI is not new. It has been with us for decades. It just never played the part in our lives that it now demonstrates, perhaps just a little too visibly. Machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) were among the technologies prominent in previous generations of AI. Some publishers sought to incorporate these into their processes but made little progress.
The current generation of AI, based on large language models (LLMs), was developed mostly over the past decade. ChatGPT appeared suddenly on Nov. 30, 2022. Two months later it had 100 million monthly users, the fastest that any technology has moved into the consumer space. (By comparison, Facebook took over two years to reach 100 million users.)
"One of the things that I've always been into, passionate about, and focused on is love stories," says Monique Patterson, in one heck of an understatement. The romance publishing veteran, who was tapped in February to helm Bramble, Tor Publishing Group's new romance imprint, has made a top-tier publishing career out of finding and putting out romance novels across a span of subgenres. Underselling it less, she adds, "That gives me a lot of room to play, because there are so many different kinds of love stories."
November marked Patterson's 23rd year at Macmillan Publishers. Three years into her first publishing job, at HarperCollins's Avon imprint, Patterson was approached by Jennifer Enderlin, then v-p and publisher of Griffin and St. Martin's Press paperbacks, who wooed her over to SMP. There, she rose to become v-p and editorial director of the St. Martin's Publishing Group in 2020, before moving over to Bramble, which published its first book, Jennifer Armentrout's Fall of Ruin and Wrath, in September. To date, the book has sold roughly 50,000 print copies, according to Circana BookScan.
Ever since I joined PW in April 1993, my objective has been to write and publish articles that would help everyone in the publishing industry succeed. Leveling the playing field by providing information to help smaller companies and startups compete with entrenched players has been a guiding principle. It's a rule that's helped me navigate the incredible changes publishing has experienced, since spring 1979 when I used the American Book Trade Directory to find phone numbers for independent booksellers to determine their hot-selling titles for a story for the BP Report newsletter.
Technology has transformed publishing in every conceivable way, from how books are acquired to how they are printed, marketed, discovered, and sold. And while book publishing has a reputation for being technology resistant, the industry has weathered the digital revolution better than most media businesses. E-books now augment print books, rather than replacing them as had once been widely prophesied. The sales surge for downloadable audiobooks seems likely to continue, especially since the newest tech trend, AI, will allow many more stories to be converted to audio editions using synthetic narration. And online retailing has made books easier to purchase than ever. The fact that technology companies, going back to RCA's 1966 purchase of Random House, have been drawn to publishing shows the importance of the written word and quality content to what has become a knowledge-based society.
‘People believe what they want to believe,' wrote David to one of his lovers. ‘ALWAYS.' he was referring to the ‘revelation' that Graham Greene had continued working for British intelligence into his seventies. ‘No good me telling them that GG was far too drunk to remember anything, & that his residual connections with the Brit spooks were romantic fantasy.'
When he wrote that people believed what they wanted to believe about Greene, he might just as well have been writing about himself. People were willing to believe almost anything about him, even if he denied it (especially if he denied it) - for example, that he had once been earmarked as a possible future head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, more popularly known as MI6). According to David, the Chief himself, Sir Dick White, had told him in a farewell interview that he was highly thought of within the Service; and that, had he remained, he might have been a candidate for the ‘top job' in due course. This is a suggestion that one former MI6 officer, with a long and distinguished career behind him, described to me as ‘ridiculous'
Mick Herron discusses his latest thriller and a career writing detective and espionage stories
The latest novel from Mick Herron manages to be two things at once: both a gripping standalone espionage thriller for readers who have never read anything else by the author, but also a must-read for fans of his bestselling Slough House series as, delving back into the past, it reveals a hidden history.
London: Melanie Price was 15 when she first thought she might write a novel.
Like many teenage students at the all-girls Wenona School in North Sydney, she was hooked on romances and so tried her hands at that genre.
But daunted by the task of penning tens of thousands of words and with more imagination than life experience she put her pen down.
Price returned to London with two book plots in mind, both psychological thrillers, a genre that she studied at university and that happens to be Amazon's best-read in e-books.
Over two years - on weekends and at nights after work - she wrote two novels, My Perfect Family, set in Sydney and told through a young Australian female protagonist and The Mother-in-Law's Secret, set in London and told through another Australian woman but also through a second character - her British mother-in-law.
"The classic, write what you know," she said.
Whenever I teach on nonfiction book proposals, I open up the conversation by talking about market potential ($) and how to convince agents or editors that your project has it.
Some of the things that don't indicate market potential:
The opinion of your family or friends (unless they've done the market research themselves)
The opinion of the freelance editor you hired
The opinion of your beta readers or critique partners
The opinion of your colleaguesAnd finally, the one that frustrates everyone:
The opinion of literary agents and editors in traditional publishing-people who probably know something about market potential
Former Waterstones boss Tim Coates among those to criticise government, Arts Council and British Library bid to create a ‘single digital presence' for libraries
The UK's beleaguered public libraries have been let down by years of indecision and delays over how to spend millions of pounds in funding earmarked for a nationwide website.
This was among damning criticisms voiced on Saturday by campaigners who have lost patience with the government, the British Library and Arts Council England (ACE) over their longstanding failure to develop a nationwide scheme. The "Single Digital Presence" (SDP) - renamed LibraryOn - was meant to bring together public libraries in one website to enable the public to access collections across the country.
The problem has been that there are 150 library authorities in England alone, each with their own technology and management systems. Government funds have been allocated in various tranches to ACE and the British Library to make it happen.
Every few years I write a book. As penance for my past snark about aging writers using decades-old photos, I always update the author photo. For the first three books, it was fine-a lark, even!-but I was in my thirties then. I took longer to publish my fourth novel, and now, squinting into the setting sun of my forties, I'm being photographed more than ever. (I realize this makes it sound as if the paparazzi are after me, which they are not. I am being photographed by myself and by friends who would prefer to be doing something else). It's a different experience this time around.
The central struggle of seeing your face in a photo only grows more acute with age: until confronted with endless documentation, I was free to assume the face I present to the world looks a lot like it did at 21. I suppose people who are photographed for a living must confront this chasm between belief and reality sooner than the rest of us, who bury the suspicion deep inside ourselves, where we keep the details of bombed job interviews and that time we mispronounced a common word in front of Colson Whitehead. Imagine!