The Blank Page

Happy New Year to all the Writing Clubs! (Or if your NY resolution is to start a writing club, Hooray and Welcome!)

I kinda love New Year because I love making resolutions, decisions, new timetables, schedules and stupidly ambitious plans. It doesn’t even bother me that I know by now that most of these will last about five minutes. Because I also know that even if I completely fail to achieve them, I’ll still end up achieving more than I would have done if I’d made no resolutions at all, and I consider that a brilliant result.

Most of my resolutions revolve around writing, even if it’s just ‘eat and sleep more healthily so I have more mental energy for writing’ which is top of my list for this year.

I’ve been dying to tell you this for weeks! The new Children’s Writing Fellow has been announced!

For me, character is everything in a story, and I generally find that when I’m stuck with my plot, it’s because I don’t know my characters well enough yet. Plot comes from character. People want/hate/fear something and that leads them to do something, and that’s all plot is.

So when my young writers are stuck on plot, I always tell them to try going back to their characters and finding out more about them. Character interviews are really helpful when you’re first getting to know a new character, and there’s one here you can use, but when you get deeper into the plot it’s helpful to start really interogating a character’s motives.

I find these 6 Questions To Ask Your Charactersreally useful for that. And you should use them for all the most important characters in your story, not just the main character.