Writing Skill: Ideas Into Scenes

Often in the early stages and first-draft, we have reams of exciting ideas in our writing, but not so much stuff actually happening on the page. We have swathes of exposition, backstory, info-dumps, and zoomed-out storytelling. That's fine: that's how we capture ideas, in first draft.  

But things actually happening, in close-up, in "real time", is what makes stories come alive. So when we rework our first draft, we want to turn all those ideas into Stuff That Happens, in scenes. In this Writing Skill, you're going to play with exactly that: turning ideas into the stuff of story. With options to use this as a starting point, OR with your existing story if you have one. You can do this as a ten-minuter, to try out the principles, or spend longer on it, as you prefer.

First up: an all-important definition.

SCENE: A scene is a section of story where things happen in close-up, in continuous time. It’s often in a single setting (but if the characters move somewhere else in continuous time, it’s still one scene). It usually includes action, dialogue, description, and sometimes character's thoughts.

To practise this, we're using the Random Plot Generator. (NB: That's a generator drawing from a database, not AI.) Click the "Situation" button to get a random situation. (You can add the other things as well, if you want more ideas.) The situation I got is "Someone is leaving prison after 20 years." So, that's my idea. Now I want SCENES.

1. Anything we need to know or understand the situation: make that a scene.
2. The thing is happening: make that a scene.
3. What happens after / as a result: make that a scene.

For example:

1. We need to know my character's been in prison for 20 years. So I'll have a scene of them giving a new inmate a tour around the prison.
2. The thing is happening: I'll have a scene of them actually being released.
3. What happens after: I'll have a scene of them sitting with family, maybe struggling to reintegrate.

For each of your three scenes, brainstorm

• Action: What are they physically doing? If this were filmed, what would you see them doing?
• Dialogue: Who's talking? What are they talking about?
• Description: What's around them? What are they noticing / interacting with? What does stuff look, smell, feel, sound like? How does that add to the scene?

For example, in my first scene, my character is moving from room to room through the prison (I'm assuming they can roam a bit during the day in rec rooms, work rooms, etc) pointing things out. So that's their action. The dialogue is them explaning stuff to the newbie, all of which indicates how long they've been there. "Yeah, that telly broke back in 2011," etc. Description: What they'd notice about the prison, having been there so long, is the changes to stuff, and maybe see some things through fresh eyes, because they're touring people round. The description could also contribute a sense of confinement, as well as familiarity, and set the atmosphere.

Importantly, at no point am I having my character say "I've been here twenty years." That's a) as part of the discipline for this exercise: characters telling each other information is still exposition, and b) to make it more memorable. Readers aren't memorising, so one line might fly over their heads, even if I did include it. If it's important for the reader to know it's been twenty years, I want to create a sense of all that time.

If you’re using this Skill as your starting point

Pick your situation, any other details you want from the generator, and spend ten minutes brainstorming your scene(s)' detail. If you want to spend longer on it, go ahead and write the scenes.

If you’re using your own story

I suggest you do this with the generator first, as a ten-minute exercise, just the brainstorming and mapping-out parts, not the actual writing. You can then apply the same principles to your own story, for any ideas that aren't being acted out in scenes yet.

Scene 1, giving us the info we need to understand, can often be layer into an existing prior scene, rather than have a whole scene just for one snippet of info. That said, if your draft currently has more ideas than events, go ahead and make it a whole scene. 

Either way

Have fun brainstorming / scene-mapping, and happy writing! 

And if you want to explore more ways to bring your stories alive, the new live evening course is Immersive Fiction: a hands-on eight-week course, taking a deep-dive into the four elements that most make fiction immersive. 

You can join online from anywhere (Thurs evenings UK time) OR in person in Oxford (Wed evenings). And it's on early-bird price until 9 April!

Click here to see all the details and book your place.

Writing Skill: What Happened?

Want to keep the reader on the edge of their seats in a scene, quivering with suspense as they turn each page? I’ve got a thrilling Writing Skill for you: What Happened? This is a splendid skill for creating slow-burn thriller-style tension, and for weaving in purposeful atmospheric description that becomes part of the action, makes the events memorable, fills the scene with atmosphere, and makes the reader feel like they're living inside the story.

So if you want to stretch your suspense skills, have a play with this. Steal ten minutes for your writing, grab a pen, a cuppa, and your notebook, and curl up to write.

To start with, you need two things: an empty public building + something very very wrong.

The empty public building

It might be empty because it's after dark. It might be deserted. It might be in ruins, ancient or modern. As for what kind of public building, it could be a library, CERN, a medical facility, a shopping mall, a college, a pavilion, a church, a school... Wikipedia has a helpful list of public and institutional buildings if you want more ideas. (An aquarium, perhaps?)

Something very wrong

As for what's wrong, well... We're playing with thriller mode, here, which opens up an inspiring range of sub-genres: action, crime, political, spy, legal, science fiction, medical, archaeological, mystical... Do you want them finding evidence of a new disease? A priceless artefact missing? Gothic powers at work? Glowing fish that almost certainly shouldn't be glowing?

You don't actually have to decide what's wrong in advance, mind. You can consider possibilities, then shrug, dive into the writing, and discover alongside your character.

Start writing

You're not mapping out the whole story, in this Skill: you're diving into writing the first scene. Your character (who they are can gradually come clear through writing them) is exploring the empty building. They know something's wrong, but they don't know what yet.

Include plenty of multi-sensory description as they move through:

• What are they seeing? They're hunting for what's wrong: we're looking through their eyes.
• What are they hearing? Sounds are particularly evocative for creating a tense atmosphere, because they also emphasise the underlying silence, and what we can't see.
• What does it smell like? Smell is brilliant for making us feel like we're really there, inside a scene, because it's not easily reproducible, unlike visuals and sounds.
• What sensations are they having? Is the air warm, cold, humid, dry? Do they touch anything? What are the textures? This brings us right into the embodied experience of the character, so we feel like it's happening to us.

All of this will create maximum creepy atmosphere. It'll also be inherently purposeful: they're hunting for clues to find out what's wrong, so every snippet of description is more information about that, for them, and for us as the readers.

Then end the scene at the most dramatic moment. That may or may not include the reveal on the page – up to you. At the moment you gasp, end the scene. (If you can't bear to stop writing, grab another page and continue the scene on that, as a new section. Leaving the reader on that cliff-hanger!)

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Writing Skill: Fairytale Detective

If you want to explore red herrings, to keep the reader distracted from the true reveal you’re actually working towards, I’ve got a lovely playful Writing Skill for you: Fairytale Detective! Red herrings are always a skill worth exercising, whether or not you’re writing detective / mystery fiction, as you never want the reader to see the real ending coming.

So give yourself the gift of ten minutes writing time, curl up with your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, and have fun!

To start, pick a fairytale. If your memory of fairytales needs refreshing, here’s a lovely site which gives you heaps at a glance. And then, as this is detective fiction, you need to pick someone who’s been killed – a main character, ideally, if not the main character.

Next, choose your detective. This can be someone from within the same fairytale or you can borrow someone from another fairytale: the gingerbread man perhaps, or Rumplestiltskin, or the Beast, whoever you fancy.

Now that you’re prepped, you’re onto the main bit: assemble the cast of everyone else in the fairytale, and work out everyone’s motivations to murder the dead character! Only one of them will have actually done it (or more, if they’ve been acting in cahoots) but all of them need an apparent motivation.

You can do this planning-style, if you’re planning-inclined, or just start freewriting to discover. As for tone – you can keep it super-playful / po-faced tongue in cheek, but there is also room to go seriously dark here, in a Gothy/noir way. Think of Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber stories and how richly literarily dark some of those are.

The main thing here is to practise exploring everyone’s motivations, so once you’ve done that, you’re done! You’ve stretched that skill. But you can absolutely take this further, if you’d like to. Here’s some suggestions of what you could write:

• The dialogue from the interviews your detective holds with each suspect
• Character cameos of each suspect plus description of how they present themselves
• Action snippets of the suspects doing suspicious things
• Action of how the detective investigates each suspect
• All four together, writing the full story!

Have fun!

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

What Is Narrative Tension?

We’re all told that a story needs “narrative tension”, a “central conflict”, and that’s true. The problem, though, is that in this context, “tension” and “conflict” don’t mean what they usually do – so when people apply that advice, it can end up ruining the story.

The most striking example I’ve ever found of this was a “castle” – I shan’t name it, to protect the innocently hapless. We’d chosen it for a mini-adventure visit mostly because it promised Talking Portraits. After the wonderful storytelling on HMS Victory, in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, we were all up for audio story tours!

The “portraits” were large vertical flat screens, with characters posed as paintings which then come alive and chat to you – basically videos that start moving when you enter the room. The characters were the castle’s owner, his wife, and their daughter, discussing the history of the castle. It started off fine, if a little dull… And then the characters started to argue. Mostly the couple berating their poor daughter, but sometimes they quarrelled with each other, too.

It fast became clear that someone had told the script writer that the story needed some tension, some conflict – and they’d gone for the garden-variety, not the narrative sort. Straight-up interpersonal tension and conflict.

The result? Cringing visitors were chased from room to room by this bickering family, flattening themselves on the furthermost walls to avoid setting the portraits off, warning each other on the sill of each room. Nobody wanted to witness the endless family quarrel, however many titbits of Useful History it included! Rather than giving the story energy, the tension and conflict ruined it, and we all scuttled away, dismayed.

I often see the same thing in early drafts, when people want to create narrative tension but end up with characters bickering. That makes us want to read it less, not more. It also often makes the main character less sympathetic – after all, they’re constantly sniping at people. That in turn makes us care less about their aims, which in turn makes us less interested in whether they do the thing or not. In short, it undermines the exact narrative tension which it’s trying to create.

That’s because narrative tension and conflict are not tension and conflict by our usual definition of the words: they’re much wider. In fact, I’ve stopped using the words “tension” and “conflict” in much of my teaching, and instead talk about narrative drive and interest. In the Story Elements course, we open it up to discussion of all the things it can mean, such as…

Casting a wide net of all the different kinds of narrative interest gives us a much richer repertoire to draw on, so we’re far less likely to fall into the bickering-characters trap.

It’s much more than those individual various drives, though: it’s the thread that draws the reader eagerly through the whole story. So the most helpful way to distil it, I find, is this: What does the reader hope / fear / think will happen next or want to find out?

That question is so useful that I’ve now added it to my template for my writing-group-instalments, so I always remember to ask them. And asking it sharpens my storytelling immeasurably. We always want the reader to be able to answer that question, 100% clearly: there is a definite reason they’re reading on. And if the reader can’t answer that question, we need to make the reason clearer – or, sometimes, invent it!

In each scene, in each chapter, in each act of the story, ask yourself, “What should the reader hope / fear / think will happen next or want to find out?” That’s your narrative tension, your narrative drive.

 

If you’d like to work on your narrative drive and plot interest in your stories, I have a brace of resources for you, now available as any-time Evergreen Resources: Narrative Drive and Plot Tension Map. 

With Narrative Drive, you’ll distil that all important question for a story, including the crucial component of backing the character through the story. With Plot Tension Map, you’ll pace and layer that across the whole story, so every part is equally gripping: no slow starts or soggy middles.

Both are self-paced videos that you can use any time, taking you through the process in an hour. You can use them to plan a story, troubleshoot it, or redraft it, whichever stage you’re at. Click here to get started with your Narrative Drive.

Writing Skill: A Magical Scientific Instrument

Happy Valentine's! And to celebrate, I've got a writing skill for you about a very different kind of love, as well as a love poem, inspired by Oxford's glorious History of Science Museum. (Which I am, yes, in love with. That picture up top is my phone background!)

You can use this skill for flash-fiction (very tiny short stories) or for a poem, whichever you prefer, to write about a scientific instrument. This could be any kind of scientific instrument: ones from astronomy, like telescopes, astrolables, orreries; ones for weather, like barometers, thermometers; ones for navigation, like compasses; ones you'd find in modern laboratories or ancient apothecaries...

If you want a list to get your mind mulling it over, here's the Wiki list sorted into categories and here's a breaktakingly extensive list of 418 instruments + their uses. Personally, I love the older instruments, especially astrolabes, so here's a wonderfully rich resource for that. The Oxford History of Science Museum has explanations and short videos on 8 different kinds of instruments in their collection: armillary sphere, camera obscura, gregorian telescope, medicine chest, octant, orrery, wimshurst machine. So if you fancy five minutes of discovery first, choose which one you fancy, read the text about it, watch the little video, and then settle into turning that discovery into your writing.

Once you've browsed and absorbed a bit, scroll down to choose whether you want to flash-fiction it or turn it into a poem. You can decide whether you feel the instrument is already thoroughly magical to you, or whether you'd like to add magical properties to it.

Flash-fiction It

This is the very stuff of story, as Philip Pullman's series His Dark Materials illustrates with Lyra's wonderful alethiometer. (Which is also in the History of Science Museum!) You could follow the links to write a fictionalised story about a real scientific instrument OR take a leaf out of Pullman's book and give your character an invented instrument.

If you invent an instrument, use these questions to inspire you: 

• What does it do? 
• Did they invent it or did they find it? 
• How do they use it? 
• Does something completely unexpected happen when they do?

To keep it very short, you could focus in on just a couple of things: them using it and what they expect; what actually happens. If you want to write a longer piece (flash fic goes up to 1000 words), you could also include more beforehand about them finding / inventing it, and possibly a second character's responses to it.

Poem It

You could write this as free verse or, if you fancy a type of poem to write, how about a villanelle? 

Line #	Repeated line	Rhyme
1	A	a
2	xxxxx	b
3	B	a
4	xxxxx	a
5	xxxxx	b
6	A	a
7	xxxxx	a
8	xxxxx	b
9	B	a
10	xxxxx	a
11	xxxxx	b
12	A	a
13	xxxxx	a
14	xxxxx	b
15	B	a
16	xxxxx	a
17	xxxxx	b
18	A	a
19	B	a

A villanelle uses two lines that keep repeating throughout: they start and end the first stanza, then they take turns ending the next four stanzas, and then both of them together end the last stanza.

• Stanza length: The first five stanza are 3 lines each; the last stanza is 4 lines
• Rhyme scheme: the first four stanzas are aba; the last stanza is abaa. 
• Repeating lines: The table shows where the two repeating lines go, that's A and B. They can have slight variations, changing words or tweaking punctuation, so the meaning shifts throughout the poem. Read the example further down, to see how it works.

Practical tip: When you’re writing a villanelle (or any repeating form), it helps to mark out the structure in your notebook, and each time you write a line that will repeat, jot it down in the places where it’ll repeat. You can always tweak the wording and punctuation when you get to it, but it’s much easier to write if you can see what lines you’re heading towards, instead of trying to hold it in your head.

Here's a love villanelle I wrote inspired by the History of Science Museum, with the repeated lines marked:

So many devices, copper and brass, to divine
the movements of planets, celestial angles, and time.
Trajectories of hearts and whether your love will align

again, its elliptical orbit completed, with mine
are hardly more complex? They built, drawing metal from grime,
so many devices, copper and brass, to divine

the shape of the oceans by peering down holes for the shine
of a singular star. Is it harder to plot out the prime
trajectories of hearts and whether my love will align

with yours as it swings into view? I’ve been stiffened with brine,
my ship lost at sea; I’ve been trying, through gathering rime,
so many devices, copper and brass, to divine

the path of your vanishing love, its return, and the sign
if it’s comet or star: Enlightenment’s cool paradigm.
Trajectories of hearts and whether a love will align

are surely the stuff of academies; measures define
Newtonian laws. I polish, through rhyme after rhyme,
so many devices, copper and brass, to divine
trajectories of hearts, and whether our love will align.

April is Poetry-Writing Month!

NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month, the April poem-a-day challenge) is an absolute joy to do. If you're taking part or want to join in, I'm sending out a few freebie Poem Writing Skills and extra titbits across April, to inspire and encourage you.

If you'd like to get that extra inspiration, join the newsletter here and click the Poetry-Writing Month link in your welcome email.

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The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms, as well as the musicality of language, poetic imagery, and other aspects of the poetic. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

PSA: Don’t Use AI In Your Writing

More specifically, don’t use AI in your stories or poems if you want to get them published. (And even more specifically: by “AI”, I mean “generative AI”, aka Large Language Models – ChatGPT, Microsoft Clippy Co-Pilot, Claude, Gemini, etc. Obviously you’re not going to use a specialist AI that spots particular cancer cells to write, but it’s worth remembering that all those other kinds of AI exist.)

There are heaps of arguments about generative AI at the moment, but I don’t want to get into the weeds of all that. I just want to give you a heads up about this:

3 Lobed Magazine

Air and Nothingness Press

Arachne Press

Asimov Magazine

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Black Beacon Books

Clarkesworld

Cosmic Horror

Death by TBR Books

Horned Lark Press

Interzone

LBA Books Agency

Litro Magazine

Livina Press

Moss Puppy Magazine

Podcastle

Rogers Coleridge and White Agency

The Dark Magazine

The Fiction Desk

That’s not a cherry-picked selection. I check submission guidelines a lot – not just for my own work, but also for the Sending Writing Out list I keep updated for the Writers’ Greenhouse Community. Over the last few months, I’ve been seeing those notices everywhere. These are just the ones I happened to screengrab over a few days, as I updated my spreadsheets.

As you can see, no-one wants AI-generated writing. Not literary journals, not genre magazines, not agents, not publishers. Many don’t want you to use it for research and idea-generation either. Some even say not to use it for grammar checks. A couple years ago, I suggested using it for punctuation, which after all is a formal system, but we found that even with the strictest instructions not to change the words, it still did. And several places dish out lifetime bans for submitting writing that’s used AI.

To avoid using AI for research and ideas, I have a few tips.

Add “-ai” to your Google searches

That removes the AI summary at the top and gives you search results instead. I’ve found I get much better results when I remember “-ai”, and often they contradict the AI summary. Even when the AI summary gets it right, the pages written by actual human experts contain a ton more info that you might not have thought to research. Always, when we’re learning something, we don’t know everything we need to ask! The AI summary will only tell you what you know to ask.

Use the Writers’ Links trove of sites

I have a lovely curated list of very useful sites for writers, organised into Words words words • Characters • Places • Plot • World building • Historical research. It also contains lots of rangens, to help you come up with ideas. These are random generators using databases, not AI. Bookmark the Writers’ Links page!

In the Writers’ Greenhouse Community, every fourth weekly Writing Skill features a useful online resource, to help you explore these. I’m steadily adding all the sites I feature there to the Writers’ Links page as well. 

Remember Wikipedia

Free, vast, accurate, up-to-date, human-written, with heaps of info on every subject, and all its sources meticulously cited if you want to delve deeper. Ah, how times change, from "You can't trust Wiki!" You really can, now. Human passions for their specialist subjects have created the wisdom of crowds. Bookmark Wikipedia – ideally on your browser toolbar. 

Block ChatGPT & co on your server

Did you know you can block websites on your own server? If it’s your internet account, you can! If you struggle not to reach for it, that’s a lovely hard-core solution. And if you’ve been paying for ChatGPT, and you’re going to stop using it, what about slinging that money Wikipedia’s way, instead?

* 

I have many, many more opinions about this – of course I do, everyone does right now – but this isn’t about My Many Opinions, it’s just a PSA: don’t use AI in your stories or poems if you want to get them published.

Writing Skill: Surprising Fact

Creativity loves novelty, the element of surprise, and what could be more novel and surprising than those lists of Surprising Facts that do the rounds? They're always tempting to scroll, but somehow we end up just threading them through our eyeballs, then forgetting them. Creativity 0, Ennui 1. It's definitely not generating the inspiration we want. 

But those surprising facts can take on exciting life and spark creativity. A couple of years ago, one Sunday morning, I was putting away the supermarket delivery with Radio 4 on in the background. It was Sunday Worship; I was about to change stations, but the priest's Scottish accent, his voice, and the music were so lovely that I left it on. At one point, he started speaking about seals and said, memorably, "They always come if you sing." 

The Story Elements class had just come up with a story about seelies, so immediately my mind leapt with the fact. I should tell them that, I thought. And what a beautiful overlap between seals and mermaids, which seelies are halfway between, that they come if you sing. And weren't tales of mermaids sometimes attributed to a particular type of seal that looks extraordinarily human? And how could that be used in the story...? 

As soon as there's a story for a fact to land in, it comes alive. But sometimes we need to find a story, and we can't always rely on life and random Radio-4-listening to hand us exciting facts: we need to seek them and make stories from them. Through that, we sensitise ourselves more to noticing them. Then, even if the particular facts we seek out and take for a tiny story-spin go nowhere, we're honing our alertness for other surprising facts, sources of stimulus, creative food. 

So for this Writing Skill, the idea is not just to read through surprising facts, like munching popcorn, but to pick a few that you can really imagine and integrate. The fact itself is just the spur for creativity: the creative boost comes when we use it.

To find your surprising facts, here's a really lovely list of genuinely delightful information. It's helpfully arranged into categories: Animals, History, Travel, Music, Sports, Human, Funny, and Miscellaneous. You can pick your favourite category or choose a cross-section. However you approach it, pick three facts and write them down.

Then, for each of your three, write one of these, whichever suits the fact or you best:

• A brief snippet of it happening, like an excerpt from a story or a scene
• A 2-3 line story teaser or blurb (think Dramatic Hollywood Voice)
• A tiny poem – perhaps an elevenie?

And just as the surprising facts come alive when you use them, so do the Writing Skills. So give yourself the gift of ten minutes, curl up with a cuppa, your notebook, and a pen, and take three facts for a quick writerly whirl. 

Have fun with your facts, and enjoy the week ahead of increased alertness and creative sparkles!

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Writing Skill: Voice Argument

If you want to practise writing dialogue, here's a lovely free-form way to approach it, which also helps you separate out their voices, and explore the effects on their characterisation: Voice Argument.

So give yourself the writing-gift of ten minutes, grab a cuppa, your pen, and notebook, and curl up to scribble.

To start with, you have two people arguing. You don’t need to worry about who they are; you’ll find out as much you need to from what position they take in the argument. Pick something light for them to argue about, so it’s not too stressful. (Especially if you’re a non-confrontational bunny like me!) For example...

• whether one of them saw a fairy
• when blackberries are best
• the ideal route between point A and point B

or what you will.

Once you’ve chosen the topic, spend five minutes speedwriting just their dialogue: the actual words they speak, not all the "he said / she said" and other bits that go around it. Make it up as you go along and allow their disagreement to generate the content. That’s the wonderful thing about arguments, in writing: once you’ve set up the disagreement, they pretty much write themselves!

Then, once you’ve written for five minutes, pick one voice to make super formal, and the other very casual. If you already have distinctive voices, I’d suggest you change the more formal one to a casual one and vice versa. It’s fascinating to see what happens when we reverse our instinctive choices! Spend the next five minutes rewriting their dialogue, into the two extremes.

For example, my speaker A said:

“No ways! They have to just fall off in your hand or they’re shit!”

Now I need to make that super formal. So…

“Nonsense! If they don’t come away quite easily, they’re simply not edible."

Or I could go right up into the rafters to make it super-super formal:

“I must disagree in the strongest possible terms. The blackberry must yield with not the least particle of force, or it will be entirely unpalatable.”

My speaker B, meanwhile, needs to become super casual. They said:

“But you want some firmness, or they’ll just turn to mush.”

So to make that way more casual...

“Ah, c’mon, they're crap if they’re all squishy like that!”

When you’re done, sit back and reread it. Aloud, if you like: that’s always a great way to hear dialogue. Look at how distinctive they now are. At how the change in register (formality) changes how they come across.

Have fun! 

Why this skill?

This is a great exercise for several things:

• Writing dialogue: It's often helpful to stick to just the spoken words, in the first draft, and add the other stuff in later. That way we can really hear the flow in conversation.
• Separating voices: It's common, when we're writing first draft, to start using similar voices for both characters in a conversation. Afterwards, you can separate them out more consciously.
• The effect of voice on characterisation: As well as making the voices distinctive, it makes such a difference to how we see them! Are you more sympathetic to the formal voice's argument, now, because they sound more educated? Or less so, because they sound pompous? And so on.

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Parlour Games

To add to your collection of festive writerly games, decor, and joyous silliness, I have a lovely new brace of parlour games for you, perfect for large groups. One of them is ideally suited to us of a literary disposition (but equally enjoyable for those who aren't!) and the other is really just a matter of joyous chaos. We tried them both at my birthday party last week and they worked even better than I'd hoped. Let the games begin!

Poem Enactments

This is best with a really good-sized group, at least ten people, ideally more. You'll also need enough space for people to sit around the edge and leave the centre of the room clear. 

Anyone can read or recite a poem. Before they do, though, they assign people to act out the parts. (Or ask for volunteers.) It's very important to cast before reading. 

While they read / recite the poem, the actors play their parts, following whatever directions come their way. I did The Walrus and the Carpenter, casting a sun, moon, walrus, carpenter, oldest oyster, and all the other oysters. My brother in law, as the sun, did a truly majestic job of trying to make the billows smooth and bright. My sister, as the moon, was splendidly sulky about it. The sight of most of my friends fervently pretending to be oysters, trotting behind the walrus and the carpenter, will live with me forever. Especially when they started making oyster noises. 

In someone else's poem, I volunteered to be the pond. It turned out the poem was Daddy Fell Into the Pond, so I got heftily landed on! In The Owl and the Pussycat, many of us were bong trees. When someone else did The Jabberwocky, Gwendi (the Jabberwock) collapsed to the floor in death so dramatically that the thunk was audible.

Nursery rhymes, picture books, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes, and Doctor Seuss are all great contenders for poems, as well as dramatic ballads like The Highwayman.

* 

The (Brief) Singing Of Many Songs

Everyone needs to be briefed to think of their favourite song to sing. A hymn, a carol, a pop song, a protest song, a lullaby, a folk song, whatever they know and is dear to their hearts.

Before The Singing, everyone firmly fixes their song in their mind, and lightly hums the opening note. Then everyone sings, all at once, for two minutes, and may the loudest voice win!

We didn't have a prize, but we totally should have, and the winner was 100% my sister with her passionate rendition of Toto's Africa, drowning out even her husband's and Will's combined Jerusalem. Glorious! Half the cacophonous choir collapsed in giggles after the first minute, but the remaining roar was still award-worthy.

*

And if you want more silly or writerly festive things to do, I've got heaps more for you already up on the blog:

• Four Writerly Party Games (these work well with 4+ people)
• Zoom Party Games (the same four games plus two extra, all converted for playing over Zoom)
• The Present Game, for a chaotic and increasingly random present exchange
• How To Make a Christmas Star, which you can do on your own as paperly decor or as a group with everyone contributing spokes to the star
• How to Fold a Little Book, if you want to fill your Christmas tree with tiny books (You could use richly decorated Christmas paper so they look even more splendid.)

Wishing you wonderful, creative, silly fun! 

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Autumn Writing Food: Mushroom Bake

Hearty cheesy mushroom bake with red lentils, succulent inside and crispy on top.
Gluten-free | Veggie

Ars longa, vita brevis, as I said to one of my students at the WolvLitFest last weekend: art is long and life is short. It's always a struggle to find enough time for all the projects. 

At least, that's what I meant to say. I said the first word, paused because my head was full of another Latin phrase (memento vivere: remember to live), so... basically I just said, with full thoughtful confidence, "ARSE" and then looked around for a bit.

I don't think she's going to let me live that one down. 

Anyway, the brevity of time (ARSE!) is why I send you these seasonal writing food recipes. We need to carve out time for our writing, often from already busy lives, and we need to remember to live. Perfect writing food is quick (either to make or to double up another day's cooking) so it doesn't steal your writing time, low-carb so your writing time isn't sabotaged by sleepiness, and as much a treat as writing itself. 

This autumn's is one of my absolute favourites for a chilly writing day, easy to double, triple, or even quadruple, and freezes beautifully (and without wasting freezer space, if you use my nifty tinfoil trick). It's one to make on a non-writing evening, in extra quantity, and then freeze the rest for future writing time.

Mushroom Bake

Serving and times

Prep & active cooking: 25–30 mins
Oven time: 35 mins
Serves: 4 (This scales up very easily; always round up the number of eggs, as they hold it together. There's a scaling-up table at the bottom for easy reference.)

Ingredients

For spicy tomato sauce (optional)

• 1 small onion, thinly sliced
• 2 chillies, sliced
• 1 tsp of hot chilli flakes / powder (optional)
• 1 tin of tomatoes (400g)
• 1/3 teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon black pepper

For mushroom & lentil bake

• 175g red split lentils
• 350 ml vegetable stock (I use powdered bouillon and hot water)
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 175g mushrooms, chestnut or portabello chopped / sliced
• 2 Tablespoons butter
• 1 stalk rosemary (5”), finely chopped
• 125g cheese, grated
• 1 egg, beaten

To serve

Baby spinach leaves (approx 50g per person) or side salad

Method 

Spicy tomato sauce

If you’re making the spicy tomato sauce, get this on the go first so it has plenty of time to simmer down (1 hour, ie the same time as the rest of the cooking)

• Thinly slice 1 small onion and 2 chillies.
• In a small pot, fry the ½ teaspoon black pepper, onion and chillies on a medium-high heat, for about 10 mins (you can start the other cooking meanwhile).
• Add the 1 tsp of hot chilli flakes / powderchilli powder if using, 1 tin of tomatoes and 1/3 teaspoon salt.
• Turn the heat down and let it simmer gently, uncovered, to reduce for about an hour.

Mushroom & lentil bake

• Heat the oven to 180 C.
• Chop one onion.
• In a pot, put the 175g lentils in the 350ml hot stock to simmer, covered, until soft (10 mins). When they’re done, just turn them off and leave them on the side for now.
• Meanwhile, slice the onions.
• Melt the 2 Tablespoons butter in a deep wide pan (the wider it is, the faster this goes; deep is helpful for when you’re stirring in the mushrooms)
• Add the onion to the pan and fry on medium for about 10 mins.
• Meanwhile, slice / chop the 175g mushrooms (you can just hack them all up – no need for finesse) and finely chop the stalk of rosemary
• Add the mushrooms and rosemary to the onions, turn up the heat, and fry till they’ve released all their water and the water has evaporated (5–10 mins)
• Meanwhile, beat 1 egg in a bowl large enough to contain all the ingredients and grate 125g cheese into the same bowl. Grease a baking dish (approx 20 x25 cm for this quantity).
• Mix the cooked lentils and fried onion & mushroom into the bowl with the cheese and egg.
• Pour it into the greased baking dish: we like it about ¾–1 inch deep, to get more crispy surface. Deeper is also fine, up to about 1.5 inches deep. Bake for 35–45 minutes.
• Serve on a bed of baby spinach with the spicy tomato sauce dolloped on top.

Want to freeze it? Fridge it overnight then wrap each portion size (eg for 2) in tinfoil.

Scaling Up

Onions	1	2	2.5	3	4
Mushrooms	175g	350g	450g	530g	700g
Cheese	125g	250g	300g	375g	500g
Lentils	175g	350g	450g	530g	700g
Stock	350ml	700ml	875ml	1 litre	1.4 litres
Butter	50g	100g	125g	150g	200g
Eggs	1	2	3	3	4

And a generous stalk or two of rosemary!

A note on quantities: The red portion fills a 20x25cm dish and serves 3-4, so the orange and green quantities need two of those or something twice the size. (You can also make it a bit thicker.) The teal and purple are going into wild quantities: you'd need the actual oven tray for those, or several dishes. (The oven tray also works well to do loads and cut it into smallish squares as part of a family buffet or picnic.)

Freezing Tip

If you're freezing bakes, you don't want your whole tray to disappear into the freezer and waste space. Put the bake in the fridge overnight so it goes nice and solid, then cut it into meal-portions and wrap each portion in tinfoil, pinching it shut at the top so that the tinfoil doubles up as their "baking tray" for when they're reheated. Masking tape for the labels doubles up to seal those folds. (Air-exposure in the freezer would give it "freezer burn".) Then you write the food name and date on the masking tape in Sharpie.

Happy writing! And remember: whenever you say "ars longa, vita brevis," finish the phrase.