Writing Blog

20230606 Last Lesson

June 6, 2023, 1:15pm

First of two things for today.

I forgot to post this at the time.

We had the last lesson with the family!

The daughter tried another descriptive piece, and it is getting there. She wants to work on a fantasy novel. Thankfully, it's stand-alone and not the first in a quadrilogy, and is based on a farm-girl in a proper medieval world (so historical fantasy, I guess) who finds a small tribe of some sort of creature, and has to protect them from the rest of the humans, learning their magic along the way. Sounds interesting. My biggest advice was to get rid of all her world-building info-dumps, and drip feed things in. I showed her a book about a knight under King Edward II to show her what I meant, and I think she's got it.

The father has written the first chapter of his non-fiction book about his own father, who had been a conscientious objector in the Vietnam War days. It is really good so far. I did warn him to be a little less emotional about it, unless he was going to indicate how it affected him personally. It's a fine line, and I'm not 100% sure which way would be the best approach.

The mother is writing a horror story, a ghost tale which she tells me is going to be quite gory. She has decided no child characters, but instead she is basing the characters on her and her friends from when she first started work, so young women in their early 20s. She reckons it is going to be like Evil Dead but without the demon possession thing. Her opening is very promising, but I did suggest she remember the "show, not tell" way of building up dread and characterisation.

So, that's it. I am now just on call for whatever the family needs.