In my 10,000 Twitter Followers Q&A there was one question I didn't answer as well as I probably should. After some follow-up conversations I decided to do a separate video on building and developing characters. I hope you find it useful!

Reaching 10,000 Twitter followers has caught me a bit by surprise. It feels like I published the 9000 Twitter Followers Q&A five minutes ago, and here we are again! I hope you enjoy it and find some nuggets of gold in there! I ramble a little, have two unexpected rants on semi-controversial subjects, and get interrupted by Alexa only once. All in all it went well!

I met Matthew Ward last year, when John Jarrold offered me representation. While waiting for other Agents to get back to me, I asked John if I could talk to any of his clients, and he put me in touch with Matthew. It was a Thursday when the request went out and he got back straight away, offering a zoom call the next evening. We chatted for, I think, over an hour, and meandered through a series of subjects, mostly literary and heavily nerdy.

Naturally, I wanted that nerdiness for the I.W.C, and his contributions have been excellent.

Ida Keogh is a jeweller and metal sculptor, an aerial acrobat, model, and now a BSFA Award winning writer.
I first met Ida in person when we, and a few other wonderful people, kidnapped Gareth Powell from his Light of Impossible Stars signing at the Forbidden Planet just off Leicester Square. I was delighted to hear that Ida had won the award, and I thought I’d make the most of my friendly privileges by asking a few questions!

I didn’t think too long about my first tattoo. I needed it at the time, it was a solution to a particular problem. This is the story behind my “yes”.

- This is a very personal blog post and I talk about the realities of losing my dad to cancer while at University. If you’re going through something similar or feeling raw it might not be for you -

I first met Chris Beckett over email when our Literary Agent, John Jarrold, offered me representation. I asked John if I could chat to any of his existing clients, and he introduced us. Some time passed, and a few months ago, I was listed alongside Chris as the Sci-Fi offering for Season 4 of The Alternative Stories and Fake Realities podcast. This provided an excellent excuse to get back in touch, and obviously I used the opportunity to ask some questions…

TRIGGER WARNING: will contain graphic descriptions of annotations in books.

As a writer, every book I pick up, regardless of genre, is a tool for learning.

How writers structure their work, build characters, interweave foreshadowing into the early narrative, all of these things are there, within the pages, to be unlocked, noticed and noted.

The InkWalker Collective was born when Adrian Walker (The End of the World Running Club, The Human Son, etc) and myself got talking about how music influences our writing. We set out on a writer’s side quest, gathered a group of fellow authors, and collaborated on a series of playlists.

I managed to catch up with Tim Hardie a few weeks ago...

Reaching 9000 twitter followers has highlighted a few things. The first is how much I love and value the Twitter Writing Community, and the second is how much I’ve learned since starting out there about eighteen months ago.

To mark this crazy milestone I never thought I’d reach, I decided to offer a Q&A session. My biggest fear was that I’d put the offer out and I’d get no questions! But once again, my friends came through.

So here it is, my clumsy, yet genuine, response to the questions asked.

Since launching The InkWalker Collective, Adrian Walker and I have gathered a gang of talented and wonderful wordy friends to contribute, and we’ve released some great playlists. Out of pure curiosity I sent my co-conspirator some specific questions about just how much of an influence music has been on his writing.

Readers play an active role in the process of making a book. The characters are being presented to the reader and the reader will ultimately judge whether or not they pass the test. The test being plausibility; does the character stand true and consistent in the face of what’s thrown at them throughout the narrative?

Welcome to the InkWalker Collective, a Spotify playlist project by writers, for writers. A group of us have got together and created playlists to suit most moods, providing you with soundtracks to fuel your creativity!

So far contributors include Adrian Walker, Derek Künsken, Daniel Soule, Tim Hardy, Matthew Ward, Rod Duncan, Ida Keogh, Emma Leadley and Madeleine White, with more to come!

The truth is that with a book, or story, the centre of your creation is character. If you write good enough characters, you could stick them in a giant cardboard box and I'd still want to know what happens between them. In writing a book or story, any kind of book or story, setting is secondary.

If you’re like me, you pants your way through writing a book.
Afterwards I always retrospectively apply certain frameworks to help gain some outside perspective on what I’ve written. These usually centre on where the action occurs and how it builds throughout the narrative. I call this “heat mapping”.

You know what a world looks like. You live in one. It is complex and dysfunctional and implausible and glorious. Creating a world as rich and diverse as the one we currently live in is impossible. At least, there is far too much to include in a book that anyone would want to read.

As a result, I have found that building a world is also an exercise in building the walls that contain it.

…So here I will say that copywriting is the art of isolating and communicating one single idea, whereas novel writing is about weaving together a whole ragged bunch of them. And more than that, the idea being communicated in copy, needs to be upfront, laid bare and said quickly… In a novel, ideas have space to move around and to grow and to form slowly in the reader’s mind. Crucially, there’s often more than one, they can be complex and they can also be up for interpretation.

Disney’s Moana has been highly acclaimed for its masterful fairytale narrative, its respectful approach to the polynesian culture, and its compelling and well rounded characters. Moana herself is bold and inspiring and the motives that drive the plot are compelling. However, what is most interesting about the film is the way in which Moana’s story develops and what ultimately gives her the strength to finish what she starts.

Imagine you’re writing a book and one team is working on chapter 1, another is working on chapter 2 and another is working on chapter 3 ...while the teams are concentrating on chapters 1-3 there’s hope that with the right management the story set-up will be coherent and successfully support the rest of the plot.

Then imagine that an editor runs in and says:

“We need chapter 6 right now!”