Books by Ian Rogers
Books by Ian Rogers
The best part of writing is getting an inspiration and dashing down a plot. Often this is a story outline - you have to know roughly where you are going. Then there’s story development as story detail unfolds in the full writing. Still fun. Often this leads to an edit; new thoughts have come and the story needs changing and correcting. One young reader spotted a character talking about an event, described earlier in the story, which that particular character couldn’t have known about!
At some point, it’s often a good policy to put the story aside for some weeks and focus on other projects. My first draft of ‘Alcade’ was way back in 1995, the first longer piece I’d ever written. A vanity publishing company I approached gave it a rave review and asked for £4000 to publish a limited number of copies in pseudo-leather hardcovers. Fortunately I had read in ‘The Authors’ and Artists’ Year Book’ that such projects sell only to relatives and pitying friends and the remaining books gather dust on one’s shelves!
Life events meant Alcalde was put away for several years. From an idea by my son (aged 9) I started the ‘Captain Pegg-Legg’ books, and the process repeated; write, revise, show people for feedback, revise again, put down, do something else, go back to it, revise again, seek more opinions, go over it with a fine toothed comb; get a completely new reader to proof reader the ‘final version’. Revise AGAIN in the light of the proof read!!!
In 2005 I sent Alcalde to a colleague in an email workshop run by the Association of Christian Writers. She did an excellent review, highlighting its strong points and suggesting changes to the weaker areas with EXAMPLES of how she would have tackled those bits. Invaluable. Thank you, Rhona.
In July this year I finally applied Rhona’s advice in a big revision of Alcalde and I have decided to release it as a ‘parallel blog’, week by week. To read it, go to ianrogers.org/king. I hope you enjoy it. All feedback to captainpegglegg@btinternet.com is welcome.
<< Next Archive Previous >>