At the end of last year, an award-winning Australian film director told me that people often asked him how to best learn to become a filmmaker. His response – study Breaking Bad created by Vince Gilligan.
Like many of the ground-breaking cable television series, Breaking Bad unfolds like a good novel. David Simon, who created The Wire, another great series, pitched the crime writer, George Pelecanos, to join the writing team with the concept that The Wire was like a novel for television.
One of the outcomes of our 4-Week Unlocking Creativity course is to help participants understand and recognise whether writing fiction is something they want to pursue and make part of their life.
Writing fiction is an art and a craft that takes time to master. If you do want to publish a novel or write a professional screenplay, you need to dedicate time to learning the craft. The same applies to any creative endeavour.
A burning question many aspiring writers often torture themselves with is ‘Do I have the necessary talent required to be a writer?’
People often ask me how many talented writers come to our courses. I respond by saying I believe everyone who has a genuine desire to write has the raw ingredients to be a writer.
More Than Meets the Eye
Having read practically all of Michael Connelly’s books and being very much inspired by his character, Detective Harry Bosch, when writing my novel No Man’s Land, it was great to return to my roots as a journalist, sit down with him at the Wharf during the 2015 Sydney Writers’ Festival and interview him.
He’s a real master of the craft and I felt very fortunate to be able to ask him all those questions that have been bubbling away in my unconscious for years. And I’m pleased to say he seemed like a very decent bloke.
This is an excerpt from an ABC Book Show interview between Jennifer Byrne and best-selling Welsh novelist, Ken Follett. I thought it was a great interview that captured the essence of what makes a successful novel and reflects many of the key principles we apply in our courses at the Writers’ Studio.
In her background briefing of Follett she said, “I think it’s fair to say you went somewhat slowly to the top. Ten books which went nowhere, then the eleventh – Eye Of The Needle, which sold over ten million copies.
Writing a novel or screenplay is an art and a craft that requires writers to go outside their comfort zone and understand the challenges of the creative process.
To fully harness your creative potential, it is essential to grasp the subtleties of the creative process and understand how at first, elements of the craft of writing and storytelling can often feel counter-intuitive or counter-instinctive.
In fiction, particularly commercial fiction, the most important thing is to keep your reader turning the pages. This is what the art and craft of writing fiction is all about.
As the English novelist, E.M. Forster said in his book Aspects of the Novel, a story “… has only one merit: that of making an audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.”