Fi Phillips

You may have noticed a recent addition to this blog, the '7 Ways' Articles (on the left hand side column). I'll be adding to this list on a regular basis so keep an eye out for new '7 Ways' articles.

If you follow me on Twitter , then you'll know that my current writing project is a TV script based on one of my murder mystery plays. I'm accustomed to writing scripts for the stage and had assumed that writing a script for television would be, well, the same. How wrong I was. When writing a theatre script, I provide dialogue, setting and basic stage directions (entrances, exits, the occasional onstage move). I like to leave the interpretation of the script down to the director and actor. Over the years, I've stopped adding comments to dialogue like 'nervously' or 'sheepishly' and now leave that decision down to the theatre group involved. When I started reading through TV scripts and writing my own, however, I quickly became aware that the story is told very differently. Whereas with one of my theatre scripts I supply the skeleton and perhaps some muscle, it is the actor who fleshes out the role and provides the heart. With a television script, however, I ...

I follow several writing and book related blogs and one of my favourites is The Sharp Angle written by Joe and Lydia Sharp, two science fiction writers. The title of their latest article caught my eye, ‘I Write Like...’. Although I value what I like to think is the individuality of my writing voice, it’s also interesting to see which well known authors I might be compared to. On investigation, the article was about a site called ‘I Write Like’ (strangely enough) which, among other things, analyzes your writing for free, telling you which author or authors your writing resembles. Now seeing as I use my writing in several ways, I used an extract from each. These were the results. Using the first page of the fantasy novel I’m writing, Dark Divide, I get the following result. I write like James Joyce I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software . Analyze your writing! Putting an extract from one of my murder mystery plays to the test, it turns out that I write like Edgar Alla...