Ruth’s Blog
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Could my novels become a television series? The story begins….
This is a question I've been asking myself for several years, wondering what it would take to translate my stories and characters and settings to the screen, small or large. There have always seemed to be barriers, and I had no idea how I might achieve this very...
Writing a memoir
My last book was written three years ago, and since then I've been unsure whether I had either the motivation or the time to write another. In 2022 I wrote a play because I was asked to do so. The writing, followed by taking the play to the stage, took up the whole of...
A new venture – my first play ‘The Day the Iron Works Closed’
Hello again, after another long absence! I've been busy this year, but not with the usual activity of writing a novel. Several months ago, I was commissioned by a project called Deep Time (http.deeptime.uk) to write a piece about West Cumbria's rich industrial...
It’s been a while! What have I been doing since Covid19 began?
It's January 2022, and it's been a long time since I posted on my own website. I've actually been posting like mad, but elsewhere, on other websites and Facebook pages that I seem to have been dragged into over the past year or so. Time to make amends, and for some...
This year’s book is at the printers!
Here it is - the cover of the new book. It's due out on November 6th 2020, a child of the lockdown, and a good yarn. I'll add it to my Paypal-linked website bookshop before publication day, and the Kindle version will be available after Christmas. The ISBN number is...
The muddle in the middle
I can’t be the only one who struggles with a muddle in the middle. This is the stage where the story gets complicated, and possible blind alleys are introduced to tempt the reader but end up confusing the writer instead.
A fresh start!
“Tension and disagreements make for good stories,”
Problem with Endings
Eighty-five thousand words in, with a plan that looked OK for a while and has now been changed countless times, I'm still unsure how to end the story. I've been here many times before, six times before in fact, once for each of my previous novels. Endings are the bane...
Plot, character and setting: which comes first?
When I'm talking about writing, explaining the balance between plot, character, point of view and setting is a helpful starting point for people who haven't yet thought about how a novel is developed. In my West Cumbrian trilogy, the first novels I wrote, setting was...
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