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!”