When I went on a creative writing course last summer, one of the guest speakers - Tom Mogford - talked to us about writing crime novels (the title of his lecture was The Everyman Hero: Writing Your First Crime Novel). During the course of his talk, he explained that by Everyman Hero, he meant a protagonist, or main character, who is not a policeman or some sort of secret agent or anything - he or she is just a normal person who has been embroiled in this crime, whatever it may be, through other means - by a misunderstanding, perhaps.
The example Mr Mogford gave to us was that your innocent character has been randomly approached - on the street, maybe - by a complete stranger who offers money for your character to assassinate somebody your character has neither met nor heard of. The hypothesis behind this, Mr Mogford explained, is that most murders are committed by somebody the victim knew - often intimately. But what if somebody is murdered by somebody completely unrelated? If your character knew that because of this there was a 100% chance of them never being discovered (let's just say it's 100% for the sake of this), what would they do?
I can neither remember the exact beginning sentence which Mr Mogford proposed we use for the writing exercise we then did nor find the piece of writing I wrote beginning with it, so this is just an approximation, but, nevertheless...
Based on the idea outlined above, this week's (two days late) writing prompt is to begin your story thusly:
My name is... [insert your character's name here] ...and I have been asked to kill another human being.
Good luck and enjoy writing!
Additionally, I would like to add that I am using this idea to run a meeting at my school's creative writing club tomorrow. Wish me luck!! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment