Writing Prompt 2: The Everyman Hero

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!

Weird Word Of The Week

Here we are again! Another week, another word. So today the word is...

-Drum Roll-

REGICIDE

Some of you may know this one but if not regicide is the act of killing a king. Fair enough right? Helpful for anybody writing a fantasy story :D

See you next post :D

Introduction 2!

 Here goes:

My name is Ross. I am fourteen and therefore currently in my first year of GCSEs (I'm doing Music, Film, History  and German). I love reading (fantasy mostly) and writng (same) and would love to become a writer if i can. I have ideas for a few things, and I am working on making them. Bring on the years and years they will take to write!

Anyway, other things. I am also a big music fan and at the moment I am mostly listening to different variants of Folk Metal. I am also a fan of most kinds of Rock/Metal/Film soundtracks/Norse chanting music...

I will be doing the Weird Word of the Week here as well as contributing to other stuff. 

I know it is not much of an introduction but........hm......probably should've thought of a positive of short introductions........never mind!

Bye for now!

Weird Word Of The Week

Okaaaaaaaaay

So we wanted to do a new thing called....

-Dramatic Drum Roll-

...Weird Word of the Week!
Let me explain, every week I will post a word that i find weird, wonderful and wobbly (because that is an awesome word). They will usually be in English but in some exceptional cases they may be in different languages. This is as sometimes words are too awesome to miss out on.

So this weeks word is

-Another Dramatic Drum Roll-

SPATULAMANCY

Definition: Spatulamancy is a form of divination involving an animal's shoulder blade.

Cool right! Right?

Swiftly moving on, this will hopefully be a weekly thing and for now, I sign off

Welcome!

Let me explain a few things.

I thought a while ago - maybe a year ago, maybe longer - that it would be nice to have a place where writers who know and trust each other can talk about their writing and share it. I shared this thought with a friend of mine, and because we're not very sane, we decided that it would be called Surprise Duck. I can't remember why. The reason will have been incredibly random.

Anyway, I forgot about this for a while, and created my own blog for the purposes of posting my own writing (and other ramblings). It wasn't very successful but I conveniently ignored that fact and continue to do so to this day.

Then, for some unknown reason, the first thought about the writing community returned to me, and that in turn caused the Surprise Duck idea to return as well. So, on a whim, I created it, and then had no idea what to do with it. And here we are now. :)