Helping Hand

by Alistair Dunlop
10th January 2012

Throughthe Big+ I have been working with a young man who needed help with his writing. Turned out it was really just punctuation. He wanted to be a writer and rather than use worksheets, used his own writing to sort out the problems. He finished his first draft, we tried to correct it and make improvemnets, realised the ending would have to be changed, and he seemed to lose heart, and moved on to his second novel. Shouls I just let the first one languish? Also young man is severely disable, has written a great crime story but not much style in the writing

Replies

G has now gone back to his first novel while I catch up checking the grammar in his second one as he did quite a bit over the Christmas break. Caught up last week as his grammar is now not really a problem. Have a feeling he may now write two stories at once! He prefers the second one as it is sci-fi which is what he wants to write. The first one is a cime novel which is quite a story and deserves to be published considering his physical problems and the progress he has made in writing.

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Alistair
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Alistair Dunlop
07/02/2012

What a fantastic series of events!

I abandoned my first first-draft after deciding that although I liked the characters and general theme of the story I wanted to tell it from a different point of view.

I still have the first first-draft sitting on my computer at around 15000 words. Maybe one day I will revisit it. But it may also end up being the prequel to one of my main characters. At this stage I am not quite sure.

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Anthony Scott Glenn
07/02/2012

Sounds like encouraging him ended up encouraging you, Alistair, which has a certain kind of symmetry.

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