#WriteCBC tip and task from Samuel Burr
BY Emily Powter-Robinson
6th Jun 2024
Welcome to our June 2024 #WriteCBC prompt challenge. I hope you’re ready to be inspired by our latest writing tip and task! If you haven’t taken part in a #WriteCBC X/Twitter competition before, we’re excited to welcome you to our writing community. Get up to speed by reading our blog full of information about how to play and the prizes on offer. It’s a lot of fun, and you might just win a free place on one of our six-week online writing courses.
This month’s special guest is Samuel Burr, Sunday Times Bestselling author of The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, out now with Orion publishing. Samuel studied on our our six-week Starting to Write Your Novel course in 2019.
Read our interview with Samuel
Samuel's Writing Tip:
- Mysterious character behaviours can help provide intrigue and make the reader pause to think. Maybe they pull something strange out of their pocket? Bury something in the ground? Say something quite unexpected in a chat with their friend?
Clues and secrets are integral to the storyline of Samuel's debut novel. The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers is a charming story about self-discovery as an orphan brought up by Britain’s top puzzlemakers unveils the great secret of his inheritance.
Read the opening passage from the novel, in which Pippa Allsbrook discovers a baby abandoned at birth on the steps of the Fellowship of Puzzlemakers:
- As Pippa removed the lid – which had been left deliberately unsecured – she was so overcome her legs started to buckle. She reached for the pillar of the porch to steady herself and folded her spare hand against her pounding chest, stealing another glimpse inside.
Surely not.
Tucked inside the flowery paper lining of the box, a beautiful little baby, presumably no more than a few days old, was swaddled in a custard yellow blanket, crying its heart out.
This opening scene introduces readers to the central mystery of the story: the mystery of Clayton Stumper's parentage. Samuel's novel is full of plot twists and clues that keeps readers guessing and trying to work out the answers before they are revealed to them.
Which leads us nicely onto Samuel's task...
Samuel's Writing Task:
- Clues come in all shapes and sizes. Tease your readers by planting a clue to a secret your character is keeping. Write a Tweet-length mini scene which shows that perhaps there’s more to this character than meets the eye.
We’d love you to write a tweet-length response prompted by Samuel's task. Here is some more advice to help you get the ball rolling.
Remember this task is about setting up a layer of intrigue and a question that demands an answer. The more questions you can raise, the better opportunity you have of crafting a novel that keeps readers guessing.
Clues are particularly popular in crime and thriller novels, but clues can also be a powerful plotting tool in any genre. Many readers love crime and thriller fiction because it appeals to their intellectual vanity. They want to lock horns with you and see if they can work out the answers before you reveal them. At any point in time, they will be coming up with their own theories in response to the questions you’ve raised, based on the evidence you’ve provided so far. Your aim should be to guide them towards one hypothesis, only to then pull the rug out from under them.
Here are few more tips to inspire you:
- Clues come in all shapes and sizes.
1. Physical clues: These are clues related to evidence e.g. in a crime novel they would include forensic evidence.
2. Verbal Clues: These are clues presented to us through conversation or remarks overhead or made by other characters in your book.
3. Circumstantial: These are tangentially related clues, usually physical clues that hint at something, but make no definite statements. - Foreshadowing is an important technique that you can use to mentally prepare your readers, directly raising the questions that you want them to think about. Essentially you show something seemingly inconsequential now that later leads to a lightbulb moment.
- Don’t make your red herrings clumsily obvious. When done properly, readers will be surprised by the misdirection, and will have learned something useful along the way. It’s also important to make sure your red herrings are plausible.
We can’t wait to read your tweet-length scenes. Tweet @cbcreative with your responses to Samuel's task and you might win a free six-week online writing course place. Competition closes Fri 7 Jun, 10am (winner announced at 11am).
Congratulations to this month’s winner, Emilie Castera @EmilieCastera1
- “It’s so peaceful here. We needed to leave the craziness of London.” By now, the official version of the reason behind our move comes out more naturally. I have presented it so often that I can almost believe it was the only motivation for our new life here.
We loved how subtly you dropped in this sinister clue to your readers! Your use of a verbal clue, with your protagonist's lie about why they moved out of London, is simple yet so effective. Immediately, we are drawn into the conversation, desperate to know what secret the protagonist is concealing about their past. You really got to the heart of this #WriteCBC task! Well done, Emilie – you get a free place on a £220 online course.
And this month’s runners-up – each getting a £50 course discount – are Juliet Trushell @juliet_tru and Heather Byrne @heatherjbyrne. Congratulations, all!
To redeem your prizes please email help@curtisbrowncreative.co.uk
Brilliant fun – hope you all enjoyed it and see you next month.
The books linked in this blog can be found on our Bookshop.org shop front. Curtis Brown Creative receive 10% whenever someone buys from our bookshop.org page.