Festival of Chichester: Greg Mosse will help you create A Novel In One Day

Greg will share techniques for developing compelling plots and intriguing characters, gripping locations and cunning twists, creating an outline of a whole novel in just one day on Wednesday, June 15 from 9am-5pm at West Dean College, PO18 0QZ (price includes lunch and refreshments; tickets £128).

Greg is convinced that there is a lot that can be achieved together on the day: “A novel needs a set-up that gives the reader an intriguing environment and then it needs what they call in the film business an inciting event that changes gear. And then you discover all these intriguing and dramatic events that emerge from there.

“I would say that in some fiction and in some films the inciting event happens super early but that seems to be less satisfying because then for the entire novel you are banging on about the same thing. I think maybe the best thing is for it to happen a quarter of the way into the novel or maybe a third of the way because by then we have engaged with the characters.

“If you have it happening too much later, you risk wearying the reader waiting for it to occur.”

An example of just such an inciting event would be the council in the Lord of the Rings, a work which runs to more than a thousand pages.

“The characters are set up and this is all very exciting and then there is the council at Elrond’s house in Rivendell where everybody says ‘What on earth are we going to do about the fact that this evil ring is at large in the world?’ Frodo says he will try but he doesn't really know exactly what to do…

“But in the story that is the inciting event. It changes gear for the story. The challenge is then to destroy the ring and it takes another 700 pages to do that. Whether you enjoy what happens is up to you but that is how it works.”

As Greg says, something similar happens in Shaun of the Dead. People watching the film know that there are zombies. But for the characters in the film. all they know for the first 25 minutes is that there are weird things going on. 25 minutes into the film they discover that there are zombies on the loose: “And that is the inciting moment there.

“But also you have got to get to know the characters. With Hamlet and Shakespeare you have got to get to know the context that his father is dead and he resents the fact that his mother has taken up with his uncle and then we learn that his father was killed and he starts to think what is he going to do about that.

"And then he learns that his father was killed by his uncle who has now married his mother. It becomes his responsibility to do something but he does not want to act until he has proof and so the whole thing becomes a crescendo of how he decides – which is all part of that character’s journey.”