Romy Sommer

Aside from the comeback of mood rings, and the fact that there are even scarier things around than vampires, most of what I've learned from the addictive CW television series, The Vampire Diaries , is writing-related. It's been a year since I blogged about what we writers could learn from The Vampire Diaries over on The Minxes blog , and there is still so much more I'd like to share with you. So pull up a comfy sofa and a glass of your favourite drink, and get ready. First, here's a re-cap of the posts I've already done: The first posts were about the earliest lightbulb moments I had while watching Series 1. You can read An Awakening - Part One here , and Part Two here . My next blog post was on Motivation - the importance of ensuring that the actions and decisions of each and every character are well motivated. Then came Character Arcs - using examples from The Vampire Diaries to show how characters can change and grow. Next was a post on Acting out...

My good friend Mandy and I are planning to start teaching novel-writing writing courses soon. Here in South Africa there's a dearth of courses aimed at writers (or aspiring writers) of commercial fiction. Here, if you're a poet or write literary fiction dripping in political angst, you've got it made. Write commercial fiction? Not so much. Another reason I see a huge need to pass on what I've learned over the last few years is that I really believe anyone can write a novel. (Can anyone publish? Well, that's a whole other blog post.) But I very strongly believe that anyone who wants to write a novel can - and should. We all started at that place where we said "I want to write a novel one day". Some of us did it because we had the discipline and focus to make ourselves sit down and write. Some of us needed a bit of a shove from friends or family. All of us discovered along the way that we had a helluva lot to learn. And hopefully, like me, most of us d...