Antony Johnston

A lot of young writers ask me about my process. They know what they want to write - but they need to know how. What's the right way? How do the professionals do it? What's the secret? ”

My process is kind of intuitive - I think about how a character will speak according to their station and personality, occasionally making notes with guidelines for their mannerisms, and then I just sort of crack on and write it. ”

There are many ways to improve your writing. Here's the bad news: 1.They all require hard work. 2.There is no magic bullet. ”

The general public has been conditioned to think 'comics = superheroes' for as long as caped crusaders have been around - by critics, mass media, and Marvel and DC themselves, who have what you might call a vested interest. ”

I sometimes see People On The Internet decrying work-in-progress tweets and posts as worthless. 'Measuring output by quantity rather than quality is dangerous,' they say. 'More work doesn't mean better work!' ”

A 300pp novel can easily become a 200pp novel by printing with smaller type; a 100pp screenplay can potentially become a film of between 60-140 minutes in length; a 200pp stage play could be performed in anything from 30 minutes to four hours. For all these media, the script length is agnostic to the final work. ”

I've always loved 'lived-in' sci-fi. We take it for granted now, but it was a revelation in the late '70s - '80s, when movies like 'Alien', 'Escape From New York', and even 'Star Wars' introduced us to the idea that the future could, in fact, look old. ”

I like high fantasy as much as the next guy, but I also like a bit of grit and grime with my faux-medieval trappings. ”