The Process of writing ‘6 of the greatest changes the Daniel Craig era has brought to James bond ’.
As part of this weeks directed study our task was too write a story in a particular genre by observing other pieces of work in that genres structure and emulating it in our work. This is a short blog of the process I took.
11/10/2021
Deciding on a genre:
The first thing to choose before starting was the genre with which i wanted to write in . For me this week i wanted to choose the genre of Listicles as it was quite a different type of writing and structure compared to the more Cortazzi based structure (Fulton , 2005) I followed for last weeks directed study.
Planning and existing examples:
So the theme i settled on was James Bond related after watching the latest instalment of the franchise and reliving my youth of watching older bond films. It brought up a variety of questions , why is Bond such an event in the UK, what attracts cinema goers so much to his story and what makes a good bond movie.
Specifically, I wanted to focus on the Craig era which has been the predominant era throughout my life, and why he is such a great bond. As i have thought about my responses to this i feel they would fit naturally into a list.
To help with this theme i had a look at many Bond related listicles finding that whilst the format of the genre of some listicles is very short with little information on each item this was not the case with most Bond related listicles. In many of these they were towards the upper 200 word limit for each element within the listicle and more in depth than other types . This is likely to be due to nature of films being intensely scrutinised by critics and as many of these listicles features on ‘film-buff’ related websites with an audience centred around the film lover these innate details were required.
Some of the Bond related listicles i looked at included:
- Daniel Craig’s 10 greatest bond moments: Odeon.
- No Time to die: Daniel Craig’s 10 best bond moments, Ranked: ScreenRant.
- James Bond : 5 Best Daniel Craig moments: Filmwire.
These articles gave me a good idea of some of the listicles out there related to my chosen topic and what there focus was. I also looked up articles on writing listicles in a good manner and found some salient points.
- List elements are between 100–200 words usually.
- They begin with an introduction and end with a concluding point too. Much like Cortazzi’s structure.
- Some may have call to actions at the end.
- Your title shouldn’t be of the ‘ Clickbait’ nature.
- Paragraphs are usually short following conventions of the web format.
- Try to have a unique angle for your listicle over other ones out there.
Taking this advice on-board i began to write my listicle with the focus coming from my experience of James Bond films and with a different focus on what Daniel Craig brought to the role not simply his greatest moments. This would mean that my listicle is not going to get lost in the best bond moments category of which many listicles on this subject already exist.
Professional Context:
Also important is professional context as in all pieces of work and it certainly impacted my writing within the piece . This is as initially felt a need to explain who each of the characters were whilst explaining things Craig brought to the role. I eventually realised however that only Bond fans generally would be reading this and therefore would have a good background knowledge of the plots meaning such explanations where not needed.
12/10/2021
Following on from yesterdays work on the piece i finished of the listicle and re-examining the listicles I looked at yesterday decided it was more in style with the genre too have it written from an impersonal way. This meant the narrator was effaced now from the story and it took on more of a industry body of film nature.
I also have edited the whole thing for basic as it is a piece of web-writing and the same features were seen on many of the examples i read of many pictures , links, scannability etc. The only exception was little quotes were found in this genre of a listicle so they were not included.
How could it be different?
One way it could be different is exploring these themes in more of a film review manner etc looking at one of Daniel Craig’s bond films and framing it in the bigger picture of his tenure as Bond. Equally the listicle could be adapted into like best moments and then explain the themes within them.
Also the number of points could be altered or split into Daniel Craig’s own influence and the influence of the era eg new screenwriters etc.
