Central Narrative:
So you have the foundation to build a narrative from here but nothing in the way of an actual narrative yet. You have a skull that speaks with a British accent. Which isn't all that interesting or engaging on its own. Although skips don't necessarily need a backstory to make them engageing for the reader, they do need something interesting to hook the reader in. Dinosaurs are cool, no denying that. An article about a dinosaur skull that talks with an accent won't engage readers for long unless there is some substance behind the narrative.
What will be important, if you're not following the tried and tested method of giving your skip a reason for its existence/creation etc, is to think of other ways to make it interesting for the reader. Perhaps consider making the meat of your story revolve around the skulls discovery? That could certainly be a good place to build reader engagement. For example, let's pick a setting. Say the skull is found in a museum and suddenly starts conversing with customers? That gives you room to show the character of your skip right off the bat. And depending what tone you're going for, would be a good place to set it.
Say you don't want a discovery log, where can we build a hook? Is the skull the only one that can talk? Maybe the skull is privy to knowledge that there are others like them? You could have it tease the Foundation, dangling this knowledge in-front of them?
Those are just some very basic examples of trying to craft a hook to hang your reader engagement on. Try ask yourself some questions about your skip, see what narrative ideas they spawn. What is the skull's goal? How does it feel about its current situation? Does it remember its time as a dinosaur? How does it react to containment? How does it feels towards the Foundation? Etc.
You'll need to consider what tone you're trying to achieve with this idea. Are you going for something on the comedic side? Something action orientated? Emotional? Or a mystery perhaps? Think about how you want the reader to feel towards your skip, that might give you a better idea of what tone you want. Whatever it may be, it'll give you a better understanding of how you're going to characterise everyone in the article and keep the piece tonally consistent.
The first thing you need to do is try and craft a narrative so critters can give you more in-depth, thorough critique. Atm there really isn't much that can be gauged from what you've included in your overall pitch.
Hook/Attention-Grabber:
So what will be vitally important, and I can't stress this enough, is that you know exactly what kind of characterisation you're going for in regard to the skull. If its origins aren't going to be shown in the article then you've already lost one potential avenue for reader engagement. So really you'll have to both think very hard about the characterisation and the dialogue. If the dialogue is too stilted, corny, slapdash or lacks verisimilitude etc then I feel the article would quickly fall-apart. I'm certainly a stickler for good, believable dialogue and would downvote articles that don't do it well. Especially ones that rely heavily on it.
So to continue that line of thought, how exactly do you intend to characterise the skull? Because it's an inanimate object you'll need to concentrate on indirect characterisation. I.e through speech, reaction, emotion, action etc in different situations. Indirect characterisation is essentially showing over telling what the character is like.
So this is admittedly a little picky on my part, but as a pommy I need to ask. What accent are you intending to portray? British accent denotes the UK as a whole. That includes, Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England. Our tiny island has A LOT of different accents and variations of such. I assume you're intending to go for a classic English Toff/ott posh accent right? If so, keep in mind that over-egging such an accent could turn people away from the article. Don't make it the sole focus of the character, if all its characterisation is the accent then all you'll have is a gimmicky hollow character.
Page Layout (Optional):
How long are you intending the article to be? Keep in mind that the description of the skip isn't important to the narrative/reader engagement (unless the whole idea is primarily built around the complexity of what the skip is). We don't need to know the minute details of an Estemmenosuchus skull is or what its physiology was and the like. Be weary of needlessly adding exposition dump. Exposition is telling, telling is boring! Unless it's important for plot reasons you should avoid exposition imo. Otherwise you'll have a bloated article that the reader will lose interest in before they get to the interesting meat of your story.
If I've missed anything or misunderstood anything please correct me! If you reply and want me to respond feel free to DM, as wikidot doesn't notify when people reply to posts.
