Facebook – General – and Chandler’s Ford Today
It’s a joy to review the plays performed by The Chameleon Theatre Group as there is always a good mix of shows put on during the course of a year. I’ve watched pantos, tragedies, and comedies. Each review I do for CFT on these means having a look at the background of the play and/or the writers of it and I always learn something.
It’s a great way of taking in stories that are new to you: go and see them acted on stage!
A Bunch of Amateurs is written by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman. The plot hinges on a local theatre company, the Stratford Players, desperately trying to save their theatre so bringing in a fading American star, Jefferson Steel, to get sponsorship and bring in the punters seems such a good idea…. You know the phrase “famous last words”? Well, that applies here!
Image Credit: All images below are kindly supplied by Lionel Elliott and the Chameleon Theatre Group and used with permission. Many thanks to them.
Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again
I was watching a Dr Who episode tonight (Peter Capaldi) and a phrase “stories are where memories go” caught my attention. Mind, it many ways it should do!
What memories of a character could you turn into a flash fiction piece (or longer)? Can you write a story where a character is led astray by mistaken or deliberately falsified memories (and why would someone do that)? Have you got another character who uses memories as weapons against others and how do they do this? What do they gain? How are they stopped, assuming that they are?
There are some good stories to be written out of memories, that’s for sure! (And the great thing is you can create the memories to write about in first place. The lovely thing about fiction is it should be rooted in truth to ring true to your readers, but it doesn’t actually have to be true, otherwise we’d have little in the way of sci-fi or fantasy!).
Fairytales with Bite – The Magic of the Theatre
My latest CFT post is a review of A Bunch of Amateurs (written by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman), which was recently performed by the Chameleon Theatre Group. It was a great play, brilliantly performed. But it led me to thinking:-
1. Going to the theatre is a great way of taking in stories!
2. In your fictional world(s), how do your characters take in stories? Do they read? Do they have theatres/cinemas etc? What would they watch/read?
3. When you go to a performance like this, you go in knowing you are seeing a “pretence” but being willing to suspend disbelief. You focus on wanting to see how the story ends and enjoy the performances taking you to that point. The challenge for writers is hooking our readers quickly enough at the start of the story to achieve the same effect for the length of the tale, whether it is a flash piece or a trilogy of novels! So face the challenge! The key is in creating characters readers will want to follow through anything.
Happy writing!
This World and Others – Why Non-Fiction Matters to Fiction Writers
I’ve written about this in a post for Chandler’s Ford Today (Fiction -v- Non-Fiction? No Contest!) a while ago, but it is a topic close to my pen so thought I’d bring it up again here. Why does reading non-fiction matter to fiction writers then?
1. If you are writing material which means you need to world build, finding out how this world works/has worked/has made blunderingly colossial historical mistakes/created some fascinating engineering etc can directly inspire you for how your fictional world carries out these things. (Sometimes it can be the direct opposite of how we’ve done it but you need to know how we did it first to be able to do that!).
2. Ideas spark off other ideas and non-fiction is full of them. What did make an inventor come up with their revolutionary new designs? What made them come up with a new system for, say, transport when nobody else had realised a need for it? There are ideas for characters here too…
3. When anyone comes up with something new, there will be opposition. Sometimes it’s justified, sometimes not. How does your hero/heroine overcome that? Or if they are the ones behind the opposition, do they achieve their objective?
Plenty of story triggers there!
Allison Symes: Collected Works 