Image Credits:-
All images from Pixabay/Pexels unless otherwise stated. Some images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. Screenshots taken by me, Allison Symes. I also took photos from my Scottish break this year to illustrate light and dark. See further down. Book cover images from Chapeltown Books and Bridge House Publishing. I hope you have a lovely Christmas, however you celebrate it, and I hope there are plenty of books amongst your presents!
Facebook – General – and Chandler’s Ford Today
Pleased to share my Merry Christmas post on Chandler’s Ford Today. I share the link to the Three Minute Santas festive flash fiction broadcast on North Manchester FM hosted by Hannah Kate and another story called Festivities.
I also discuss the joy of writing festive pieces and share some thoughts about “baking the perfect story”. I mention ingredients and method too! Hope you enjoy the post. And as the post says, Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas!
Other half and I have now had the booster. Rest of family will be “done” tomorrow. Will be a relief to have it dealt with. And a big thanks to the lovely folk at Salisbury City Hall today. Hubby and I jabbed and out in under 10 minutes.
I’m sharing festive flash fiction on Chandler’s Ford Today this week. Link up tomorrow. See above!
To all who were shortlisted in the Friday Flash Fiction festive competition, well done.
Best writing tip of the year for me was to record on Zoom a practice run of any talks/presentations ahead of giving them. Zoom converts any recording into a mp4 file. I found on playing things back I was speaking too fast. Yet it didn’t seem as if I was when recording.
Lesson learned here: you are not always the best judge of how you come across. You can’t fool a recording on play back! But worth noting and learning from.
Indulged in some alternative creative therapy earlier – Christmas baking! Best of all, it meant I had to be in the warm on what has been a bitterly cold day for a lot of the UK. It is another advantage to writing – generally you do it indoors!
Have started indulging in my favourite Christmas stories – watched The Muppet Christmas Carol, which is just brilliant. Next up on my list will be Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather.
No YouTube video from me this week and I will probably not submit anything to Friday Flash Fiction over the Christmas period but I will look forward to resuming both of those after a bit of a break.
Am currently reading two excellent flash fiction collections by other authors and hope to review those in due course. Yes, I read in my genre as well as outside of it. You do need to know what is going on in your field too. No two writers go about their storytelling in exactly the same way and I find the differences in style and approach fascinating.
What we can do is learn from one another – what works well, what doesn’t and so on. I know I’ve been grateful (and will continue to be) for learning this way. One aspect to creative writing is we keep on learning – how to improve our craft, get better at spotting what markets are best suited for our work etc – and that is so good for us in terms of this keeping our brains active and in terms of encouraging and developing our own creativity.
Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again
Hope you have a lovely Christmas and get to enjoy plenty of books, stories, flash fiction tales etc. The latter is of course ideal for a quick read when time is tight! I’ll be back posting on here again next week.
Meantime, I’m sharing the link to my page on CafeLit where you will find a mixture of flash pieces and short stories. Hope you enjoy. Merry Christmas! (And yes it is a good reminder to me to submit more work to CafeLit next year!).
M = More flash tales for 2022.
E = Exploring more genres and varying word counts
R= Remembering not to exceed the 1000 word limit for flash.
R = Rules can be stretched a bit – hyphenated words count as one word in flash.
Y = Yet noting you do still have to hyphenate where that is legitimate – no cheating!
C = Characters are the stars of the stories.
H = Hearing their tales, their voices is what readers want.
R = Readers are your audience of course so write with them in mind.
I = Imaginative characters in unique settings will grab readers’ attention.
S = Stories – it is all about the story and its impact on readers.
T = Truth is often revealed by characters, usually showing some aspect of our nature.
M = Mirroring life, stories can share what we might not like to discuss in more palatable ways.
A = Always be truthful in your writing even when telling stories – you have to believe it first.
S = Structure and editing – don’t rush either as it pays to get these right.
Merry Christmas!
Turning the tables on a character is great fun to do and I’ve used this for my longer short stories too. (My It Is Time from Mulling It Over by Bridge House Publishing is a good example of this).
You have the ending set up in advance – the moment the tables are turned and this is especially true for a flash story where it works best as the last line. What you need to work out is whether the character deserves having the tables turned like that or whether you are going to leave your readers with a sense of pity for your character where such a thing is undeserved.
If your character does deserve what is coming to them (and most of mine do), then you need to work out why. Also are your characters going to have a chance to redeem themselves, say, or do they blithely ignore all of that and what hits them hits them?
One of the reasons I love A Christmas Carol is because Scrooge does deserve the fright he gets but he recognizes this and accepts the need to change. That kind of story is so positive and I love them.
And it’s perfectly feasible to do this in flash. This kind of story is where I do work from the ending back to the start and use a spider diagram to help me work out the best start. I’ve found that technique for this kind of story is especially effective as it ensures I have the “turn around” written and good to go. I can then work out what led to that. You don’t have to always write A to Be. B to A can work really well too. Give it a go!
Fairytales with Bite – Light and Dark of Fairytales
Fairytales reflect the light and dark side of life. They show cruelty up for what it is and ensure the villains get their comeuppance, though this doesn’t usually happen for a while. Pantomime, which so often uses fairytales as the story base, adds humour into the mix. But both of these don’t shy away for calling out the dark and ensuring the light triumphs.
Maybe, because we know so often that doesn’t happen in real life, the appeal of fairytales is very long lasting. I think there is a deep-rooted need to see wrong being righted. I know I feel that way.
Fairytales are also realistic about what human nature can be. We don’t question Snow White’s stepmother’s murderous intent. We just know some people are just like that, again motivated by envy a lot of the time, or being unable to accept the person they’re feeling murderous towards for other reasons.
But fairytales can also show virtue being rewarded and I’ve always loved that aspect, again because it so often doesn’t happen for real (even though it should!).
So fairytales are far from twee then. They’re open to interpretation and cover a wide range of emotions we recognise in ourselves. Light and dark both have to be shown – and shown honestly – and I feel fairytales are brilliant at that. I don’t feel they will ever lose their appeal simply due to that.
This World and Others – Deciding What You Need to Know
Every writer, regardless of what they write, needs to decide what they need to know before bringing their story to life. I need to know my character’s major traits (and as a result what can come from those). I don’t need to know what they look like and, even when I do, that comes in later for me. Other writers need to have an idea of what their people look like before fleshing them out more. Different strokes and all that.
When it comes to world building, what do you need to know there? Do you need to know the physical geography of your setting or its political make up? Do you need to know both and one directly affects the other? If so, how? What will make your fictional world seem real to you? You have to believe it first before any reader might.
It would pay to take time out then. You have this great idea. You have fantastic characters you can’t wait to bring to life on the page. So what do you need to know to make the most of these, to get the best out of them? Even if you don’t usually plan, a little forward planning could save you considerable time on the editing later on.
And it may well be you will need to know things the reader does not but that knowledge will help you write your characters with more conviction. It is my belief (as a reader and a writer) that sense of conviction does come through.
It is what I think keeps readers glues to characters and their stories. It definitely pays to work out in advance what you need to know to convince yourself. You will write with more confidence. You will know this character. You will know their story. I hope you find a bit of forward planning helps you against the wretched Imposter Syndrome which affects most writers at some point.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels.com
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://t.co/KLrtuZwD59 In my CFT post, I share the link to the Three Minute Santas festive flash fiction broadcast on North Manchester FM hosted by Hannah Kate and a tale called Festivities. I discuss writing festive pieces and “baking the perfect story”. Merry Christmas! pic.twitter.com/V7pFOw0zJ0
— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) December 24, 2021
Allison Symes: Collected Works 