Image Credits:-
All images from Pixabay/Pexels unless otherwise stated with many created in Book Brush. Book cover images from Chapeltown Books and Bridge House Publishing. Screenshots taken by me, Allison Symes. Many thanks to Geoff Parkes for taking the photo of me at one of my Swanwick Open Prose Mic Nights.
Hope you have had a good week. Lady and I have had a wet week -with many soakings! I am so glad writing is generally an indoor activity where I can stay dry! I share a flash fiction in Fairytales with Bite this time which I hope you enjoy. I also share how I wrote this. I look at character vocabulary too.
Facebook – General and Chandler’s Ford Today
Am pleased to share Ways Into Creating Characters as this week’s post on Chandler’s Ford Today. I hope you find it useful. I look at why stories are character led (I have good reason to think this given how many I invent over a year), and share various tips.
I look at picking a trait, interviewing characters, and thinking of situations you want to write up (as from that comes the kind of character who would work best in those situations) just to name a few thoughts and tips. I also discuss why a writer needs to know their characters well enough.
What is “well enough” will change from writer to writer as so much depends on what you need to know to be able to picture your people/other beings of choice in your head but you should figure out what it is you do need to know. I have found that last bit to be invaluable.
Ways Into Creating Characters
Lady and I had a real soaking this morning. She dries off far quicker than I do! Then I went swimming…. That soaking I didn’t mind at all!
I’ll be looking at Ways Into Creating Characters for Chandler’s Ford Today this week, link up tomorrow. Hope you will find it useful. Looking forward to sharing it. See above.
Am also looking forward to the Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction Group meeting on Zoom next week. Theme will be on the fact it is a leap year and how we can use that in our flash stories.
Am also busy working on PowerPoint presentations and enjoying writing these. I hadn’t used PowerPoint for years until Zoom came into my writing life. It is useful for this. Flash writing helps for this kind of thing too. The slides work best if you don’t put too much on them! Far better to have more slides than crammed ones.
Hope you haven’t got too soggy today. Lady and I probably soaked up your share when we were out this morning. No ducking it today! Am glad rain doesn’t make you shrink otherwise we’d both be in trouble.
Newsletter out again shortly. Where does the time go? Having a monthly newsletter brings home how quickly it does pass. To sign up do head over to my landing page at https://allisonsymescollectedworks.com
Writing Tip: I work out my characters’ likely vocabulary as part of my outlining process. I have an idea of the kind of speech they would use (based on what I believe their educational levels would be) and, just as importantly, what they wouldn’t come up with unless under great stress.
So if I get a non-swearing character to suddenly change their mind on that, there has to be a great reason behind that change which plays out in the story. It does mean I would’ve dropped them right in it and the kind of situation they’re in is likely to produce this effect.
Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again
Time to end the working week with what I hope you will find is a fun story. Am delighted my latest piece is now up on Friday Flash Fiction. Hope you like Facing The Frog.
When I take part in Open Prose Mic Nights, I look for a mixture of flash pieces to read in terms of mood. I like to try and show what flash can be capable of and that it can produce moving, punch in the gut type tales as well as laugh out loud on a punchline ending ones.
I also mix up whether I read pieces in the first or third person. Flash works well for both. And yes when I am reading a first person piece, I do try to get “into” the character so it is almost a performance rather than a straight reading.
Why? Because I am showing the audience my character. Acting out their story helps me to get them across more vividly I think. And it is huge fun. I am being the “I” in the story after all even if I “just” read it so I may as well get right into the character’s head and “perform” their tale.
I’ve mentioned before flash is great for twist and/or humorous punchline endings. It is also great for giving a character who deserves it their comeuppance fast. Is fabulous fun to do.
One of my favourite stories of mine here is A Kind of Hell from From Light to Dark and Back Again. Comes in at 94 words, excluding the title, and I paint a scene where my horrible character does get justice and in an appropriate way too.
With these kind of stories, again I work out what the appropriate justice would be first, write that out, and then work out how I could logically get to this point. It works!
Fairytales with Bite – Crossing Spells
Crossing Spells by Allison Symes
The great inventors always discover things by accident. Oh they write down what they think will happen but something always goes awry and either there is an explosion or they find something which is even more useful to us all. There is never any middle ground here. Same goes for us fairy godmothers with spells.Happened to me last week. I looked up my spells, made sure I had all the ingredients to hand, and then what should have been a pumpkin turned into a coach, let’s just say she turned up to the royal ball smelling of squash! I don’t know what I crossed to get that.
Still I must say the pumpkin style coach did have something about it. My critics say yes, it had a strong pong and the rats, which had been turned into footmen, remembered their original form and started eating away at the coach before it reached the Palace.
I had cast the right spell. Miranda, my best friend at fairy college, tells me I mispronounced one word and hence the desired effect was crossed with the basic ingredient and it all went horribly wrong.
Still the girl got there. Neither she nor His Nibs seemed to care and they’re getting wed next week. So no great harm done. But it has had the effect of whenever I go out and about, people point at me and chuckle. Some wag keeps leaving pumpkins on my doorstep too.
Miranda swears it wasn’t her but why did she stink of squash recently? She tells me she’s taken up gardening. Well if she has, she has the cleanest hands of any gardener I’ve known!
On the plus side, I have been invited to give the annual address to the Pumpkin Growers’ Society this year and I get paid for it too. I just hope the payment isn’t my weight in pumpkins though!
Ends
Allison Symes – 21st February 2024
Hope you enjoyed that. One of my favourite forms of writing is taking a well known fairytale and coming at the story from another angle. It works best when kept short and, I hope, funny and flash fiction is ideal for this.
Here I took the idea of a well meaning fairy godmother not getting things quite right and seeing what would come from that. So start with your character. Who are you using and why have you chosen them? What could you get them to do to bring something different to the tale?
And have fun writing the tale up!
This World and Others – What We Know as Science
What we know as science covers a wide field, of course, but what would it be thought of in your setting. Would science be seen as that or as a kind of magic?
I went to a medieval fair some time ago and spoke to the herbalist there. She was brilliant but told me that in medieval times, women who were renowned for their use of herbs were okay if things went well for their village because of that herb usage. If anything went wrong, they were likely to face accusations of witchcraft and a horrible death usually followed.
Yet in discovering you could cure headaches with the bark of a certain plant (which we now know led to the development of aspirin), that would have been seen as some kind of magic. What the herbalists had done was simply observe the effects of this bark. This had been observed repeatedly too as one or two spotting this would have just been dismissed. The fact that this was a known remedy meant this has had been tested and found to be true many, many times.
Observation and testing are core skills in any and every science.
So with this in mind, what would your characters make of what we call science? Are they accepting of it or suspicious? Has the practice of science (magic in your setting) gone wrong and led to suspicion of it? How could that be overcome?
Story ideas there I think.
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https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsFacing The Frog, by Allison Symes – Friday Flash Fiction https://t.co/sGunSCGKAe
— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) February 23, 2024
Time to end the working week with what I hope you will find is a fun story. Am delighted my latest piece is now up on Friday Flash Fiction. Hope you like Facing The Frog. pic.twitter.com/GNmQW9W4Ta
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsWays Into Creating Characters https://t.co/sT0xXl5qbD Am pleased to share Way Into Creating Characters on CFT. I look at why stories are character led (I have good reason to think this given how many I invent over a year), and share tips, which I hope you'll find useful.
— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) February 23, 2024
Allison Symes: Collected Works 