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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, as were the photos of my lovely dog, Lady, and pictures from the local wildflower meadow which is always stunning.

Hope you have had a good weekend. Lovely family meal out here. The calendar may say July but outside it is definitely saying autumn! Hope things are better with you. Not that Lady minds. She’s pretty good about accepting the need to have paws wiped etc after a rainy walk out. I must admit though I am a bit put out I am back in my walking boots though – in July!

Facebook – General

Another soggy day but Lady got to meet and play with a lovely Golden Retriever called Winston. Good time had by both.

Had a lovely Zoom meeting last night on a topic I love – history. Looking forward to the next ACW Flash Fiction Group meeting on Zoom later in the month. Can’t help but think I may have been optimistic in choosing summer as a theme!

Need to look up some writing competitions to have a crack at – these are good for making you write to a deadline and often to a theme as well. They’re also good for getting you into the habit of submitting work to someone who will truly evaluate it independently.

How do I know the latter? That’s because I have been (and still am) a competition judge. All entries are submitted to the judges anonymously so we really can’t tell who has written what. I’m looking forward to putting my judge’s hat on again in the summer and autumn for flash fiction in both cases. Will be fun.

Hope you have had a less soggy day than Lady and I. She dries off better and quicker than I do. No danger of a suntan here – rust might be a possibility though!

Writing Tip: If you are going to use the weather in your stories, be specific about it. Let us know your character has got a drenching rather than became slightly damp. You can show us how that drenching changed the character’s mood.

I would be specially interested to know if they were happy about it given that is not most people’s reaction to getting soaked. Has the character got other troubles which put the drenching into perspective, for example? Could the drenching help them in some way (it gives them a good excuse to get out of something, say)?

Anyone would think it was autumn around here – strong winds, heavy rain etc. Still on the plus side the wildflower meadow is in full bloom at our park – it’s a joy to see. Lady approved too!

Good questions to ask your characters when you’re trying to discover more about them could include the following:-

What would you like to do if you could get away with it and why?
What would you never do even if circumstances allowed you to do so?
Who would you consider to be a hero and why?
What do you think is the most important thing in life and why?

Answering those would give you a good outline. It’s often the reasons why which reveal much about a character.

If my character decided they would love to rob a bank but, only because they know they could get with it, because they were once sacked by a bank, then you’ve got a clear, understandable motivation of revenge (doesn’t mean you have to approve!), and you could write a great story based on this. Knowing the likelihood of getting away with it is remote, do they find other outlets for their need for revenge instead?

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Has been a strange blustery day where I am. Hope it has been much better with you. Managed to get the lawn cut before the rain came in – will take that as a win.

I’m looking at the topic of Writing Fitness for Chandler’s Ford Today next week. More details nearer the time but I will touch on issues such as screen and other breaks and being ready for the ups and downs of the writing life. (Oh and another author interview to come towards the end of the month).

Looking forward to flash fiction Sunday tomorrow as I get a fair amount of flash written then. Lovely way to spend the afternoon.

Just over a month away to The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick – so looking forward to that.

Writing Tip: Do, as part of your editing, check there are no plot holes. Is everything tied up which should be? It is easy to over look something so make sure all marries up as it should. All should make sense, even in the most fantastic of settings.

What you are after here is to avoid anything which might make readers think “but…”. What you want them doing is rooting for your characters to succeed or fail. That way they will keep reading with nothing to jar their reading enjoyment.

Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again

More rain. Should have guessed. Wimbledon’s on! If anything is guaranteed to bring out the rain, it is the tennis.

My favourite all time moment from SW19? There could only be one. It is when Andy Murray won the title for the first time. Had the great joy of ringing my Dad, who was a life long tennis fan and had been waiting for a British champion all his life, who was all over the moon about it.

Now how do I link that to writing flash fiction? Easy peasy! Flash focuses on the important moment of a character’s life. Nothing more. Nothing less. It is the figuring out of what is the most important moment which can be tricky so I ask myself questions here. What does my character have to achieve by the end of the story and why? Get that sorted and I have my outline. I have what I know I’ve got to focus on.

It’s Monday. It’s more like October than July at the moment out there. It’s definitely time for a story then. Hope you like my latest on YouTube – Routine. When all is change and turmoil around him, can Larry keep his job? Will his routine ever be the same again? Find out here.

Hope you have had a good weekend. Will be looking at the theme of summer for the next Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction Group meeting later this month. I hope summer will be back by then! It’s more like autumn where I am at the moment.

If you are ever stuck for a theme to write to, do check out the random theme generators. These can be useful for getting you started on something. I’ve found the broader the theme, the more I can do with it.

A theme like summer I can take in all sorts of directions from holidays to someone hating summer because they have the world’s worst case of hayfever to stories which focus on legends and/or sports associated with the summer season.

Another good place to start with themes is looking at what interests you. I love music of a wide variety but classical is my favourite. So I could base a story on a character who loves or hates classical. I could use a classical concert as the backdrop to a story.

So often it is getting started on a story which is the issue so having a wide variety of “methods in” is useful. This is why I use the random generators, story cubes, books or prompts, my own photo, all sorts of things. Sometimes I will look for the theme or something which is an intriguing opening line so I can work out how I would follow on from said line.

Mixing things up is fun and keeps you on your toes. That in turn encourages further creativity.

A favourite theme of mine for flash stories is someone not being all they appear to be. Sometimes the character is a magical one who has absconded from their old life to live somewhere else, usually here on Earth. (The Past – Ready Or Not? is one example from Tripping the Flash Fantastic. And yes I did have the old “coming, ready or not” phrase used in childhood games of Hide and Seek in mind for the title here).

What I do is give small details to indicate to the reader my character is hiding something. Those small details add up so the reader can work things out.

Sometimes my character is as human as you and I are but they know someone who isn’t. That can cause issues because they don’t want the neighbours finding out about their dodgy connections – see my What The Neighbours Think as an example of this and how my character handles this.

Again it is the small telling detail which packs a great deal of punch here. My character wonders what it is about her that attracts the oddballs. From that you know said oddball is going to turn up/has just turned up and my character has to handle it/keep things quiet as they see fit.

What I don’t do is give lots of details about the hidden past/dodgy connection. The reader doesn’t need to know all of that. They do need to know how my character is going to deal with it and an idea of what it is they have to handle at all.

Goodreads Author Blog – Books of Letters

I love books of letters. I have books of letters by Evelyn Waugh (his own and those he exchanged with Nancy Mitford) and P.G. Wodehouse on my shelves (real and electronic). Yes, the letters do shed insights into the writing life which are fascinating and useful. I also have a book of letters by Jane Austen and I must finish reading that so this post has proved useful in reminding me to do so!

I do so wish Agatha Christie had done this though. Am sure her letters would have been insightful. Having said that, her The Moving Finger does have its plot focus around a string of poison pen letters so she brought them into her fiction at least!

What I like about letters are they do show something of the writer and the recipient. I’ve made use of this as a wiring technique in my Punish The Innocent (From Light to Dark and Back Again). Good fun to do and it makes for a freshing change of story format but one I think best done sparingly. You do have to have strong characters to carry this off successfully.

Maybe that is why more writers haven’t produced books of their letters. They would rather get their characters to show you something of themselves rather than of the writers themselves. What do you think?

WRITERS NARRATIVE SUBSCRIBER LINK

Am sharing the bumper January/February 2024 issue of the magazine this time which looked at new beginnings AND romance writing. I looked at New Beginnings for Characters and asked Flash Fiction Romance:  Is It Possible? for this edition.

AMAZON AUTHOR CENTRAL – ALLISON SYMES

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liked Allison Symes's blog post: Books Of Letters https://t.co/ZZlWNyR9K4 via @goodreads I share why I love reading books of letters by authors and why letters themselves can be an interesting story device for Goodreads this week. pic.twitter.com/tAMhg8t2iD

— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) July 6, 2024

It’s Monday. It’s more like October than July at the moment. It’s definitely time for a story then. Hope you like my latest on YouTube – Routine. When all is turmoil around him, can Larry keep his job? Will his routine be the same again? Find out here.https://t.co/5KXjrsBT45

— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) July 8, 2024