Tag: Learning from stories

Learning From Stories

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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.
Hope you have had a good weekend. Lady and I are out and about, making the most of a mixed bag of weather. I’m looking forward to sharing a fabulous interview with Esther Chilton on Chandler’s Ford Today later this month. More details soon.

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Hope you’ve had a good day. All well here. Enjoyed a lovely historical online meeting last night. It is amazing what you can find out from a topic which is not of direct relevance to your own writing at times.

I do know things I’ve picked up along the way from meetings like this one can sometimes find their way into my stories at a later date. It’ll be interesting to see if this topic does that. Am not saying what it was in case it does!

Writing wise, I’ll be sharing Story Essentials on Chandler’s Ford Today later this week. Mind you, the basic essential of any story for me is it has to grip me and it is usually the characters who do that for me. More on my post on Friday.

Hope your week has got off to a good start. Not bad here. Weather better today too.

Writing wise, I’m glad to share my latest Substack story here – When The Message Finally Gets Through.

Hope you enjoy it. It links to my YouTube story this week too. See further down for that.

 

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Hope all is well. Mixed bag weather wise today. Didn’t stop Lady enjoying herself on her various walks today.

Plan to get on with flash fiction Sunday shortly.

Writing Tip: Don’t forget to review your notebooks every so often. You will come across ideas you’d forgotten about. Now perhaps is the time to have another look at these and see what you can do with them.

One of my tales in my forthcoming Seeing The Other Side started life as a writing exercise set at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick. Reviewing it later and polishing it up as needed, well I’m delighted it is now going to be published.

It is worth giving this a go. And you may find the initial idea jotted down in those notebooks may spark further ideas, even if you discard the original one.

Hope your weekend is going well.

Writing wise, I will be sharing Story Essentials for Chandler’s Ford Today next week. I hope this will prove useful.

Am currently re-listening to the fabulous Going Postal by the much missed Terry Pratchett. I love audio books as well as the print variety. Both have their joys.

Audio books are especially great for literally hearing how dialogue and description work. That in turn can help with your own drafts. There is always good pacing to audio books. And I can always learn from that.

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Am catching up with some reading which is always a joy. So many of my flash and other stories have been inspired by tales I’ve loved for years.

The classic one here is Cinderella which was a direct inspiration for my first story in print back in 2009 – A Helping Hand in Bridge House Publishing’s Alternative Renditions anthology.

The fairytales have timeless themes and a great story structure so are always capable of inspiring further fictional thoughts, I find.

It’s Monday and storyline again. Hope you like my latest on YouTube – The New Order of Things.

 

Flash fiction Sunday starts for me in a moment but I was glad to get something sent in for The Bridport Prize earlier this month. The deadline for that, by the way, is the end of May so you’ve still got time to send things in. Naturally I’ve sent something in for the flash fiction category.

Every so often I will review those stories I submitted for various competitions which didn’t go anywhere. I can often polish these up further and either send them elsewhere or save them for a future collection. Often when I review my stories, I can then see why perhaps they didn’t make the cut but this is good too as I can learn from that.

This is the thing with all forms of creative writing. We learn all the time. We seek to improve all the time. No wonder writing can be phenomenally good for you, brain wise.

Plan this weekend is to pick a couple of flash fiction competitions to try soon. Probable deadline date I’d be looking at here would be end of June or July.

I also want to get back to using books of prompts again as I haven’t used these for a while. I do like to mix up where I get prompts from. I usually take any prompt and add something to it but this starting point is incredibly helpful.

Bridge House Publishing have their Big Book of Prompts, which I had the privilege of contributing to, and I have other prompt books too.

The nice thing with prompts is you can reuse them. A prompt on the theme of, say, justice can be used over and over again. It is the characters who change, as they should do in the course of their individual stories.

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Goodreads Author Blog – Learning From Stories

I love learning from stories. As a writer, what I learn helps no end with my own writing. That includes learning about how dialogue is laid out, how to tell characters apart via dialogue alone, and much more.

The important thing is does the story work? If it does, I then look at what made it work and why specifically for me. I also learn to look out for the next story from that author. Well, if I loved one of their tales, I’m highly likely to love others by that same writer.

You can also learn from what doesn’t work in stories and apply that to your own writing.

Best of all, you get to do lots of reading!

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Learning from Stories and Characters

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Image Credit:  Pixabay/Pexels unless otherwise stated.

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Writing characters is good fun, especially when you can think of suitable flaws that you know you can use to drop said characters right in it. The important thing is for the flaws to be realistic and not over exaggerated.

I have never really liked larger than life characters in fiction (with the honourable exception of Mr Toad in Wind in the Willows! That’s partly because we know he is OTT from the start of the story!).

I want my characters’ flaws to be reasonable based on what I’ve found out about them. For example, if I know a character is kindly, then their major flaw is unlikely to be anything violent etc. The flaw has to fit with the character.

In this case I would probably make the flaw irritability. This makes sense as a kindly soul pushed too much would be irritable. There should always be a flaw to balance out the virtues.

I find goody two shoes characters difficult to read too and I think most readers would. We want realistic characters, people we can identify with, even if we don’t always agree with them or their actions.

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What have I learned from stories I’ve read over the years?

The big lesson, of course, is I’ve discovered what I love and equally what I don’t!

What is more useful still is in working out why I haven’t liked something. It is almost always that the characters didn’t come across well enough for me. I then look at that and think about how I might’ve portrayed those characters and why.

For stories I love, I study how the dialogue flows,how the chemistry between characters works (and you can always tell the author has put a lot of thought into how their people will be on the page), and what I thought worked well.

From all of this, negative and positive, you can learn a lot to apply to your own tales.

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I use the Scrivener template for outlining my characters though you can easily devise your own. Work out what you think you need to know about your characters and outline from there.

One of the Scrivener settings is for character name. Okay, okay, I hear you say, why the fuss about that? Course you’ve got to know the character name.

That’s true but dig a little deeper and look at why you’re naming the character as you have. Names can reveal much such as likely age of character (Gertrude has not been a fashionable name for a while now!) as well as likely class background and things like that.

The template also has a lovely section on personality and that’s where I get to outline major traits. By the time I’ve done that I know what the character’s personality is like.

I’ve also found outlining like this speeds up the process of writing the story. Outline in place and away I go as I already feel as if I know the lead character(s) in depth.

How I feel as I work my way through a draft to the finished story!
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Good questions for writers to ask themselves.
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I know I have lots of stories and books in my head but I didn’t mean it literally! Pixabay
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Looking forward to sharing my CFT post with you later this week. Crime writer, Val Penny, will be looking at her venture into non-fiction with her recently released Let’s Get Published. We’ll be discussing the challenges of writing non-fiction and the aspects of that you simply don’t face as a fiction writer.

Got the first draft of a story for a competition done earlier today so that is now resting, waiting ready for my eagle editor’s eye to attack it with the old red pen!

I now know (by not hearing) a couple of my earlier competition entries this year have not got anywhere in the places I submitted them to but this means I can look at these stories again. Sometimes I can find an alternative market for them and I have been published that way too. So it is always worth considering this as a possibility.

Work might find a different home from the one you originally intended for it but that’s okay.

Gill, Dawn and I will be talking about the writing life and working with a publisher on 26th September 2020 via Zoom. Pixabay image.
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Flash characters have to lead from the front given there is not a lot of room to tell their story. This is one reason why I use first person a lot. There is an immediacy about that which helps increase the pace of the story but it also takes you right into the character too.

So when I’m planning a story, I outline my lead character. They’ve got to have a story worth sharing after all. So what makes a character worth writing about?

It has to be someone who intrigues a reader. Intrigue can come from setting up a situation the character has to resolve and a reader wants to find out how they do. It can come from a character being the type that lands themselves in it and a reader wants to see if (a) that stops or (b) what their latest adventure is.

 

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Hope the writing week proves to be a good one for you. Likewise the reading one! And if you count under both categories, have a fab time reading and writing!

I’m reading a couple of collections on my Kindle at the moment and thoroughly enjoying them. I’ve found reading collections to be a good way of getting out of my thankfully temporary reading drought.

I’ve long hoped that flash fiction might also be a good way to tempt reluctant readers in to reading at all as you’re not asking them to commit to too much in one go for a start.

Well here’s hoping!😊

 

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It’s been a while since I’ve shared some flash one-liners with you. Time to rectify that then. Hope you enjoy these.

1. The elephant was in the room and looked around with interest, wondering who would be the first to try and make him leave.

2. Of all the last words she’d heard in her time, she’d never expected to hear “I don’t suppose you’re a vegetarian dragon by any chance?”

3. The witch incinerated the speed camera after she went through it at 180 mph as she didn’t fancy facing Lucinda who had gone through the same spot the week before at over 200 mph.

Allison Symes – 22nd June 2020

 

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Hope you enjoyed the one-line stories. They’re great fun to do. I’d also recommend having a go at this as (a) an interesting challenge and (b) as a warm-up writing exercise ahead of whatever your main writing event is!

One aspect to flash fiction is that all those writing exercises you’ve had a go at over the years might be able to be turned into stories you can submit to a publisher and/or competition. Give it a go! You’ve nothing to lose here. But as with any fiction writing, ensure all is as polished as you can make it before you send your work anywhere to give yourself the best possible chance.

Good luck!

 

I doubt if they’d let you put your feet up with a good book in here. Pixabay
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Glad to see the Little Library idea is speading.
Fab end to a day I think. Pixabay.
Books take you into other worlds.

Goodreads Author Blog – Outdoor or Indoor Reading

Allowing for the time of year, do you enjoy reading books outside?

The only time I get to do this is when I’m on holiday. At home I tend to think I should be getting on with some gardening rather than reading a book.

I know! Allison, why don’t you tell the inner critic to go away? That is sometimes easier said than done though!

That said, I do find it easier to grab a magazine and read that outside while enjoying a drink or a bite to eat. (It’s also easier to use as a fly/wasp swat should the need arise!).

So how about you? I do find it far easier to read indoors and ideally at bedtime when my inner critic has gone away for the night and I can read in peace.

I also know my treasured books aren’t at risk of being rained on etc so I guess that comes into it too,

What matters though is finding time to read and unwind. And reading is such a wonderful way to unwind. I can only live one life but through books and stories I can get to experience many at secondhand. That is one aspect to stories I simply adore.

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