Tag: The Toy Cupboard in the Sky by Allison Symes

Dialogue in Fiction

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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 the weekend went well. Lovely one here. Great progress on writing and editing and Lady did get to see her Rhodesian Ridgeback, the first time in a while, too. Both dogs were delighted to see each other. Dogs can be lovely like this.

Facebook – General

Hope you’ve had a good day. Lovely weather after a cloudy start. Lady and I enjoyed our time in the park again. Parks are wonderful things.

Writing wise, I’m looking forward to the next meeting of the Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction Group tomorrow. Hope to get a couple of drafts down.

Have a story ready for submission and hope to get that off either tomorrow or Thursday. Deadline isn’t until well into May but I will always send something in when I genuinely know it’s good to go. I deliberately won’t hold on to a story any longer otherwise the temptation will be to just have “one more look at it” and it makes me go on to draft another story for another competition instead. It’s too easy to put off submitting work. Well, there is no rejection risk in that, is there?

Hope the week has got off to a good start. Lovely time in the park with Lady. Had a great writing and editing weekend. Pleased to get lots done.

Glad to share my latest story on Substack – The Next Repair Job. All dog owners (and I suspect parents of toddlers as well) will identify with this one. Hope you enjoy it.

Hope your Sunday has been a peaceful one. Will be cracking on with flash fiction Sunday shortly but have already edited a story I’ve got in mind for a competition. Good start to my writing day!

Looking forward also to catching up with folk at the Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction Group on Wednesday. Always good to see them and, as ever, I hope we’ll get a couple of draft pieces written.

Later in May I’ll be interviewing Esther Chilton for Chandler’s Ford Today about her new book, Myths and Magic. And I hope to share news on my third flash fiction collection, Seeing The Other Side, in May too. Plenty going on then and most of it involving flash fiction in some way (Esther is also a flash fiction writer).

Hope the weekend has got off to a good start.

Writing wise, I’ll be sharing Using Old Sayings in Fiction for Chandler’s Ford Today next week. I’ll be sharing a couple with some ideas on how they could be used to create stories. Looking forward to sharing that on Friday. Proverbs and sayings are excellent to use as themes and will always resonate because these things are timeless, readers will alway identify with them. Hope the post will prove to be useful.

Editing is continuing to go well.

And don’t forget it won’t be that long before my next author newsletter is out. To sign up for hints, tips, story links and news, do head over to my landing page at https://allisonsymescollectedworks.com

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Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again

Will have news on Seeing The Other Side soon. Meantime, I’ve been busy producing more flash work and hope to send something in for a competition this week as it is good to go as I mentioned on my author page here.

I always take time out to double check the submissions process to ensure I haven’t missed anything. For most places I’m submitting work on Duotrope, Submittable or as emails (sometimes in the body of the email as flash is short enough for that). But each place has its different requirements.

Funnily enough, I’ll also be thinking later this year about getting another collection together but meantime it is all systems go with the third book. So looking forward to sharing more news on that.

It’s Monday and another hectic one so time to relax with a flash story. Hope you like my latest on YouTube – The Toy Cupboard in the Sky. This one links to The Next Repair Job which I’ve shared via my Substack and via my other Facebook page.

Hope you enjoy both tales. I had great fun writing them.

Why can’t my mother like character in this story face up to telling someone their toy is beyond repair? Find out here.

 

Although my forthcoming book, Seeing The Other Side, is naturally very much on my mind at the moment, I am also looking further ahead towards further collections and am well on my way to another one, possibly two, books from what I’ve written in the last year or so.

I also have another project connected to flash fiction which is on the back burner for the moment but which I hope to get back to later this year.

What I would really like now would be for one of my benevolent magical characters to come to life and, as a favour to me for creating them, grant me more time in which to write! Alas…

Mind you, this is a nice problem to have because I know what I’ll be working on when I do get to my desk. I suppose that’s the goal to aim for here. Know what you’re doing and when. It’s a good thing for your characters to know too!

Am looking at a story for a flash competition for the end of May. Will be working on it, I hope, tomorrow. This is a story from my “store” and on re-reading it, I can see where I can tighten it up further. This is the purpose of having a break away from something you’ve written. When you do come back to it again, you really do see the piece with fresh eyes and you are much more likely to be able to judge it objectively.

For flash, there is the advantage of not needing anywhere near as long a break from it as, say, a novelist would for their work, but I’d say don’t be tempted to skip having the break. It does pay off. I’ve found this to be the case time and again.

Put work aside for a time and come back to it so you can look at it as a reader would. Pixabay image.

Goodreads Author Blog – Dialogue in Fiction

I love every element to a story or book – characters, plot, scene setting (though I prefer that to not go on for too long) and dialogue. Dialogue in fiction has to resemble real speech but not be an exact copy of it. It would be tedious to read all the hesitations, repetitions etc. But fictional dialogue, when it is done well, will propel the story forward, show you more about the characters speaking, and fill in the gaps in back story where a character needs to know something from the past but doesn’t need to know chapter and verse about it.

I like to think of it as overhearing an interesting conversation and I love that. This probably says a great deal about me but I also find dialogue can do wonders for pacing in a story too.

And, of course, dialogue can reveal a great deal of information, secrets etc, which are pivotal to the plot. Someone had to tell Frodo from The Lord of the Rings why he had to get out of The Shire and why a certain ring left behind by Bilbo wasn’t such a wonderful gift after all!

Dialogue is a trigger for all sorts of happenings in stories and I think that it is why it is one of my favourite elements to any story.

MailerLite – Allison Symes – Newsletter Sign Up

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WRITERS’ NARRATIVE SUBSCRIBER LINK 

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ALLISON SYMES ON SUBSTACK  

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AMAZON AUTHOR CENTRAL – ALLISON SYMES

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