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 few days since the last post Lady and I have ducked the rain, got caught by the rain, but the temperature is so much better for said rain. Trees and plants are looking happier too. Writing going well too.
Facebook – General and Chandler’s Ford Today
I’m delighted to share Deadlines on Chandler’s Ford Today. I work to deadlines all the time for CFT, Writers’ Narrative, Authors Electric, More Than Writers, and for various story competitions.
I find deadlines useful but know not every writer sings to that tune so I thought a post sharing tips about how to make these things more manageable (and therefore endurable!) would be useful. I also use some old school ways to help me manage my own deadlines. Find out more in the post.
Hope you find the post handy.
Hope today has gone well. Some amazingly heavy showers today but Lady and I have managed to duck those, thankfully.
Writing wise, I’ll be sharing Deadlines on Chandler’s Ford Today tomorrow and share some handy tips as to manage these things. Most writers have to face them at some point and many of us all of the time at that! Hope you will find the post useful. See above.
Have booked my train tickets for The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick today. (You can get good discounts booking a reasonable way in advance and even more of one if you have a railcard. I am now the proud owner of a Senior Railcard and am putting this to good use already!). So looking forward to being back at The Hayes in August.
Character Tip: What drives a character to do something is so important. It is what makes a story believable, I think, even if your character is some fantastic creature from the back of beyond. So understanding motivations, for me, is a key part of character creation and yet another reason why I focus on character over plot. I fervently believe characters set the plot anyway.
Lady and I did get a soaking this morning though that was still easier to cope with than the super high temperatures of last week. There really is a silver lining regarding those clouds!
Looking forward to going to an online ACW group tonight. Plus I plan to get on with various pieces of writing though it will be mainly non-fiction this evening. Having said that it is a joy to write non-fiction as well as fiction as it means I always have something “on the go” and often ideas from non-fiction can spark thoughts for potential stories. It does tend to happen that way around too.
I hope my recent revisit to The Dorset Museum will spark a future Chandler’s Ford Today post. It has already inspired my recent Goodreads one. Ironic as it may sound, getting away from the desk for a while may well trigger ideas to put to good use when you get back to said desk again.
Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again
Hope you have had a good end to the working week. Weather has been a bit of a mixed bag but it didn’t stop Lady and I getting out and about. Writing wise, I hope to look at some stories for potential competitions over the weekend plus I have various blogs to get on with and am getting ready for when Seeing The Other Side comes out. No chance of being bored here but I like that. I have a very low boredom threshold!
Flash is a great format for developing your characterisation skills. Given it has to be led by characters (as there is no room for lots of description), you do have to focus on what matters about the characters you have as the stars of your tales.
What does the reader need to know about them? Why should they care about what happens to them? Both of these questions should be answered for any length of fiction but it is especially crucial for the shorter story forms.
Hope to pick out a story to review for a possible competition at the weekend. It’s often the best time for me to go through my “stock” and it is nice to come across those tales I wrote a while back but which I have not yet placed. It means I have had the necessary time break away to judge them objectively enough.
It is also a fun thing to do to revisit these because you can see what works and from there figure out how to fix what doesn’t. This is the ongoing challenge of story writing. It’s great for the brain!
Flash Fiction Tip: Let’s say you have a character and storyline you like. Why not try writing this up to, say, 100 words, then 300, then 500 and see which works the best? The longer ones will have a bit more depth to them and that may be exactly what you want for a competition you’ve got in mind. Good luck!
Some of my non-fiction posts can come into the realm of flash non-fiction when they come in at 500 words or fewer. I must admit I still tend to think of them as blogs though!
But a thought to try on this front is to pick a topic you like and see if you can write a flash non-fiction piece to it to 500 words exactly. It’s a good challenge and, if nothing else, this can give you interesting material to share on your website.
Thoughts for topics could include ideas which would work just as well for a story theme. For example:-
Justice;
Favourite historical character (whom you can then put in a story or have someone who would have known them put in a story);
Inventions which changed the world (and you can invent some for stories with a fantasy setting).
Best Day Out Ever (and then write a story around a character who has their best ever day out).
There are many more topics, of course, but I like the thought of flash non-fiction feeding into flash fiction like this. It’s useful! I like the idea of having one idea and getting more than one piece from it.
Fairytales With Bite – Magical Stores
Where do your magical characters get their supplies from? I must admit I love the idea of Diagon Alley in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The films especially confirmed my thought the place may well look as it it came straight from the times of Dickens! But it also confirmed magical characters need supplies – potion ingredients, wands, other equipment and so on.
So as well as thinking about where they’d go to get these things, flip it and look at who manufactures these things. How did they discover the art? How did they become expert at producing certain things? Is there a “government standard” they have to adhere to and, if not, why not? (Magic is dangerous enough without dodgy equipment!).
How do your “magical storekeepers” protect their premises against those who would steal their wares? What can be done to stop those on the dark side corrupting products so they’re used for things not originally intended?
Story ideas there for sure!
This World and Others – Provisions
How do your magical characters provide for themselves? Is magic allowed to be used for, say, the growing of food, or would that be the equivalent of “artificial farming” which most of us would reject? If they can’t create their own things like this, where would they get food, clothes etc?
If anyone is allowed to produce these things magically do they have the equivalent of a government licence to do so?
For centuries in the UK, the monarch would grant monopolies on various things to those they favoured and those folk would make money from that. For example, Queen Elizabeth Tudor gave monopolies to print and publish music for twenty-one years to Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. That guaranteed them income.
If your setting cannot produce everything it needs, where would it get the “missing items”? Who would it import from and is there anything it could export back?
Provisions have to come from somewhere and there will be people who make things happen here. There could be some great stories here.
