Thursday 28 May 2020

SIX PLOT IDEAS. WHICH SHALL I CHOOSE?


HELP! I NEED TO MAKE A CHOICE!

Many of you know I’ve already written and published 13 books for adults and children.
I’d love to write another 13 but I’m well aware that time is against me. I hope I’ll have time to write at least one more, but the difficulty right now is that I need to choose between six plot ideas (for all of which I’ve already written a few chapters). My books for children are the most popular but I love writing for adults too.

These are the six. Help me choose!

A) THE OTHER BOY (for 10 years up). Identical twin boys separated at birth, unaware of each other’s existence until 12 years later one sees a newspaper photo of the other and sets out to find him. (This is my latest idea and I’m slightly leaning towards it).

B) THE TRAVELLING SWEETSHOP (9 years up). A magical sweetshop, advertising all you can eat for 50p, suddenly appears on the route to school. My worry about this one is that it might suggest the sweetshop owner is selling drugs!

C) HIGH SCHOOL ROBOT (13 years up). Another story based in Swindon but 30 years in the future. A perfected robot, indistinguishable from a human teenager, is the forerunner for a spy operation.

D) THE SECRET OF COTTINGHAM HALL (Adults). A romance with a tragic secret.

E) BODY SHOP (Adults). A rape/murder victim finds herself at the North West Clearing Station, run jointly by representatives of Heaven and Hell who compete for dead souls. The dead are allowed to rent a body and return to Earth for two weeks, to seek revenge or forgiveness but must give up their souls to Satan when they return.

F) A SNAPSHOT IN TIME (13 years up). A teenage girl and a boy are separated by a century but linked by a photograph.

HELP!!!

Monday 25 May 2020

OTHER WAYS TO WRITE - AND EVEN GET PAID FOR IT!

FICTION IS NOT THE ONLY PATH


Do you have an unfulfilled urge to write, but creating a short story or a novel is daunting?

Fear not. There are so many ways to get your words in print, from a paragraph to a page to a multi-page feature. The only criterion (apart from spelling, grammar and the ability to construct a sentence) is that it should interest/inform/intrigue/educate/amuse or even shock its readers.

If you’ve ever written a letter to a newspaper or magazine and had it printed, you’ve taken the first step. Now it’s time to consider what else you can do.

Take a trip to your local newsagent’s and check out the shelves of special interest and hobby magazines. If you have expertise in any of the activities or crafts or you’ve devised a new way to approach one of them, write about it.

If you’ve had an unusual, rewarding or frightening experience, write it down, polish it up and send it off to the editor of a newspaper or magazine.

If your pet has an extraordinary personality, send a short piece to one of the popular magazines for pet owners. Or perhaps you have an unusual pet? I saw something on YouTube recently about a woman whose pet was a bee that had no wings.

Having edited magazines myself, I know how useful it can be to have a stockpile of news items and articles for the months when nothing much is happening. You may be lucky. Who knows, you may even get paid!

NOTE: If you're writing something for a magazine, check the required page length and the number of words per quarter, half or full page. My story for WRITING MAGAZINE had to be between 1500 and 1700 words. This will fill a double page spread, with a heading, a fairly large picture or design at the top (supplied by the magazine) and a small photo and personal details (supplied by myself).





Thursday 21 May 2020

TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT DURING LOCKDOWN

 SNAPSHOTS FROM THE PAST  

 The lockdown seemed an ideal moment to start this new Facebook group, and you don't have to be a brilliant writer to join in. We already have 154 members and the numbers are growing.

 Births, marriages, deaths, the basic facts – you can get all these from the genealogy web sites but the little
personal details and experiences that make up a person’s life are lost forever once that person is gone. No, I’m not for a moment suggesting any of us are going to die! Far from it, we’ve been protecting ourselves by self isolating. But this could be the perfect opportunity to record your memories on paper, providing a legacy for future generations of your family.

On paper, yes, not just online. The internet is too ephemeral. Your family two or three generations, even one generation, down the line, won’t be able to read your posts and get to know you.

And it's easy! You don't have to be a brilliant writer. Jottings can be far more interesting than a formal autobiography. Use an old diary, a notebook, drop scribbled scraps of paper into a memory box. Later there'll be all the fun of sorting and categorising.

I've been posting regular triggers to provide inspiration. Examples: scents and smells, and what they evoke; your first home, first day at school, your first job, your first date; your school and teachers; a loved relative or friend - and there'll be more to come. All of them should spark memories.

Sometimes, too, you may recall other catastrophes experienced by yourselves or our forefathers. Those were overcome, and so will the present catastrophe be too. 





Monday 18 May 2020

NEW WRITERS - WHAT TO LEAVE OUT OF YOUR STORY

TOO MUCH? OR TOO LITTLE?


If you're new to writing, the danger is more often to write too much rather than too little. It makes no difference whether you're writing a 90,000 word novel or a 1000 word short story: unnecesssary detail, information or dialogue will slow down, irritate, distract or bore the reader. So here are some points to keep in mind.

DIALOGUE: We all discuss the weather, or what we ate last night, or how our offspring is doing at school, but none of these things is relevant, UNLESS IT AFFECTS THE PLOT, eg the weather hints at a forthcoming hurricane which will then prevent our main character taking a ferry to Spain, or the prospective bridegroom ate a couple of dead mussels that night and therefore won't make the wedding, or our offspring will be arrested for burning down the school lab, which will explain why Dad goes on one drinking binge too many and Mum packs a suitcase, which therefore explains .. ..... It's all about consequences. So, cut out the small talk. Dialogue should sound natural, but every word should advance the story.

CHARACTER INFORMATION: Some creative writing books recommend you write a cv for each of your main characters so that you know them inside out. This isn't my way but lots of authors do it. But however you build and get to know your characters, do you need to download it all for your readers? Ration the details you pass on, you might be surprised how few you need to explain how someone behaves, reacts, emotes.

SETTINGS: A friend of mine happened to spend a lot of time in an exotic setting. He decided to make it the setting for his first novel, and while there he amassed notebooks full of information - about the place, the people, the economics, the history, etc, etc. Sadly he put so much of it in his novel that it became virtually unreadable. It's tempting to include all that you've learned, but you have to resist. From all those notebooks try to extract the essence of a place. A few well-chosen snippets slipped in here and there will usually do the trick.

I could go on and on - but then, I don't want to bore you!

Sunday 17 May 2020

LET'S GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER



NEIL GAIMON, MY LATEST MUST-READ AUTHOR

WHO SAID YOU MUSTN'T SCARE CHILDREN?

The Graveyard BookI knew his name, of course, and I'd caught a couple of interviews on YouTube - and very charismatic he is, too. But it wasn't until I'd watched the television series Good Omens that I was drawn to reading Neil Gaimon's books.

I started with his massive tome, American Gods (I read this on my Kindle but I believe the hard copy is nearly 800 pages) and next, I read Neverwhere, both of which I really enjoyed.

Then, because I write for children as well as adults, I read The Graveyard Book (listed as suitable for 9+). Now we know that children of an even earlier age become acquainted with horror stories. Grimm's fairy tales for example are full of lost children, children being cooked and eaten, children being confronted by wolves, and so on. But those tales belong to a distant past.

In The Graveyard Book's first couple of pages, a man with a knife steals into a house in the darkness. He stabs to death a father and a mother in their bed. He then stabs to death their small daughter. And finally he steals into the baby's nursery. The book may be fiction, but the act of breaking into a house and killing all its occupants echoes not one but many real life crimes of today.

So, would this book terrify 9 year old children? I looked up some reviews and was surprised to find that many parents had read the book aloud to children even younger, without inducing nightmares.
In fact, all the children loved it - as did I. It's a brilliant book, full of imagination, tenderness and humour.

But in children's literature, do we need to draw a line? This is OK but that's just too gruesome? How do we judge?


WRITING YOUR FIRST CHAPTER


Dialogue always looks good on the first page, doesn’t it? Two characters plunging into the story. Plenty of white space. Exclamation marks!

But you don’t have to start at the beginning of the conversation. The small talk, the explanations. Start in the middle, where the drama begins.


‘You’re leaving me?’
‘I’m sorry, I -’
‘Who is she?’
‘You don’t know her.’
‘It’s not that new secretary, is it?’
He shook his head. ‘You’ve never met her. She’s … someone from the past.’

Ah! The first clue!

Or, in a crime novel, start with the murder. Your reader doesn’t know who the victim is, or even the murderer. All that will come later.

How about a waking up scene? Your character opens their eyes. They’re in bed/in a locked cellar/buried under masonry/on an operating table/ sprawled alongside a wrecked plane, the pilot and his mate hanging out of the cockpit.

Drama! Mystery! Suspense! Explanations can come later, maybe not until the final chapter.

Friday 15 May 2020

HOW TO HOLD ON TO YOUR FLASHES OF INSPIRATION


The best ideas often come to you when you're in bed! Or on a bus, train or plane, eating lunch in a pub or grabbing a coffee halfway through a shopping trip.

KEEP A NOTEBOOK (preferably two, three or even more). One in your bedside cabinet, one in your handbag or briefcase, one in your office desk drawer, one in your coat pocket.  If anything good occurs to you, note it down IMMEDIATELY! You'd be surprised how quickly good ideas can be forgotten if you don't record them.

Many writers have a special thinking place. Somewhere the ideas come thick and fast. It could be a garden shed kitted out as an office, a favourite chair by the fire, a warm comfortable bed - but not too warm and comfortable or you'll doze off.

My favourite place is my bathroom. Lying in a hot steamy bath, with notebook propped on my knees may not be the most practical method of note taking but that's where I'm most productive.

Of course, the notebook soon becomes cockled and damp, the writing angle is unsuitable for ball point pens, pencilled notes are hard to read back through the steam, and how do you juggle notebook and pencil with your glass of wine?

Ah well, who said a writer's life is easy?