Embarrassing Endings

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Confession time!

Confession 1: I am in a rush, so this will be quick
Confession 2: I missed a day at the weekend so will have to catch up!

Still sticking to random inspirations, I decided to run my eye down the list of other A-Z blogs, find one belonging to someone whose name began with an E, and be inspired by that. Luckily it didn’t take long –  I came across this blog: Workingmymuse by Eric.

I will forgive him for bracketing Benny Hill with Monty Python in his ‘F’ post (even though this is sacrilege and I’m crying, inwardly, on the Pythons’ behalf). I do so because he wrote this in his E post about writing endings:

“I actually had a very embarrassing moment once (when I was in a writing class no less).  I had to finish up this short story I was working on (which incidentally I’m still revising), and when I got to the end, I just didn’t know how to end it.  So I went all melodramatic and wrote an ending that I was definitely ashamed of later.”

Endings that you’re ashamed of struck a chord with me because one of my juvenile story endings has become a family legend. And I still have the book with the story in -somewhere. I was only 7 or 8 when I wrote it and my teacher was very impressed by my idea (it was all about a trip to another planet and some aliens who, I think, were invited on board the spaceship). It was detailed. It had dialogue and plot. All sorts of stuff.

Green alien clipart monster with lots of long tentacles.

However! Like my son, who is a brilliant writer (I say that as a fact, not a gloat, because he will be – perhaps already is!- farrr better than me), I did sometimes have a problem getting my work finished in the allotted time at that age. So when the teacher had said, ‘right, that’s it, time to finish!’ I had panicked. All the plots and imaginative descriptions went out the window. Character motivation? Pah! I had aliens in my story, and back then we all knew what aliens did.

Hence my brilliant story ended thus:

‘The aliens turned. “We will eat you!” they cried.
And they did.’

Hah! Come on Eric – bring it on. I dare you to say that your ending was worse than mine! 🙂

D is for Daughter

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I thought today was the perfect day to blog about my daughter, although she doth protest 😉

I refer to her as Arty Daughter because she is…arty. She is a very talented artist who doesn’t have enough faith in her own ability. Her DeviantArt account is here (on DA she is TheDarkfellProject) and although she has protested that she’s ‘only uploaded one piece of her art to her online gallery and it’s nowhere near her best work’ (exhibit A, below) – I’m still posting the link because she is someone to keep an eye on (particularly if manga and graphic novels are your thing), and also because She Is My Daughter & Very Talented.

We often talk about what inspires us, and even though superficially art and writing seem very different mediums, it’s surprising how often we have similar problems, ideas or sources of inspiration.

She also deserves a pat on the back for listing me on her DeviantArt profile as her favourite writer 🙂 Cinders, you shall  go to the ball.

The Creepy Way To Create A Character

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I say Creepy, because it may seem slightly stalkerish to some of you. I am, however, just leading your metaphorical horse to water. You don’t have to let it take a drink… 🙂

In Louise Doughty’s excellent book A Novel In A Year (which may or may not help you write a novel in a year, but will definitely give you a lot of excellent advice, strategies and inspiration), she often presents her readers/writers with a situation to thrust a character into (even if it’s not one they envisage being in the completed novel), or to write about a time a particular situation happened to them, such as: having an accident, getting lost, feeling trapped (emotionally or physically), being of a different nationality from your own, being a character from the past, and being an inanimate object.

Of course, these exercises are designed to generate plots and characters, and she then helps you assemble this generated material into a novel. I found those chapters fascinating and incredibly useful (Big Respec’, Louise). And it’s sparked my own ideas on ways to create a character – or to get to know an existing one better.

My Writing Idea of the Day is:

Make your Character walk in your Shoes
(because actions speak louder than words)

Walk your character through your day (or even week). Lterally, if you want; think about your character wearing your shoes! Would they? Imagine your character living through your day. Would they be good at your job, more or less patient with your children/ mother/ dog/ boss? Would they have gone for coffee with that friend? Would they walk the children to school or drive? Bus or train to work? Would they remember to send that birthday card as you did, or are they forgetful/ lazy/ inconsiderate? Would they be a blogger or do they not know their Mac from their PC?

Or perhaps walk them through days in the lives of people you know. I have a female friend who is a bouncer. This wouldn’t be every woman’s cup of tea, but what kind of woman is prepared to do a job like that? (One who is also a black belt in Karate, if you must know!).

Look out your window – is your neighbour off to a club or their work? Would your character be there too? Karate or WI? Or both? And if you have no idea where your neighbour is going, use your imagination – where could they be going, why, and would your character be likely to be there too? Asda or Waitrose? Deskbound or a landscape gardener? Would they have waited patiently in that traffic jam or would road rage have taken over? What might have resulted if they had lost their rag?

Now prepare for boredom.

My uneventful day: Took son to school, spoke to Mum on phone, emptied & refilled the dishwasher, tweeted, revised opening of my novel, researched readability score/reading age of a few novels using MyNovel software, had text conversation with my boss and agreed to increase my hours, drank tea, coffee and a double chocha mocha, ate a chicken and coleslaw sandwich, picked up the post, did some more writing, emptied the bins, went to village shop to buy chicken, bread and fruit juice cartons, collected son from school (delivering two papers from my daughter’s round on the way), spoke to my black-belt friend and another who runs a natural beauty products company, filled in a school form to say yes, son & I would love to go to the Royal Wedding barbecue at school, emailed Techy Husband holiday dates, spoke to Arty daughter when she got in, spoke to Techy husband when he got in, deleted 4 spam comments awaiting moderation on this very blog, read a few other blogs, spent ages converting file type & reformatting text of the work newsletter so I can put it on the work website (which I run), dispatched my family to karate (yes, they go to classes run by black belt friend!), and then wrote this post.

Now your answer may be similar, or completely different – but ask yourself:

What did your character actually DO today?

 

B is for Birthday

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No, it’s not my birthday. But on days when nothing profound springs to mind to blog about during this challenge, I’ve decided to make my inspiration as random as possible.

So today I thought I’d look around the study for things that began with B, and take whatever it was as my starter. Bingo! Within seconds I had spotted a birthday card, so birthdays it is.

I wondered if there were any interesting people with birthdays today. There were! Here’s a whistlestop tour of a few of them,

Shing-Tung Yau – astronomer & mathmetician

“With Richard Schoen, Yau solved a longstanding question in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity by proving that the sum of the energy in the universe is positive; their proof has provided an important tool for understanding how black holes form.”
read the rest of the article here

Antoine Galland

 “(April 4, 1646 – February 17, 1715) was a French orientalist and archaeologist, most famous as the first European translator of The Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights in English). His version of the tales appeared in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717 and exerted a huge influence on subsequent European literature and attitudes to the Islamic world.”
read the rest of this Wikipedia article here (and consider making a donation 🙂 )

Isoroku Yamamoto

“Isoroku Yamamoto (4 April 1884 – 18 April 1943) was a Japanese Naval Marshal General and the commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet during World War II, a graduate of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy and a student of Harvard University (1919–1921). Yamamoto held several important posts in the Imperial Japanese Navy, and undertook many of its changes and reorganizations, especially its development of naval aviation. He was the commander-in-chief during the decisive early years the Pacific War and so was responsible for major battles such as Pearl Harbor and Midway.”
Read more about him on Wikipedia here, and more about the U.S op ‘Vengeance’, which ended his life, here.

Right, tight on time today so That’s All, Folks!

A to Z Challenge: Come Hither To Feed Your Brain

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Yes! It’s here! The challenge 800+ bloggers (many of them writers) – and their hangers-on (sorry, followers) have been waiting for. It’s….

THE A TO Z BLOGGING CHALLENGE! 

DAY ONE. Brought to you by the letter – A.

Last night I was pondering my first post. I enjoy the quirky randomness Google can bring to the proceedings, and thought I’d see what the hits were for…a. All by itself. Excluding hits for the same/ very similar things, the first 5 were:

  1. A (Wikipedia article) – an article all about the letter A.
    “the first letter and vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.”  So now we know.
  2. Youtube – including ‘Noah takes a photo of himself every day-‘
    Well I had to look that one up, my writer’s curiousity was burning like, like… a chicken curry that’s being ‘kept an eye on’ by a 14 year old (bitter voice of experience). Now I suspect I may be late to the party here, but that intriguing sentence in full is: “Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years. ”
    Yep, that’s right, it’s a 5 min 46 sec video of photos that Noah Kalina has taken of himself, every day, between January 11, 2000 and July 31, 2006. Noah is a photographer from Brooklyn. To see the photos individually (perhaps a good idea, the video is quite fast and makes you feel seasick!) go here. He is still taking a picture, every day, of just his head and shoulders – boy, there’s a book in there somewhere!
  3. A dictionary of slang  http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/a.htm
    The first entry in this fascinating dictionary is abdabs: noun Terror, the frights, nerves. Often heard as the screaming abdabs. Also very ocassionally ‘habdabs’ [1940s]. This site is well worth a visit – great stuff!
  4. HTML a tag
    a is an anchor tag in HTML. This is not interesting unless like me you like to walk on the wild side and play with your HTML. ‘Nuff said.
  5. The world’s rubbish dump: a tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan – An article from The Independent
    This is a genuinely interesting article from 3 years ago about ‘A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean’. Back in Feb 2008, it covered ‘an area twice the size of the continental United States’. I’ll be looking this up later to see what’s happened to it since.

I can only hope you find this randomness as  interesting as I do. Or perhaps, like Elizabeth Crieth, I’m just ‘interested in too many things’ – this is what her careers guidance person told her at school! Doread her excellent post on ‘composting’ your mind. This in particular is sterling advice: “I’d encourage every writer, or would-be writer, to cultivate a compost heap in her mind. Learn something new every day, even if it’s only a bit of trivia or some Believe-It-Or-Not oddity. Read widely. Talk to people. Ask questions.”

Hear hear, Elizabeth!

Unsensational Celebrities & Character Creation

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 Today Plinky demands that I talk about my top celebrity sightings. Ok – haven’t had many of those, so it’s not diificult to recall them – and it occurs to me that there’s a writing lesson to be learnt here.
When our children were young we decided to spend the afternoon with a friend at Brogdale Farm, just south of Faversham in Kent. What’s so special about a farm, I hear you ask. You ignoramus! Do you not know that Brogdale Farm is home to the National Fruit Collection, and supplier of fruit to her Majesty? Tsk, tsk.
No, we didn’t see the Queen. Don’t get excited.
We had gone there on a whim qite late in the day, and found that we were just too late for a guided tour. Rather disappointed, we were just about to head off for a mooch around and a quick look in the gift shop, when there was…well, a commotion might be going too far – let’s call it a slight stir – over on the ticket desk. And then someone came over and told us that there would be another tour after all, if we would like to come.
We looked over. Who’d managed to wangle that then? What did they have that we didn’t? It looked like an ordinary family. Then the Dad turned round. It was Suggs from Madness.Mystery solved.

Suggs @ Wollaton Park, Nottingham

Did we have a good time? Yes. Did we ask him to autograph a pear for us? No. We played it very cool. Didn’t even hum ‘Our House’ as we wandered round learning about the Queen’s favourite apples.

Oh and Techie Husband and I have also sat opposite the lovely Patsy Byrne (y’know – Nursie from Blackadder) on the tube – many years ago now. We didn’t ask for an autograph then either. Why? Well she was very simply dressed and nobody else had noticed her. (She knew we had though and gave us a lovely smile). I thought she deserved to be left alone. And – I’m embarassed to admit I couldn’t remember her real name, and felt if couldn’t, I didn’t really deserve an autograph.

Oh! Almost forgot! Walked past Rory McGrath a couple of years ago during the Cambridge Science Festival.

On the whole, I’m quite pleased I saw these celebrities when they were just going about their daily lives. After all, they’re just normal human beings who have a talent. That talent is just one facet of who they are. And perhaps that’s a good reminder to those of us who write, when we develop our characters – we may have to show their strong and possibly controversial traits, but we shouldn’t forget to show them as rounded people – nobody is all about ambition, greed, revenge, adventure, love, research…whatever. So don’t forget – let them have a cuppa occasionally. They’re characters – not just the embodiment of a theme, or a plot device.

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