My Chandler's Ford Today post tonight is a reminder one about a children's poetry competition Chandler's Ford Authors are organising with Hampshire Libraries and the Hiltingbury Extravaganza.  We are, of course, hoping for a good number of entries and that the competition will encourage creative writing amongst children (8 to 11 and 12 to 15) in the area.

Encouraging writing - in all age ranges - is vital, I think, for all sorts of reasons.  Not only is there the joy of being creative, becoming involved in the arts is known to be good for physical and mental well being.  I found I didn't know what I could write until I actually started writing.  I never expected to be a published author of flash fiction (From Light to Dark and Back Again) or a blogger but I love both and am still hoping to do something with my unpublished novel at some point.  I love the sheer scope of where writing has taken me and where it will continue to do so.  I have made friends online and in person as a direct result of writing.

Also creative writing encourages reading and that has got to be reason enough to write in itself!

My Chandler's Ford Today post tonight is all about humour in fiction and I loved writing it.  I share some classic examples of really good comic writing.  It was great to revisit these clips (both TV and radio/audio).

So how to use humour in fiction?  It can be a great characterisation device.  If you say someone has no sense of humour, doesn't that conjure up in your mind's eye an immediate image of what that person is probably like?  (You may not necessarily be right, of course, but you will have that image. I know I do).

Also the type of humour your characters like/come out with themselves can give added depth to their portrayal.  Those that like subtle irony (think Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice) are a world away from those characters who prefer outright farce. 

So what kind of humour would your characters like/come out with?  Humour can be a good way of differentiating your characters for your readers too.  They will come to know Character X comes out with this kind of joke, Character Y hates that and prefers one-liners etc.

Have fun with your humour (!) as you write your stories!


Image Credit:  Image below is taken from free to use site, Pixabay.

This topic has come up as my Chandler's Ford Today post this week is about a children's poetry competition being organised by my writing group, Chandler's Ford Authors, in association with Hampshire Libraries and the Hiltingbury Extravaganza. We are all hoping the poetry competition will spark off and encourage creativity in youngsters in the area.

So what can we do to encourage our own creativity when the spark seems to have gone? I go to a couple of writing conferences a year, carefully chosen, and find just immersing myself in writing with no distractions/other commitments can be really helpful for re-enthusing me about writing. I should add day courses work well here too.  It really is a question of finding something to suit you.

Remind yourself of what made you put pen to paper at all.  Think about your trigger points. Also if life events, illness etc are the cause of slowing yourself down, don't worry about it.  Get over it as soon as you can.

I've mentioned before I have to have a title for my story, which I can then get on and write, before I actually put pen to paper/keyboard. I base my title either on some theme within the tale or on an aspect of the character whose story I'm telling.  I rarely have to change the title later either.

I want my titles to intrigue, tease, and give a good flavour of what the story could be about.  It is particularly crucial to get the title right for flash fiction given in some competitions, the title is part of the word count allowance and for others it is not.  So it always pays to check the competition details carefully.

I keep my titles fairly short (e.g.  Calling the Doctor) as I want to maximise their impact.  They're also easier to remember that way! 

I've talked on my Facebook author and book pages and my Fairytales With Bite website tonight about story endings. Especially with flash fiction where you haven't a lot of time or words to get your story across, every word must count and you are looking for maximum amount of impact given those constraints.

For me with From Light to Dark and Back Again, this tends to lead to stories that end with a punch or where the reader knows the character is wrong (and a lot of the time would be about to be proved to be wrong if the story continued) and what I am after there is how knowing that makes the reader feel.  Does the knowledge make them laugh (my light stories) or make them shudder knowing there is crime/horror to come (my dark tales)? 

Thinking about what impact your story is going to have obviously directly affects how you write it but you can use this to strengthen the tale.  Knowing you want to, say, write a funny story does dictate how you are going to present your characters but this is another reason to always outline what you think you are going to write before doing so.  You can work out your options and then go for the one you like best.

Every writer's journey is a unique one.  We may have several things in common but there will be no two people on exactly the same writing journey at the same time.  This is great because it means there's always plenty to talk about when you  meet other writers at a conference!  We all try different things to help with our work (in my case I switched from Microsoft Word to using Scrivener) and I find it fascinating to talk about why
and what I find mose useful about Scivener.

The good thing about a writing journey is it's not just a question of looking backwards. You're looking ahead trying to map out where your path will take you.  And if you veer off, you can always come straight back on the main journey at any time.  I

It also doesn't matter if you're quick or slow. I wish I'd started writing flash fiction years ago but now I am writing it, I hope there'll be no stopping me!  Whatever type your writing journey is, good luck.

To write a story (of any length) with conviction, the writer has to have somewhere in their head (and ideally on paper too!), a layout of the setting of the story and of the main characters.  This means that when the writer starts writing their story they are already hitting the ground running because they know who their antagonist and protagonist are, why they are in these positions and usually you'd know something (but not necessarily all) about the objects/other characters in the way of our hero/heroine/villain achieving what they wish.

Neither is it necessary (or desirable) to put all  your planning of the background of your story actually into the tale itself.  It is better to drip feed information the reader really does need to know to make sense of the tale but to avoid doing this all at once.  It should be a gradual realisation. 

I think the more you the writer know of your story background the more convincingly you'll write about it but there does come a time when you actually have to write the tale and the background research has to stop.