What a fabulous week it’s been for misspelt words, words missed out of sentences, wrong words put in, incorrect words used in both speech and text – gotta love the human inability to string two words together sometimes!

I’ll start with this quote that forms part of a book review: “…so no need for rubber over parts.” I suspect the correct word should be ‘pants’, but parts works for me. Sounds like it could be an interesting read. Then this, from the i newspaper and although technically not a wrong word, the small bit of copy was enough to make me chortle. The copy was entitled ‘Satanist club allowed at school’ (page 3, 30^th Sept) and the last line ended ‘…said the club would provide an alternative to the school’s Bible-centered Good News Club.’ I kid you not. But I did double-check the date and it’s not April 1^st. But as any high-wire walker would tell you, it’s all about balance.

Next up is a friend who has hens and a habit of texting without her glasses. This is what she meant to say to her teenage son: ‘With you soon – just putting the chicks away’, and what she actually texted, sans glasses, was this: ‘With you soon, just putting the dicks away.’ Up to  you which version you prefer.

I know an elderly gent who functions very well using his own language. Or rather, a cross between old no-longer-used West Country sayings and words, and new words created by his encroaching deafness. Only last week he was talking about his glorious crematus. Hmmm… was he planning his funeral? I wondered. It took a while until, after much frowning from both parties, he took me outside to view his glorious crematus. Or Clematis, as it turned out. And very pretty it was too.

Punctuation – and especially that pesky comma, is guilty of altering the meaning of, well, pretty much anything, as Morecambe and Wise observed in a skit about the famous 1929 song What Is This Thing Called Love. Or as they would have it: What Is This Thing Called, Love?

I only noticed my most recent missing word faux-pas when I re-read an email I had sent. What I thought I had written: ‘Sorry about that, my cock-up I think.’ And you guessed it – what I actually wrote: ‘Sorry about that, my cock I think.’

So the (correctly spelled!) word of the week has to be – Mondegreen – from Lady Mondegreen,  “A misinterpretation of the phrase ‘laid him on the green’, from the traditional ballad ‘The Bonny Earl of Murray’” (1954)

Getting close to your main character has its perils. What do you do, when, like a heartless lover, you’ve finished with them and seal their fate with that final full stop? Is it over between you? Once that closing chapter is written and the story you’ve plotted and perfected is done, what happens to your characters? Now, if you’re savvy, you would have ensured at least one of your characters makes a return in some sort of sequel (surely there is only one sort of sequel?!) – a DI for example. ‘DI YoureNicked returns to pound the stony streets of *choose your location* arresting baddies by the bucketload’ or ‘She started out as just a customer care worker, but now she runs the Company. Read what came next for Brenda O’Flaherty (other protagonists are available) in this sizzling sequel to Customer Care Hotline…’ See what I mean? I wonder if Helen Fielding knew that her creation Bridget Jones would become the sensation it has. I suspect she did. Sensed the Zeitgeist, and all that. Clever Bunny.

So who should be the top four types of characters you would keep alive to keep your readers coming back for more?

Well, number one has to be

1. Your Main Character – The Winner. ‘Cause everyone loves a winner right? Of course we do. Just so long as they fail loud and long first. Y’know, lose their lover, lose their job, find their lover, regain their job, lose their lover again, struggle with some demons (usually the addictive sort), get passed over for promotion and dumped on from a high height by their nemesis – but hey! they still come out a winner and we love them for it.
2. The Baddie. Gotta love a baddie. Yin, yang, all that stuff. No good DI YoureNicked turning up for work if there’s no-one to nick because the baddies have just found their consciences and now do voluntary out-reach work. No, you’ve got to have a baddie, whether it’s an all-out Bad Baddie, or a slimey grimey smarm-monster with no social etiquette and a taste for unpleasantness. Dracula for example. Now there’s a character you can get your teeth in to.
3. The Other Character. You know the one – not entirely sure why it’s there but seems to hold the story together… and that actually doesn’t have to be a human character at all – could be an inanimate object: Lion, Witch…Wardrobe…
4. The Fourth Dimension (Usually In The Form of a Cat or Dog). Yes yes, yes, I know, dogs and cats are often the main character, the furry protagonist; Bob, for example, surely upstages his ‘owner’ at every and any available moment. Cats are like that. But what I mean by fourth dimension here, is not other-wordly, but the Other Other Character that may only have a minor role in the story but is the hinge on which the whole story hangs. The mysterious shopkeeper in the Mr Benn series for example – we never know anything about him, but without him Mr Benn wouldn’t have had half the fun he did.  And now here, from someone else long ago, is

An old post, but still helpful nonetheless!

Imagine this: your work is snapped up by an agent who says ‘bloody brilliant – 50 million copies right off the press – I’ll make sure they get distributed to all the car-boots and charity shops in the area asap…’ Would you look at your agent and think perhaps it would be time to sever your relationship? I pondered on this dichotomy as I picked a book at random from a dusty cardboard box of pre-loved books at a car boot recently, handed over my 50p and dropped the book into my bag for later reading. Whenever that would be. I forgot about it until emptying the bag a few days later and when time allowed, I would sit with a coffee and have a little look at it. Now I have of course, and can’t put it down. I’ve checked-out the author’s website and am ashamed to discover that he is a very well known writer, having burst on to the writing scene in 1991 (my god that seems like another century!      No, wait…) though at the time of my purchase I had never heard of him. But hey, I was busy in the ‘90’s with babies and nappies and whatnot, so reading never happened. Ever. And by the time it did resume it was usually to help with homework or to read a school report, so it’s not surprising that this particular author slipped under my radar.   Anyway, win-win for me, as I have discovered purely by chance a writer whose work I enjoy very much and will now hunt down and trap at my local library, and whose back catalogue will keep me going through the forthcoming winter nights. Is it a lose-lose for him though? All that effort put in to plotting and writing and editing, to end up in a dusty cardboard box at a car boot? For 50p? Although that 50p did go to support a local charity.  On balance however, I think that if a book I had written had been sold in the traditional way back then (and the book I bought is 16 years old though you’d never know it by the good condition) then made a reappearance at charity car boot, a little part of me would be pleased. Pleased because it hadn’t ended up in landfill, pleased because 16 years later it was still in existence, and pleased because two parties benefitted from its re-sale. I guess humans will never stop reading or writing or painting or drawing or singing or all those other creative endeavours our humanity enables us to do, which means we’ll always have books of one sort or another. One of my daughters commented recently about ‘that red book I used to have. The one with the picture of a rabbit popping out of a blue box. What happened to it?’ Red book? I queried. Blue box? I had to think long and hard, trawling through the memories of all the children’s books and toys that came and went (mostly to and from charity shops) and then I remembered. The Red Book. It was made of fabric, and the pages padded out with foam so it was soft and easy to get hold of. For a ten month old baby. Guess I must have been reading back in the ‘90’s after all then. The book must have stayed around a while until we moved on to more complex storylines and characters – a giraffe with a sore throat rings a bell – but I allowed myself a little smile. What a precious thing to have given my children: a love of books.

Donate your books to Oxfam

As writers, many of us use the things we see around us as inspiration.  Sometimes we have an audio prompt – a conversation overheard, a snapchat or message on our phones, even a snippet of a song on the radio – but often it is the things we see that start the cogs turning.  With this in mind, I want to share with you these pictures taken very early on Sunday morning in the Teign valley in Devon.  Taken an hour apart, the contrast in the colours and feel of the photos is quite dramatic, and has already sparked my imagination to write a competition piece.  I hope you find them useful too.  Just imagine the gentle sound of the trickling water and the chattering of the birds in the reeds and you’re almost there…

6.45am

 

An Hour Later

Like the in-coming tide, I hope the pictures get your creative juices flowing!

So that’s August done and dusted for another year. What is it about the 8^th month that acts like a dam, preventing any creative waters flowing and rendering the garden of editing parched and untenable? I guess we’d like to think it’s the wonderful weather causing a lapse in creativity – all that wall-to-wall sunshine insisting we frolic in the blue, blue sea before being rinsed down with a long cold beer or chilled white wine. Or the lure of visiting friends and family for those spontaneous barbeques that occasionally end with a wasp in the trifle and a visit to A&E – such events not always being connected. Or may be it’s just hard to be brilliant all the time.   Or any of the time. But you and I both know that with September striding out with his It’s Only Late Summer Not Autumn Yet attitude, the C word is hovering on the horizon throwing writers across the country into a flurry of activity akin to falling into a moving tumble dryer. Open mics to organise, works to proof read and edit, events to attend, ideas to nourish and flourish… Yep, summer’s gone and.. I can’t say it… summer’s gone and C…. Ch… Christmas is only (at the time of writing) one hundred and thirteen days away. Not so bad when you see it in text. See it in numbers though, and your mind plays different, more sadistic games: only 113 days until Christmas. Which is NOTHING! So time to get writing. Trying to find some inspiration the other day, I was directed toward some fantastic prompts – Thank You to all those people out there whose imaginations are currently far more fertile than mine! You know who you are – you crazy clever Creatives on Reddit. Here’s to you!

https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/

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Scientists have invented a serum that allows animals to speak. Your dog was recently given the serum, but it appears the treatment has not worked. Your cousin, whom you haven’t seen for years pays you a visit. As the door opens, your dog suddenly whispers in your ear: “Run”

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You manage to get on the set of your favorite sitcom. When you go to get autographs from the actors you begin to realize none of them know they are on a show

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Every human knows the day date of their death. They just don’t know the year

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You are an archeologist exploring the ruins of a dead planet

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After dying, you discover that ghosts are bound to the places where their ashes are located. Now you’re really regretting that last clause in your Will.

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So there you have it. A few lines of inspiration to tickle your fancy with, and ease you back into the garden of editing.  Happy writing!

And thank you Hannah for showing them to me in the first place

What another fabulous day!  A great authors Open Mic session organised by Lindsay Stanberry-Flynn at the Evesham Festival of Words.  It must have been poets day, as so many attended.  With the recent news coverage of the centenary of the battle of the Somme, I read a poem dedicated to one of my grandmother’s brothers entitled and statesmen still murmer.  Here it is.

and statesmen still murmur

we would never meet,
you and I
only grainy images
remain
to explain to me
how you would die
just sixteen
your lion’s courage
could not compare
to your mother’s love
and she, discouraged
you to go
too young, she said,
too bored you had replied
until knee-deep in sucking mud
machine-gunned down
until you died
my Great uncle Denzil
a generation
lost to us
by the conceit and vanity
of others
an empty chair at the supper table
grows cold and dusty
your sister and brothers unable
to close the gap between them
so we lay wreaths,
at the Cenotaph
and statesmen still murmur
of the rutted path
to peace

©Jacci Gooding 2016