Tag: Writing

Adventures with Hats and Squirrels

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday1 Comment

I’ve been bouncing around a bit today.  You may remember I reviewed A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag by Gordon Korman a few months ago.  After that review, I wrote him a letter.  Well, I just got a personal email back.  Which has prompted a lot of “Gordon Korman wrote to ME!”  And a bit of bouncing.  Context for this excitement: I’ve been reading (and rereading) his novels since I was, I don’t know, ten.  Maybe younger.  And I own eighteen of them.  And there are some which rank easily among the funniest books I have ever read.

So.  Bouncing.

And having just had an email from one of my favorite writers of hilarious fiction, I think it’s a good time to share some humor for Fiction Friday.  My most absurdly humorous writing, barring some very early Star Trek parodies, is definitely my Pirates of the Caribbean novel-length extended joke (I hesitate to really call it a novel, because there isn’t a plot!)  So here you are: a scene from Cornfield Madness.  The only context you need is a basic familiarity with the characters of Jack Sparrow (Captain) and Will Turner, who are currently wandering around in a cornfield in the middle of the night, trying to avoid Navy sailors who are chasing after Jack.  Oh, and earlier in the story Jack acquired a bonsai tree and named it Hector.

*********************************

            Jack and Will walked through the cornfield, more or less aiming for the far end.  Will was in the lead, as that was how they had started and neither had yet taken the trouble to change that.  It was as they walked on that Jack’s hat suddenly fell off.  A small furry body had leapt out of the cornstalks and knocked into his hat.

            Jack’s hands went to his head.  “My hat!”

            Will hadn’t noticed the small furry body, and wasn’t comprehending Jack’s concern.  “So pick it up again.”

            “Oh.  Right.  Hold the tree.”  Jack handed Hector to Will and looked around.  His hat was lying quietly in the middle of the row a few feet away.  He took a step towards it.

            The hat skittered away.  Jack frowned.  He leaned forward.  The hat sidled back a few inches.  He took two quick steps towards it, the hat hastily backing up.

            Jack frowned at the hat.  “Now you stop that,” he said sternly.  The hat snuck back another inch.

Continue reading “Adventures with Hats and Squirrels” →

When Cinderella’s Slipper Fits

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday2 Comments

After sharing my very short Cinderella story last week, I thought it would be fun to share a scene from the Cinderella portion of The People the Fairies Forget (more background here).  This scene starts at The Nightingale, an inn run by the heroine of this section, Catherine.  She’s a cousin to Jack, the hero of the Sleeping Beauty section.  Tarragon, my fairy and narrator, has been hanging out at The Nightingale recently, but hasn’t revealed his magical abilities.

Earlier in the story, Prince Roderick threw a ball, and invited every eligible woman in the country to attend (it was a large ball).  Catherine, though engaged to be married, attended the ball for the sake of the food and the dancing.  Tarry came too, for the same reasons, and while they were there they saw that the prince’s favorite dance partner had mysteriously run out on him, leaving a glass shoe behind.

A few days later, they’re hanging out at The Nightingale, when…

***********************

…we were interrupted by a sudden explosion of apples.

            Another of The Nightingale’s staff had come through the door, carrying a box of apples that had just been delivered.  He tripped on the threshold, dropped the box and sent red apples tumbling around the room.  No one looked surprised, including him.  I had already learned that his name was Richard Samuel Jones, and that this sort of event was normal for him.

            “Are you all right, Sam?” Catherine asked, bending down for an apple that had rolled near her feet.

            “I’m fine,” Sam said, rising to a crouch to gather up apples.  As he did, he remarked, “There’s all kinds of excitement going on out in the street.  Royal heralds and everything.  They’re going door to door.” Continue reading “When Cinderella’s Slipper Fits” →

A Retelling of Cinderella

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday8 Comments

To continue with the fairy tale theme of this week, for Fiction Friday I have a very short story I wrote, retelling Cinderella, with some pointed observations thrown in.  This actually started out in Spanish, as a class assignment, and then I rewrote it (and expanded it) in English.  I wrote this about four years ago, but a lot of the ideas eventually made their way into Book Two of The People the Fairies Forget, “Cinderella’s Substitute.”

**********************************

Once upon a time in a far off kingdom there lived a maiden who was very beautiful and very kind.  Fairy tales always begin the same way, and the maidens are always very beautiful and very kind.  Often their name is Ella, as was the case for the maiden we’re talking about.  This particular maiden, as do most of them, had long blond hair, very fair skin and eyes of the deepest blue.  She didn’t have any initiative, spirit or goals for her life.

Continue reading “A Retelling of Cinderella” →

How Exactly It Was That We Robbed the Sultan of Arabia

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction Friday3 Comments

One of my writing classes in college was an Experimental Fiction class.  It mostly meant finding strange ways to tell stories, or odd rules to impose on yourself (never using the word “and” or telling an entire story frequently repeating the same two words…)  My professor was adamently against all “genre writing.”  Interestingly, I’ve found that in the world beyond the college classroom, the first thing anyone wants to know is what genre you write…

Despite this opinion of hers, I somehow managed to get away with writing a lot of pirate stories.  I’d use whatever constraints we were supposed to use for the story-writing, but I’d write experimental stories about Captain Red Ballantyne and the Ocean Rose.  I was writing Red’s Girl at the time, and I found the experimental stories to be useful writing exercises.

For this story, the constraint was to write a page that was all one sentence.  Red is a bit of a rambler anyway, so it kind of fit.  He’s also a storyteller, so I decided to retell in one sentence one of his stories about his many exploits.  Whether it actually happened is a different question.  But here it is: in one sentence.

**********************************************

          So there we were chasing down this ship and believe me, it was a very big ship with a lot of red silk sails, which is how we knew that it was the ship we wanted: the one owned by the Sultan of Arabia, of course, seeing as we’d heard rumors Continue reading “How Exactly It Was That We Robbed the Sultan of Arabia” →

Who Do Your Characters Know?

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations2 Comments

Have you ever noticed that an unnatural number of characters seem to be loners?  Or close to it?  It’s the standard formula–you give your main character one friend so that they won’t be totally antisocial and will have someone to bounce conversation off of, and then you ignore the rest of their social life while you pursue the plot.

But lately that second part has been bothering me.  I recently read Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, and his main character, Richard, though a basically nice guy with a good job in a populous city, seems to have absolutely no one in his life except a coworker he’s friendly with, and a really terrifying girlfriend.  In some ways the trajectory of the book explains why Gaiman wouldn’t want to tie Richard down (I’ll leave it vague to avoid spoilers), but it put me on the thought track, and I don’t think Richard is the only character in this social situation.

 Why don’t these characters have more friends?  Why don’t they have second cousins and old college acquaintances and coworkers they’re friendly with and members of groups they attend and old friends of the family and neighbors they nod to and that best friend they bounce coversation off of?  At least, that’s the way the world works for me and the people I know.  So why don’t characters exist at the center of their own web of people?

Probably because it doesn’t make sense to clutter up a story with all those people who aren’t relevant to the plot.  But shouldn’t they exist in a subtext sort of way?  You never meet Aunt Susie and Cousin Jimmy, but the character has family photos on the wall.  We don’t need to know who’s in them, but family photos means family and it would be nice to know they exist somewhere.  Yet lately I keep running across books (and even more so in movies) where characters seem to know barely anyone.  Some characters, of course, really are loners and that’s part of the point.  But a lot just seem to be sort of vaguely unconnected.

It’s made me think about my own writing.  How many people do my characters know?  Take Jack, my goatherd.  He’s new to the area, having moved from the next country over, but he’s friendly with the servants at the castle, and he ought to know a few other shepherds and goatherds in the area–but I must admit I’m not sure I’ve made that second part clear.  He also has relatives back in his hometown, an uncle and a cousin.  His cousin, Catherine, becomes the heroine of the second part of the book.  She runs an inn and I’m pretty sure she knows most people in town.  She has a whole network of people running the inn with her, she goes to the prince’s ball with a group of friends, and when Cinderella is eventually found, Catherine knows her slightly and has heard gossip about her (unpleasant family situation).

I’m not claiming I have it down perfectly with all my characters either–far from it, I’m sure!  But it’s something I want to think about more consciously when I write characters.  Do they know a lot of people, and what kind of people?  And if they don’t–because I think the main characters of the story I’m writing now wouldn’t–why not?  And how does that change the character?

My pirate captain, Red Ballantyne, knows everyone.  Every bartender, every tavern girl, every pirate, every person he trades goods with illegally, he knows by name.  He’s also not very close to any of them.

The main character of my current in-progress novel, another fantasy loosely drawing on fairy tales, is a wandering adventurer named Jasper.  He meets new people constantly, by doing things like rescuing them from ogres.  But I think if he bumped into them six months later, he wouldn’t remember them very well.  And I don’t think he keeps in touch with hardly anyone.  But that’s who Jasper is as a character, and I eventually get into a backstory about why he doesn’t form lasting friendships with the people he meets.

Any case, it seems to me that who your characters know is a pretty good way to convey information about them.  Has anyone else seen authors who do this really well?  Or, like me, do you find that it seems to be an under-utilized tool?