Try Something New

It's Monday morning. My son is off to work experience and looking apprehensive. Time for me also to try something new and that's learning to post a link. I'm going to see if this works. Monday mornings are hard. My brain has gone elsewhere over the weekend (walks in the rain, driving the children around ...) so I started my writing week just now with a trawl through some of my favourite blogs. Womag's blog linked me to some writing tips from Lydia Jones. I know she's been somewhere else this week - I'm thinking, The People's Friend? - so I was interested and went to read and yes, her tips are great. Let's try and find them. OK, I've tried this twice and it's still not working. Sigh. Technology is never intuitive for me. So let's just do this: http://lydiajones.hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Earn-Money-Writing-Stories-For-Womens-Magazines#comments. Then maybe I'm covered. The one that grabbed me was her discussion of how NOT to use real life events, because this chimed with my own thought processes in my last post. She was suggesting playing the 'What If?' game - you take the real-life event and then say, 'But what if ...' and that leads you off in many new directions which turns a single event into a story that has wider relevance. So I'm off to apply that process to my own half-written story and see how it goes.

That Rewrite

This story, this series of posts, could soon become a serial. So they wanted ANOTHER rewrite. That would be the third. It's lovely to get feedback, it's generous of them to take the time, but there comes a point when saying yes, again, begins to look like desperation to get published. It isn't worth the time. It's a shame - it was a good story (certainly the last time I sent it!) and they keep telling me how much they like it, but if they like it that much, they need to just publish the darn thing! I'm deep into other work now, anyway, for one of my other markets, and if I look round, I'll lose concentration. There's one just awaiting a title and a final re-read, and I'm also halfway through another one. There, I've just seen a way to take the story a stage further and create a whole new level to it. Sometimes you have to write in layers - this one started with a fairly specific idea and was planned to fill a shorter slot - probably 1000 words. However, when you begin from a very literal point, you may find that at first you're telling just that one story and doing so fairly literally. As you edit down to the essential oil of the story, cutting the plot and raising the theme to more prominence, you then see beyond to how you could widen your focus out from that one event. At the moment it's hovering between 1000 and 2000 - I'll wait to see which way it needs to go. One hour till the school bus gets in!

Following Your Children (part two)

OK, so follow your children, but not up a tree. Or, more to the point, down again headfirst.
Trees seem to be a feature of this blog. I climbed trees all the time when I was my daughter's age. I sat up a particularly spectacular pear tree reading on Saturday mornings (Monica Edwards, Antonia Forest, Rosemary Sutcliff, Barbara Willard, KL Peyton ...) I climbed oak trees in the woods and balance-walked along fallen trunks just as she does now. They are warm and living things and infinitely comforting. Oh yes, sign me up to the ranks of tree-huggers any day!
I never, luckily, fell out of one as she did just recently, and now everyone says, to her or to me, 'oh, she won't be doing that again ...'
But she will and why would I stop her? She is her own person and all I can do is teach her safety, and how to balance the sheer joy of living with the risks. She is not just a glass-half-full kind of person, she doesn't even see the glass is anything other than full. She enjoys every new experience of life.
As the paramedics wheeled her into the ambulance, I held her hand and said, with that rather desperate parental attempt at calm, 'You have to remember all of this - it'll be so useful when you next write a story ...' and sure enough, she told me two days later, cast on arm, 'I can't really even say I wish it hadn't happened, because it's all been so interesting. I didn't know what it felt like to fall out of a tree before ...'
I can, however, tell you just what it feels like to watch and that's an experience I'd rather do without.
But can I use it in a story ...?