October 14, 2013
I've been asked to give a talk about writing to 11 and 12-year-old members of a local school's book club. I'm honoured and terrified. What can I possibly say that will interest them? It's a long time since I was that age–perhaps they'll be interested in what I was reading then, and I still have some of my 'deathless prose' from that period which might not be too embarrassing to show them.
In trying to trace what it was that set me writing initially, I realised that it was reading. I had an Enid Blyton book featuring Josie, Click and Bun (one of them was a mouse, but I can't remember which). There were pictures with the text beneath them, rather like the Rupert Bear strip. I couldn't read all the text, so I made up the story to match the pictures. I've been making up stories ever since, and I've been reading ever since. What a great gift that book was! I've learned so much from reading, and my imagination has allowed me to be whatever I wished. I can order the world however I want in my daydreams and fiction, no matter how limited my actual abilities. Writing lets me justify playing 'let's pretend' and calling it work.
There was something else I had when I was 11 that today's children don't have in abundance, and probably don't even realise that they're missing, and that's silence. I'll probably suggest that they try a few minutes' quiet now and then to let their minds wander and ask 'what if...?' Whatever they decide to do in future, it will stand them in good stead.
P. S. I've just realised that the talk's booked for 13th December–Friday 13th. Of course, imagination can have its drawbacks.
Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
October 6, 2013
In the past couple of weeks I've had news of a few successes. I've had a poem short-listed in a competition (the final winner is yet to be decided) and a short story short-listed in another. A poem has been commended in the Thynks competition and another has been long-listed in a fourth competition. Okay, none of them are actually in the prizes (yet), but it's still something to be pleased about, isn't it? The fact is, the organisers of the latter competition offered me an extra opportunity, ...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Competitions
September 30, 2013
Fiction that crosses genre boundaries is increasingly popular, so much so that many sub-genres are popping up, such as steampunk, paranormal romance and Western science fiction. Reading
Map of Bones by James Rollins recently, I was struck by how easily the plot could have been adapted for a fantasy novel.
Map of Bones is a fast-paced action-packed thriller involving secret societies, undercover agents with special abilities and a race to stop an evil sect from gaining ancient knowledge that w...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Inspiration
August 26, 2013
I've been reading some classic stories, courtesy of Paul Hatcher. The Pedestrian is by Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit 451. A man takes a walk on a November evening. The writing is evocative, yet spare. There isn't one wasted word. The tale itself is science fiction, and as with all good SF (even the stories that are full of aliens) it concerns the human condition and where we might be heading. The story was written in 1951, which makes it uncannily prophetic.
The second tale, August H...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Reviews
August 18, 2013
Following on from what I wrote last week about how coincidences that have happened in real life seem too far-fetched if used in fiction, did you hear about the Chinese zoo where the lion turned out to be the keeper's pet chow-chow dog? It took a small boy to point out that lions didn't bark. The story made me think straight away of Hans Christian Anderson's fairytale, The Emperor's New Clothes. The reason that Anderson got away with such an improbable tale was primarily because readers unders...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
August 11, 2013
Here's a definition of 'serendipity' from the Oxford Dictionary: "faculty of making happy discoveries by accident". This week, I've made a few serendipitous discoveries, not least how well my view of how creativity involves talent, hard work and (you guessed it) serendipity chimes with that of Paul Hatcher, an artist who combines all three. You'll find his work at
http://thedrawingsofhatch.blogspot.co.uk and
http://thehouseofhatch.blogspot.co.uk.
Although serendipity is a great thing to find ...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
August 5, 2013
I'm back. I've been to Vienna for three days, followed by three days in Budapest and I'm just about recovering from the heat, which was in the mid 30s or higher most of the time. It was far too hot to wander around on the sunny side of the street, so while I was sitting outside bistros with something cold and non-alcoholic in a glass (alcohol and high temperatures just don't suit me), I had plenty of opportunity to people watch and to write about anything I had seen or done and my impressions...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
July 28, 2013
One more piece about apostrophes and then I'm done with it, honest. There's another use for them that I didn't mention last week, and this one's bucking the who-needs-punctuation trend. This is where apostrophes are placed around words or phrases to indicate that they aren't necessarily factual or true e.g. writing that someone was the 'driver' of a car probably means they were sitting on the back seat. This use is so handy, that some people now draw apostrophes on the air when they speak. I ...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Linguistics
July 22, 2013
At the risk of being told where to stick my ;!?"s, I'd like to make a case for punctuation, and apostrophes in particular. The whole point of punctuation is to avoid ambiguity. Most apostrophes are used to show a contraction where letters have been left out of a word or two words are joined, or to indicate possession. 'I'd' is a contraction of 'I would'.
"That's obvious," I hear someone say, but without the apostrophe, it would read 'id', which is a pyschological term referring to the instin...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Linguistics
July 14, 2013
If you have time to sit outside and make the most of the summer weather, and you can't find anything you fancy on your bookshelves, try reading some of your old work. Don't fancy that? Why not? If you don't think it's worth a second look, why should any other reader? Okay, so you already know what happens–or at least you think you do. If you haven't looked through a story, poem or whatever for some while, you could be surprised at how differently you remember it. Not only will you be coming...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Inspiration
