Book Release: Spectra
A monstrous child is born from the ground where a building fell. And the child is hungry…
A gladiator must make the ultimate choice, between freedom or friendship…
Deep in the heart of Brazil’s desert forest, the world’s rarest parrot is kidnapped by smugglers…
The Christchurch Writers’ Guild are pleased to announce the release of their second anthology, entitled Spectra: with all the different stories in the world begging to be told and all the genres and styles available for telling them, any community of writers is going to produce a spectra of stories. There is something for everyone in this collection of short fiction and poetry showcasing the interests and talents of members of the Christchurch Writers’ Guild.
Authors include: Shelley Chappell, Beaulah Pragg, J.L. O’Rourke, Kevin Berry, Ami Hart, Matty Angel, Jean Flannery, Jonathan Kingston-Smith, Mia Andrews, Philippa Drayton, Chris Visagee, Sille Mannion, and Angela Oliver.
Spectra is available on Amazon, in both ebook and paperback format. We will be creating a bulk order from Amazon in early February; if you are interested in purchasing a copy/copies, please drop us a line.
Special thanks to Kura Carpenter for designing the cover, and also to Philippa Drayton, Jenner Lichtwark and Shelley Chappell, for helping with the editing. Formatting was done by Angela Oliver.
NaNo Interview: Jill Winfield
Can you tell us a little about your NaNoWriMo 2016 project?
I find it really hard to talk about what I’m writing because I can’t bring myself to spoil the surprise, I know you need to be able to do this for pitching purposes, but I still struggle. For NaNoWriMo, I’ve picked up a story idea I’ve had kicking around for several years but never figured out the way into.
Just to explain the photographs: My novel passes through a lot of share houses, featuring those kinds of surfaces and textures.
How many times have you participated in NaNoWriMo?
Although I’ve signed up before, this is the first time I’ve actually got going.
How have you adjusted your regular routine for the month of November?
I haven’t made changes as such, it’s more that I’ve ratcheted up my commitment by setting very specific (but achievable) goals. I set a goal of writing 2000 words per day with 1 day off per week, just in case. I figured out that on weekdays, if I got up fifteen minutes earlier, I could get an earlier bus and have an hour of focused writing at a cafe before work, instead of half an hour of maybe writing in my journal about – whatever. Before work, I usually manage between 600-800 words. Sometimes I get in another 200 or so at lunchtime, trying to get food in my mouth rather than on my keyboard. After work, usually after dinner, I write until I’ve met my target and finished what I wanted to write about. On the weekends, I cram writing in whenever I can. It is incredible how much you can achieve when you sit down and plug away at it every day.
What made you decide to take the NaNoWriMo challenge?
I’ve been working on the second draft of my first novel for what feels like a very long time – 18 months thereabouts – without feeling like I’m getting anywhere. I started to wonder how I would ever get to work on all those other novels I have floating around in the back of computer/brain/journals if I couldn’t get through this *swearword* second draft. NaNoWriMo was a good opportunity to put down the hard slog of editing/re-writing and pick up an idea I’ve wanted to play with for a long time – like a working holiday. A fun one.
I also thought that the daily habit of writing those 50,000 words would improve my writing. There was an American photographer, Vivian Maier (1926 – 2009) who worked for forty years as a nanny and took photographs after hours and sometimes during her working hours. 17,500 negatives, 2,000 prints and 30 home movies were found after she died and they (well, probably not all of them) are extraordinary. I believe that good art is made through doing and doing and doing. Doing NaNoWriMo is establishing a good habit of writing and writing and writing.
P.S. I do like my first novel. When I finish it, it’s going to be great.
P.P.S. Google Vivian Maier, I don’t imagine you’ll sorry, there’s a story in every photograph.
What do you like the most about NaNoWriMo?
I’ve found the more I write, the more I want to write and the faster my ideas come. Doing NaNoWriMo has reminded me (because I had forgotten) of the FUN of writing. I love making stuff up and I love playing with words and if can make up a great story using a compelling arrangement of words then that’s a worthy way to spend my time.
How has the establishment of NaNoWriMo influenced your writing habits?
Doing NaNoWriMo has brought home how much you can achieve through discipline. It has also made me question my preconceptions of what writing work I can do where. When I first started writing I had a lot of false starts, I kept changing and editing and stopping and starting. It was easy (for me) to get nowhere writing on a computer. I didn’t really get going until I began writing by hand, in a journal, because you can only go forward. The overriding directive of NaNoWriMo: keep writing! Don’t edit, just keep going! has helped me learn to keep going on a computer. That will save a lot of time 🙂
After NaNoWriMo, I think I will continue my hour-long session of writing before work. I often get far more done in that hour than I might in four hours on a weekend.
Do you have any tips for NaNo newbies?
I find when I get stuck that if I just start writing, something will come to me. It might be something like:
Oh no! I don’t know what to write. Whatever will I write? I’m hungry. I wonder if my character is hungry. I wonder what they like to eat.
I bet they like chips. I bet they eat chips all the time, especially when they shouldn’t…
Using Scrivener really helps with getting stuck too – you just start a new scene and keep going and all those bits and bobs are still there waiting for you in one neat location when you find out you really do need them.
Also, don’t forget to stretch your wrists around and get up every now and then.
Do you reward yourself for achieving your daily/weekly goals? If so, how?
My plan is to reward myself with a new book for each week I meet my target. Last week I went to Scorpio Books aiming for a nice fat fantasy or SF novel and came home with a collection of Walt Whitman poems. His writing soothed my brain.
NaNoWriMo 2016 Interview: Angela Oliver
Angela Oliver is an author and illustrator, with a wide cast of colourful and unusual characters, very few of them human.
Can you tell us a little about your NaNoWrimo 2016 project?
Initially I intended to rework – for the third or possibly fourth time -the second book in my Lemur Saga, Tail of Two Scions. However, I quickly realised that I was not in the right frame of mind for re-writing a previous draft, and that something fun and frivolous was more likely to help me achieve my goals. Therefore, I switched to a novel entitled Love in Tirra-Inle. This is the first in my Furritasia trilogy (I’ve almost finished the third and abandoned the second halfway through, but that’s by-the-by) and is my first attempt at what is intended, vaguely, to be a romance novel. Albeit a fairly unorthodox kind. With giant cockroaches.
How many times have you participated in NaNoWriMo?
NaNowrimo began in 1999 and I have participated in it on and off since it’s inception. I cannot recall exactly how many times I’ve accepted the challenge – but I believe my success/completion rate to be around 50%. In early years, I actually I finished the novel before attaining the word count goal.
How have you adjusted your regular routine for the month of November?
I have shifted my focus back onto writing, which is a good start. Previous years I have used techniques such as getting up earlier (5am) and attempting “1,000 words before breakfast” but as I get older, I seem to require more sleep. Fortunately this year my husband has a few other commitments which mean that I do not feel so much like I am neglecting him.
What do you like the most about NaNoWriMo?
Probably the social aspect and the fact that it re-establishes in me the habit of writing. Although I do not attend a great deal of write-ins, and actually write better at home, the mere knowledge that out there hundreds, thousands, of other people are undergoing the same process of frustration, dedication and determination as me is really quite encouraging. As writers, it is easy to feel alone, but by bringing together communities, either online or in reality, it really helps to create bonds and make it much harder to just give up on the story.
How has the establishment of NaNoWriMo influenced your writing habits?
The awareness of NaNoWriMo makes it easier to put off writing something new straight away, knowing that I intend to spend the entire month of November writing means that I don’t feel September is wasted because I mostly played Pokemon and didn’t achieve much of anything else. It also gives me more focus, and causes me to force myself to sit down each day and write – at least for the month of November!
Do you have any tips for NaNo newbies?
The secret to successfully completing NaNo is by not caring too much about making the story perfect, focus instead on getting the words on the page. Never delete anything – if I must remove it from the plot, I will either highlight mine in a different colour (so I can find it against later) or cut and paste it to the end of the manuscript so that it still counts towards my final word count goal. And if your story feels a bit flat, then it’s time to add something dramatic and different! Be random if you need to.
What is the most unexpected thing you have had happen in a NaNoWriMo novel?
It’s hard to remember what the most unexpected thing is, but I’ve had a few! One of my favourite was when I discovered which of the characters in Tail of Two Scions had the hidden agenda, but that wasn’t entirely unexpected. I had set up several “red herrings” and determined that the original plan was just too obvious so thought “who is the least obvious suspect that would make sense” and voila! It then involved some going back to add in foreshadowing and also determining her motivation, but still!
What is the strangest thing you have ever Googled for “Research purposes”?
When I started my story this year, I spent a lot of time looking up random cockroach stuff – and got caught up on trying to determine whether a cockroach was a beetle or a bug (turns out roaches are neither) just so I could pull off a humorous dialogue interchange. I’ve also looked up what would happen if a chicken ate a cigarette (spent half an hour looking and then just decided that it was easier just to not include it in the plot at all as it wasn’t really of any relevance).
Do you reward yourself for achieving your daily/weekly goals? If so, how?
I started doing that this year, although I’ve lapsed somewhat now we’re halfway through the month (I think one day my reward was “sleep” – ironically the same night we had the house-gone-to-sea earthquake and I got NO sleep at all due to the tsunami warning). But I’ve tried to come up with something for every day – often it’s food related, a trip to the local Coffee Culture for chai and belgian biscuit, occasionally it’s watching a favourite show (QI, MLP or OUAT). The night after the EQ it was ice cream, but I ate it before achieving the word count – figured I deserved it anyway, given I was running on 3 hours sleep.
Anything else you would like to add?
I blog my NaNo Process day-by-day. If you have the time, this is actually a pretty neat process, because it allows you to determine patterns in your writing. My standard pattern, I realised, was to flake out around the end of the first week – between day 6-9 when typically I would either wind up with a: “my story sucks, I don’t know why I’m bothering” or “I’m really losing momentum”. I don’t think this is atypical, I think it’s a result of the first few days of exciting out-of-the-date writing, followed by the realisation that, if you, like me, are seat-of-the-pants writing (as opposed to rendering a pre-plotted story) then that’s about the point when you actually get into the plot and may, indeed, start to falter. Advice? Be aware of it, and push on through to the other side!
You can follow my day-by-day process here: lemurkat.co.nz
Book & Resource Recommendations for NaNoWriMo’s.
For NaNo Newbies
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No Plot, No Problem Chris Baty |
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No Plot, No Problem Chris Baty |
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Write your Novel in a Month: How to Complete a First Draft in 30 Days and What to Do Next Jeff Gerke |
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The Everything Guide to Writing Your First Novel Hallie Ephron |
For Writers
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Scene and Structure Jack M Bickham |
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On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft Stephen King |
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Save the Cat! Blake Snyder |
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Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story K. M. Weiland |
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The Emotion Thesarus Angela Ackerman & Becca Peglisi (their Thesaurus series have a several other books that are invaluable to writers – available both in hard copy and e-Book) Recommended by: Judy Mohr, Em Lowe |
Websites
www.nanowrimo.org
www.jamigold.com/for-writers/
Facebook has several pages dedicated to including the main NaNoWriMo group as well as municipal groups.
Scrivener Workshop: October 23rd
Scrivener is the only word-processing programme designed solely for writers. NaNoWriMo and CampNaNo participants are offered discounts for the programme. If you are struggling to get your head around this powerful program, the next workshop in the 2016 series of Christchurch Writers’ Guild workshops is just what you need.
Scrivener
Sunday October 23, 2016, 2pm – 3:30pm
South Library, 66 Colombo St, Cashmere
(The Learning Centre)
(Parking is across street by river outlet)
Cost:
Free (Sufficient numbers have preregistered, but spaces are still available. You can preregister here.)
This practical session will get you off the ground on how to use Scrivener, with some of the basics and more advanced features explored. All participants are expected to have their own laptops with Scrivener installed (trial version is okay). It is also recommended to have the Kindle Mobi extension also installed, but not necessary.
Our Guest Speaker is Judy L Mohr: writer and freelance editor with Black Wolf Editorial Services. Judy has always hated using MSWord, so when she started writing her high fantasy novel, there was no way she was going to use MSWord. She first started writing in Latex, but quickly discovered the limitation in output formats. When she discovered Scrivener in 2014, she quickly made the switch and never looked back. Now all of her fictional writing is in Scrivener, along with the writing she does for the various blogs she contributes to. In this session, Judy will share with us some of the tricks that she’s learnt over the years on using the software programme specifically designed for writers. You can learn more about Judy and her personal writing endeavours at www.judylmohr.com.
Pre-registered members will receive additional cool stuff (ie: resources) in their email prior to the event, so don’t delay, pre-register today!
Not a member of the Christchurch Writer’s Guild? Not a problem. There’s no time like the present. Join here.
This workshop is proudly sponsored by:
Writing Non-human Characters
Back in July, I did a presentation on “How to Write Non-human Characters” as part of our Character Building Workshop, and I thought it time I shared a little of it here for those of you unable to attend. I have written several novels, and numerous short stories (including fanfiction), about birds, lemurs, animal-people (“furries”) and fantastical creatures such as goblins and Pokemon. Whilst I do, on occasion, have human characters in my story, they are generally not the main protagonist.
So, why do I favour non-human characters?
First and foremost, I love animals, plus I have a zoology degree and I’m not afraid to use it, to educate while I entertain.
Other reasons you might choose to write non-human protagonists:
- Challenge, to explore the world from a different perspective.
- Adds an extra quirk to a fairly mundane or traditional plot idea.
- Allegory or parable.
- FUN.
Non-human characters can range from realistic style animals (Incredible Journey, Watership Down), through to the aforementioned furries. Generally speaking, I prefer to read animal-protagonist novels in which the animals behave much like their wild counterparts, but with increased insight and complex communication, or truly anthropomorphic ones, where the characters still show some of their natural animal traits. The movie, Zootopia, is an excellent example of this. However, shows like Arthur, where the characters are basically just children that happen to look like animals, don’t interest me.
Of course, “non-human” can also refer to werewolves, elves and many other near-human species.
For the purposes of this post, I’m going to deal predominantly with mostly-realistic animal characters.
The first thing to do when writing an animal character is RESEARCH. I watch documentaries, read books, look up information on the internet. Remember, if you get one facet wrong there is someone out there who will notice and most zoologists aren’t shy about correcting errors! Of course, the more popular your animal is, the more is known about them, so not only will you have a plethora of information at your hands, there will also be more folks out there looking to correct any errors you might make. If you are making up the species, as I did with my goblins, then you can create as crazy an ecology as you like, but remember to keep it consistent!
Next you need a plot, and with that, CONFLICT. Is your character wild or domestic? If domestic, you could write a family drama from the animal’s perspective – The Last Family in England (aka The Labrador Pact) by Matt Haig is an excellent example of this. Murder mysteries seem popular too: why have several cats in the neighbourhood been found dead? Sit down and brainstorm a list of possible adventures that your domestic cat or dog could get up to. For both domestic and wild animals, there is the classic theme: trying to get home/find a new home, in which either the original habitat is destroyed (Animals of Farthing Wood) or the animal is taken from his/her home and must find her way back (Far From Home Cats). Survival in general is also a popular theme, (ie: Black Beauty and Bambi), but you will still need the plot to build to something – whether it be the battle for dominance to claim his position as head of the herd, or that final hurdle before being reunited with her owner or finding his forever home.
Even animal characters need PERSONALITY. They should always be a character first, animal second. They should have needs and wants, hopes and dreams – and forces (be it another character, or nature) acting against their achievement of these. Cliches are fairly common in animal-driven narratives: cats are sly and manipulative, dogs dependable and loyal, but it is fun to twist the stereotypes. After all, hyenas are generally portrayed as scheming and malicious thieves and rogues, but did you know that they do regularly hunt their own food (not just steal it), have a matriarchal society and form strong clan bonds, not entirely dissimilar to the oft-romantisied wolf?
Whether your animal character is predator or prey, pet or stray, it can be fun to delve into the world, look at it from a different perspective (don’t forget the senses!) and challenge yourself to write something different!
Angela Oliver is a writer and illustrator, a reader and a dreamer. She has independently published two novels via Amazon’s CreateSpace, Aroha’s Grand Adventure
Upcoming Workshop: The Writer’s Toolbox
There are many different tools that a writer uses within their trade. Now would be the perfect time to brush up on those skills.
Then the next workshop in the 2016 series of Christchurch Writers’ Guild workshops is just what you need.
The Writer’s Toolbox
Sunday September 25, 2016, 10:30am – 12:30pm
South Library, 66 Colombo St, Cashmere
(The Boardroom)
(Parking is across street by river outlet)
Cost:
$10 (CWG members), $15 (non-members)
Places limited to 25 people.
Sessions:
- Nuts and Bolts
Brush up on your basic punctuation and grammar. Get a refresher on colons and semi-colons. Learn the differences between the dashes. Remember the differences between different sentence structures.
Presented by Joan Gladwyn (Editor with Proper Words) - Work Gloves a Must: Roll Up Your Sleeves and Get Active
Remind yourself about the differences between active and passive voice. Get it straight in your head the differences between show and tell, and when it would appropriate to use each.
Presented by Shelley Chappell (Author of BEYOND THE BRIAR)
Whether you are a new writer, just starting out, or an established author, it can always help to have a reminder of those common tools of our trade.
Preregistration is now open. Please note that preregistration does not guarantee a place within workshop. The places will be strictly limited to 25 people. Door sales only.
Members must have membership code with them to receive discount.
Not a member of the Christchurch Writer’s Guild? Not a problem. There’s no time like the present. Join here.
This workshop is proudly sponsored by:
Finding value in a critique…
As a writer, if you ever want to publish – be it indie or traditional – you are going to need feedback on whether your novel works or doesn’t work. Critiques can be hard to take, and here’s some tips from our President, Judy Mohr, on how to find the value in even the harshest analysis.
Self Publishing? How to format your book
You’ve finished your book. It’s been edited thoroughly and all the typos and grammatical errors have, to the best of your knowledge, been removed. Well done!
You’ve eyed up the pros and cons of the self-publishing and traditional routes, and have decided — for whatever reasons— to go it alone, and do it yourself.
So, how to make your book look professional?
This step will vary depending on which site you’ve chosen to publish through. Some offer templates, which merely require a cut-and-paste, then a quick tidy through. If you’ve chosen an unusual trim size, or just want to maintain complete control, then here are a few steps you can follow to make your book look as professional as possible:
– First, adjust the page sizes of your manuscript to match those of the Trim Size you have chosen. Most writing programs should allow you to “custom” your page sizes. It will then reformat your entire work.
– Now, you must add in the front pages. For some ideas here, pick up the nearest book in your house and look at the way the front pages are set out:
(Odd numbered pages are on the right hand side, evens on the left. Therefore, even numbered pages are on the back of the odd numbered pages)
Page 1*: In some books this is merely the title, in others, a page of glowing reviews, others choose to put in a passage from the text that it particularly gripping.
Page 2*: Often blank, or you can list other books you have written here.
Page 3: Title page – shows title of book, author’s name etc
Page 4: Copyright details, ISBN, perhaps a dedication (unless you want that on the next page)
Page 5: Dedication or quote
Page 6: Blank, Map or other Illustration
Page 7: The story begins.
* My earlier self-published books skip these two pages, and start with the title page (meaning the story starts on page 5). There are a few traditionally published books that do this too, but not many.
> The story should always start on a right-hand page, even if this means leaving a page blank.
> Page numbers should not be on the pages before the story begins.
> Justify your text. Unjustified text in a printed book pretty much screams of amateur publishing (however, poetry and books written for dyslexics are the exception to this rule). After justifying it, you may like to look through for any sentences that have been stretched too long and manually add in hyphens/divided words. Do this after the ebook conversion, or you’ll find random hyphenated words in your ebook. Either that, or you can also adjust the kerning (the spaces between letters).
> Be consistent. Make sure your line-spacing remains consistent for the entire novel, that you don’t accidentally change font size or style, or the size of your margins.
Other Things to Consider:
Margins: I generally set the same margin left and right, with a larger gap top and bottom. You may choose to have a narrower margin along the gutter of the page. My margins are quite wide, which worked well when CreateSpace did one of my print runs at a smaller trim size (the books were still readable), but you may choose to make them narrower. Study printed novels of the appropriate size to determine your own, preferred, measurements.
Headers: I don’t really like Headers, and a random opening of my shelved books shows that not every traditionally published book has them anyway. If you do have Headers, remember to remove them from the pages which say “Chapter One” in them, or whatever. Otherwise they look poorly formatted and ugly.
Footers: Page Numbers are ESSENTIAL. The library needs to put a tag in your book on page 33, after all. You can center your page numbers or set all the left hand pages to the left hand side, and all the right hand to the right side.
Font: I prefer serif fonts for my manuscripts and all of my novels use Century Schoolbook. You can use Times New Roman, but it’s so common, it’s kinda blah. Century Schoolbook adds a bit of class (in my opinion!). Make sure the font you use is easy to read, also be aware that some fonts are not royalty free, meaning you can’t use them in something you’re making money from. If you set your font too large, it will look like a book for young kids or the elderly. If you set it too small, it is difficult to read. I use font size 10-12, Century Schoolbook for my novels. Note that font size (and line spacing) will affect your number of pages, and if you want a really thick book, you need a bigger font! (Which is why I think some traditionally published authors use such big text, either that or it is for their older readers!). Sans serif fonts (like Arial) are good for children’s books, however, as they are easier for dyslexics or those with reading difficulties.
Paragraphs: Note that after a line break, the first sentence of a paragraph is not indented, but all the rest are.
Line Spacing: I publish my middle grade books with spacing set to 1.5, because these make it easier to track the lines. In my adult books, I set it to 0.54, which allows some space between lines without looking too “childish”.
Chapter Headings: Make sure your fonts, size and style are consistent. Don’t write “Chapter One” then have “Chapter 2”, for example. Also note that changing the size of the font here may affect the way the text lines up at the bottom of the page, and it is preferable to have these consistent. For this purpose also, you should Kill all Widow and Orphan Control*. Adjust the font size of the Chapter headings until you can see that they line up in the PDF version. An easy way to do this is to make sure that the line spacing is proportional – ie: I usually set my line spacing to 0.54, which leaves a bit of a gap between lines, and for the headers I set it to 1.08 (2 x 0.54). This seems to work.
Adding Illustrations to Text: There are two sorts of ways you can include illustrations in the story – one is as a full page spread, the other is as little line drawings interspersed with the text. There’s no real rule to doing this, just make sure it looks right. Personally, from here-in I intend to draw my images at a size that is proportional to the page size so it will fit without having one or two sentences around it. Aroha and Midsummer Knight both have them mingled with the text, but for my Lemur Saga books, I’ve got them on full single pages at the end of the relevant chapters. Use lineart, or grey-scale your colour images first, to make sure they look right; you can make adjustments to brightness etc to make it clearer. If intermingling it with the text, use the “padding” option to provide a few millimetres of space around the image so that the text doesn’t run into it. Trying to get them to sit right on the page can be endlessly frustrating and I have no advice but perseverance. If you are also writing for ebook format, illustrations will mean the text on the page preceding may run for half a page or less, as they often (but not always) show up on an individual page. I have removed the illustrations from most of my ebooks, as it gives more incentive to buy the physical book.
* Widows and Orphans – when the page re-formats itself so that if you have two lines in a paragraph at the base of the page that would be left hanging, they get shifted up to the next page leaving a gap of two lines. They are the bane of my OpenOffice existence, since I want my text to line up at the base of the page, and I don’t care if there are only four words on the next page. I keep turning this off on OpenOffice, and it keeps coming back to haunt me.
Once you think you’re done – export your novel as a PDF file and look through it, to make sure everything looks as it should.
Writing Fairy Tales
(A Guest Post by Shelley Chappell)
Recently I put out a call for submissions for an anthology of radical retellings of fairy tales for young adult readers. I’ve always loved fairy tales and I released my own collection of novelette-length retellings, Beyond the Briar, back in 2014, followed by some shorter fairy tale retellings. I’m keen to see what other writers might do with fairy tale retellings and, in particular, to gather together fairy tale retellings by Southern writers – citizens or residents of New Zealand, Australia or a South Pacific island – and explore what synergy we can create in our retellings.
Wish Upon a Southern Star will be a collection of quirky and profound reinterpretations of our favourite tales. The contributors will all be citizens or residents of New Zealand, Australia or a South Pacific island. The stories will each retell a single fairy tale, which may be from the European fairy tale canon or a lesser known original (including non-European fairy tales). I’m really looking forward to reading the submissions and selecting some thought-provoking stories for fairy tale fans to read.
As many writers have never experimented with fairy tale retelling, my fellow writers at the Christchurch Writers’ Guild have asked me to share what I know about fairy tales and my suggestions of how to rewrite them. My recent blog series covers this subject in depth, tracing why I love fairy tales, what fairy tales are, the history of fairy tales and fairy tale retellings, fairy tale critics, approaches to fairy tale retellings and a writing exercise on how to radically retell fairy tales. But that’s a lot of reading! For those of you who just want a quick overview as you’re chomping to get started, here are the essentials:
What is a fairy tale?
A fairy tale is a kind of folk tale which takes place in a magical, other realm, contains archetypal characters, repeated motifs, and a plot structure involving journeys or quests, tests, magical help, transformations, punishments and rewards.
What’s important about the history of fairy tales?
Fairy tales have been around for thousands of years but they took on a new lease of life with the writings of the French around the turn of the seventeenth century followed by a range of collectors and writers in the nineteenth century, including the Grimms, Hans Christian Andersen, and Andrew Lang. To retell fairy tales, you have to know the originals. You can read a huge range of fairy tales from around the world online.
How do you retell one?
Fairy tale retellings can be standard and close to the original or they can be radically different or ‘fractured’. How radical or fractured a fairy tale retelling is depends on how many of the key elements are changed – characters and their roles and motivations; settings; plot events; motifs and objects; genre; narrative perspective; themes and messages. If you want to write a radically retold fairy tale, you’ll need to work out how and why you want to change each of these elements – what you want to keep (so that the fairy tale is still recognisable) and what you want to transform.
If you’d like to contribute to Wish Upon a Southern Star, please read the details in the Call for submissions and contact me if you have any queries. I can be reached on my Facebook page, my website, or by emailing wishuponasouthernstar@yahoo.com. Happy writing!
Shelley Chappell wrote her PhD on the motif of fantastic metamorphosis in children’s and young adult fantasy literature and has taught literary analysis at a variety of institutions. In her spare time, Shelley writes fairy tales and other fantasy fiction for all ages. She is the author of BEYOND THE BRIAR: A COLLECTION OF ROMANTIC FAIRY TALES.
Christchurch Writers' Guild 
