The Slushpile Silly Season - Into the Groove with Mood Music

by Addy Farmer

This is my starter/root/anchor song for a story about a terrible Summer holiday. I put it on loop and I'm into the sad-summer-takemehomenow-groove. It's also, extremely catchy ... BEWARE. 

Some people like to write in company, some people like to write in the deep silence of an empty house. Others find that writing in a cafe with somebody serving coffee and cake is tremendously helpful (sounds like madness to me, hem-hem).

Whilst some people like to write to music. Sometimes you can find that song that encapsulates everything you want to say about your story and if you do then you're lucky because that's like finding your voice and it's shortcut back into the groove. More often than not I have to play stuff which reflects the theme of my wip and leave the specific songs to individual scenes. For a general creative lift I might listen to Classic FM or i-player radio 3 . There I can find a shipload of classical toons which help my mood but don't interrupt my tiny brain thoughts.

ALSO, why not try free music streaming from somewhere like Grooveshark. .Here you can make your own collection of music, even play your own radio station. Choose your genre  to fit your work - indie, 60s, 70s, rock, R and B etc etc - and let the music waft over you.

So, what great scenes will you write about? How about LOVE for one. Take this - your teen protagonist goes out on a 1940s themed evening and meets The One.





 Oh but then it all goes hideously wrong cos your girl has fallen in love with The Wrong One



So she breaks up :(



But then it's unicorns and meadows again 'cos she's met The Right One and life is sweet. It's like Stevie says, As Long as I Know I have Love I can Make it. Quite right too.

What else?

Well, let's take a fight/battle scene. Try this ...




Friendship ...



Being silly...



Existential crisis ...



Okay, maybe I should stop because things are getting a bit personal. You get the idea anyway. If you want to get serious(er) then there was an interesting discussion sometime ago on Goodreads about this and Teaching Authors blogged some useful ideas.

There must be a few more writers who have opinions about music and writing, silly or otherwise. I promise that the team won't laugh/make assumptions about you, if you spill the beans on your music choices. Go on...

The Slushpile Silly Season - What a Difference One Letter Makes

by Addy Farmer

"Twitter just loves wordy hashtag games and the latest is of a literary bent: #bookswithalettermissing has been trending as tweeters gleefully delete one letter from famous titles to conjure up different works altogether. Hence the likes of The Princess Brie, Loud Atlas, Laughterhouse-Five, A Christmas Carl and The Lion, the Itch and the Wardrobe. It's hard to resist coming up with one's own: Madame Ovary, The World According to Gap or A Brief History of Tim, anyone? One tweeter, the mysterious @darth, duly picked up the ball and ran with it, responding to suggestions by designing actual book jackets." The Guardian

Thought our readers might enjoy this piece of inspired madness. It's all here in a piece from The Guardian. Read, look and enjoy...

the brilliance of @darth

I'm sure Dickens would have approved.

more @darth excellence

Not so sure about Dan Brown...

and @darth does it again

Got any others?

The Slushpile Silly Season - Who's the Daddy or the Mummy or Anyone Else for that Matter?

by Addy Farmer

The PG Wodehouse society will mark the centenary of the cricket match which saw the writer create the character after watching Percy Jeeves play for Warwickshire. Wodehouse had been thinking of naming his character Jevons before the match but changed his mind when he saw the young cricketer in action. His friend Conan Doyle, is thought to have named as many as 249 characters after cricketers.

That's a lot of cricketers and why not - they've got names like everyone else.

Listening to the Today programme,  (go to 2:56 and catch it) there was a tiny but fascinating interview with a man with a pipe in his mouth (he really did have) called Norman Murphy, the author of A Wodehouse Handbook. He talked about how Wodehouse named his most famous creations Jeeves and Wooster and it got me thinking about naming characters.

Jeeves and Wooster - how could they be called anything else?

Val McDermid, the crime writer, was also part of the interview and she gave her tips for character naming. She researches her character names and then googles them to make sure she's not liabling someone. She advocates:

• looking in graveyards
• fitting the name to social class and age  e.g Ethel would not suit your average teen nor Chardonnay your average pensioner
• looking for local names

She did admit to naming one of her characters after a piece of cathedral architecture; a man called Undercroft which seemed to fit his role as a duty solicitor. To my mind, it also sounds a little Dickensian. Is there a technical term for the names which Dickens gives to his characters in order to denote the kind of character they are?

Scrooge - sounds like screw but worse

There are so many examples; Scrooge, Sweedlepipe, Honeythunder, Bumble, Pumblechook, Podsnap, Gradgrind and Pickwick all sound like the sort of person they are. So clever of Dickens to make them all up or did he ...relatively new work by Ruth Richardson has been reported in The Guardian :

Bill Sikes and Scrooge are among the most well-known characters in English literature but rather than being figments of Charles Dicken's imagination, their names were derived from real people. The thug from Oliver Twist, the miser in A Christmas Carol and the ghost of his deceased partner, Jacob Marley, among others, have been linked to people who lived or worked near Dickens's first London home

So, not so unlike Wodehouse, Conan Doyle and McDiarmid and probably many others. It seems strange but who hasn't come across oddly satisfying names such as Ms De'ath, a registrar for births, marriages and deaths, Constable Lawless, the postman called Mr Stamp, an electrician named Ms Sparkes ... and so on. Turns out you may not have to look as far as you think to find a name which fits your character. Ah, that's what it's called:

aptronym" or "aptonym" (n.) = "A name that matches its owner's occupation or character, often in a humorous or ironic way." Cf. "aptronymic" or "aptonymic" (adj.).

But if you don't want all that faffy leg work, why not try a name generating site like fakenamegenerator or fantasynamegenerator or Peter Halasz' useful resource. The Writers Cheatsheet. 

So this is randomly generated me signing off ...

Lydia Duncan - a 59 year old sports professional (!) from London - nah or Gwenna Macgregor, a 22 year old dragon-hunter - close or  PHENOMENA FURY - that'll do
.

or this one...

http://voices.yahoo.com/the-name-generator-writers-list-serious-funny-859317.html?cat=15