Behind Sally's Books Mark 2

    This month's blog hop topic is  What was/is your all-time favourite character(s) in literature and why . I feel War and Peace coming on (if not Poor Fellow My Country ) but I shall endeavour to keep this post brief and to the point. As with favourite tunes and books or even foods, I put my favourite characters into categories. I remember a time when I was asked to write about my ideal dinner party guests, choosing from a range of deceased and fictional characters.  The seven I chose then would probably be different now. I might also consider whether the guests would get along—or even be able to converse intelligibly. For example, Geoffrey Trease’s Alexis Leonides, though he speaks with colloquial 1950s English (though he doesn’t use 1950s idioms) in The Crown of Violet , would really be talking in Socratic Greek. I wouldn’t understand him, for that matter. Even English speakers from too long ago would be a challenge. I looked into how many centuries it takes fo...

 This month's blog hop topic is  Creating Compelling Characters who drive the plot and keep readers reading . My heading is somewhat of a cheat, in that it's the title of one of my how-to writing manuals which I produced years ago in concert with my assessment and editing service. Eventually, I combined a dozen or so of the manuals into one giant edifice (truly, you could use the thing as a stepladder) with a long title. Characters to Go became a part of that. Mind, I'm not simply reproducing chunks of that book for this post. That really would be cheating! I've been creating characters for more than fifty years. My earliest ones were generally girls of about my age (then) or animals. The human characters tended to be fascinated by animals, fantasy, stories and country adventure, just as I was. I suppose most of them were offbeat, just as I was, and am. I never had any desire to write about immoral characters, or MCs who were cruel or nasty or unlawful or even disobedie...

   Today's blog-hop topic is  Finding compelling conflict and avoiding clichés .  As usual, this is an interesting challenge, both in reality and in describing... if you see what I mean. It offers lots of possible approaches. I've chosen to focus on clichéd situations and their role in compelling conflict rather than on verbal clichés...  So, to clichéd situations.  Many genres and sub-genres rely on genre-specific tropes, or givens. I don't regard these as clichés in the parameters of this piece, and indeed they can be used in varied ways to avoid that clichéd feeling. What I find of more interest is situations that are commonly used to create conflict or action, but which contravene the  would-he-really  test. Let's look at a few of these. 1. Character One (let's call her Jane) overhears a conversation, whether in reality or via phone, or even by reading part of a letter/email. Jane immediately decides Character Two, a friend, mentor, ...

The round robin this month is a wonderful subject... creating fictional settings. Creating fictional settings is one of my favourite things to do. I've always loved reading about landscapes of the mind- p laces that don't exist- so long as the author makes them  seem  as if they do. The whole concept has a long and grand history. Plato did it so convincingly that even two thousand years later some people choose to believe Atlantis once sank beneath the waves rather than rose from a Greek man’s imagination. I've never invented any place as ambitious as Atlantis, but I've been creating my own settings for almost as long as I remember. Back in the 1970s, I created a farming district I named Springford as a main setting for my first published book, a collection of linked stories called  Her Kingdom for a Pony.  I didn't use the real farming district in which I lived, because I wanted freedom to use features that didn't exist. Having developed a taste for it, I...