Farnham has long been a craft town. Now it is a literary town, with the first Farnham Literary Festival due to run from 5-13 March, 2022.
I am running the Farnham Fiction Award, and we have just selected the shortlist. Congratulations to all the talented writers.
Fool’s Mate by Tim Taylor
Train the Brain by James Gault
Not Your Ordinary Love Story by Ekaterina Crawford
The Watcher in the Woods by Stephanie Thornton
Stuck Like a Dope With a Thing Called Hope by Jilly Funnell
The Lady Without the Van by Jilly Funnell
The Calling by Prince Cavallo
Ayashe and the Red Crow by Diana Lock
The Forced Generation by Grace Walker
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Join us for the Award Event on 13 March, 2022, at 2:30 p.m, St. Marks Church Hall, Alma Lane, Farnham GU9 0LT. Author Gary Couzens will make the awards.
If I could buy a kit to make a dog or a cat, how many parts would it contain? That question had obsessed him since he was a kid.
“Simon’s always taking things apart and putting them back together again,” his Dad liked to tell anyone who’d listen.
The boy’s interest in the family jalopy soon palled. You could disassemble a bike or a car and rebuild it. But, he soon discovered, that wasn’t possible with a frog. Why not, he wondered?
And so he came to an unusual fork in the road of his life. Surgeon or serial killer?
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Her parlour is crammed to overflowing. I perch uneasily on the threadbare chaise-longue, avoiding the broken spring. Charity-shop portraits, of people who are not her ancestors, glare at me from the flocked wall. Outside, a storm brews.
“Another cuppa, vicar?” she asks.
My eyes sweep the brocaded lampshades, the carved giraffes, and a set of faux-leather-bound books entitled “Great Novels of the Twentieth Century.”
I shake my head and can’t stop. The chiming of a clock, playing Edelweiss, wrenches my neck round, as if gripped by an assailant.
I stand.
“Do stay, vicar. It’s so nice to have company.”
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
There’s a song, an old and now-unfashionable ditty. But, hearing it again, the memories flood him like a drain backing-up. All those days and all those secrets! Secrets he has never shared. The skylight’s great eye glares down. And he stares at her across the ballroom, his eyes full of love and despair.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
When he tried to thumb the base, I explained that this was a book and showed him how to open it, that swiping didn’t change the screen and how to turn the pages.
Everything became too much when I found him holding the cat by the tail and looking suspiciously at its bottom.
“Where do the batteries go?” he asked.
So, you can understand why I had to take him back to the droid store and swap my robo-child for a hoover.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
I took the glistening silver fish from him. “That’s kind.”
The man seemed to be waiting for something. Did he want payment?
“Will you come back this evening and share with me?” I suggested.
“Demasiado pequeno. Too small for both.”
“I’ll make roast tatties, lots of them.”
“Alright, entonces,” he said, almost grudgingly.
There was no telling what was in the man’s mind. Still isn’t, and we’ve been married now these twelve years.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
He has grown old at this marketplace table. One day, we were young and easy, running in the narrow allies; the next, he was shackled to his brush.
“Chrysanthemums sell best,” he says, a flick of his hand tracing the stem of his eighth gaudy flower. “And waves, Hokusai waves.”
I notice the slightness of his wrist. As if all the meat has boiled away, leaving only a skeleton that paints and paints.
“Oh, that’s beautiful,” a woman says to her beau. “Let’s buy it.”
And my old friend’s face brightens in a smile, skin stretched parchment thin.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
One is not enough—not to carry the load. Two can share it, but we bend under the strain. Happy voices ring out in song and laughter but, when we turn the corner, they have vanished.
Two is not enough. Nor even a single family—parents, little ones, and grandies.
It takes a whole community.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Behind us, bright lights ho-ho-humming in the night, and the merry jingle of coins pinging into their slots, the city one immense pinball machine. Ahead, darkness.
Oh, they were good times! We didn’t know it then, but we do now. Simple times—the times before. We understood what to expect.
Anything can lurk in the obscurity to come. Maybe a dragon, but maybe also a unicorn. Probably nothing. But it’s the uncertainty we fear. Even if we believed cataclysm was coming, we’d be buoyed by the knowing, and step forward jaunty to meet it.
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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
By convention, we think of character as the essence of the novel. At least of the literary novel. Or, at least of the Western literary novel.
I picked some writing advice from a random internet search: Masterclass has this to say:
“While a mastery of plot can help you develop exciting twists and turns, great character development draws readers in by giving them strong characters with whom they can identify…A novel consists of a character interacting with events over time.”
Someone told me that once you have a character with a want, you have the beginnings of a plot.
But, of course, the idea that stories should be about characters striving to achieve their goal is a comparatively new one in story-telling, and depends on historical preconditions. These include the development of the belief that what goes on in other people’s heads is interesting, and the existence of societies in which it’s meaningful for individuals to strive towards goals.
Orhan Pamuk, Turkish novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature has an interesting take on the primacy of character.
“The aspect of the human being we call ‘character’ is a historical construct and,…just like our own psychological and emotional makeup, the character of literary figures is an artifice we choose to believe in… Since I believe that the essential aim of the art of the novel is to present an accurate depiction of life, let me be forthright. People do not actually have as much character as we find portrayed in novels, especially in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels…
“Furthermore, human character is not nearly as important in the shaping of our lives as it is made out to be in the novels and literary criticism of the West. To say that character-creation should be the primary goal of the novelist runs counter to what we know about everyday human life…In the beginning, there are patterns formed by people, objects, stories, images, situations, beliefs, history, and the juxtaposition of all these things—in other words, a texture…
“The character of my novel’s main protagonist is determined the same way a person’s character is formed in life: by the situations and events he lives through…The defining question of the art of the novel is not the personality or character of the protagonists, but rather how the universe within the tale appears to them…
“Novelists do not first invent a protagonist with a very special soul, and then get pulled along, according to the wishes of this figure, into specific subjects or experiences. The desire to explore particular topics comes first. Only then do novelists conceive the figures who would be most suitable for elucidating these topics.”
Orhan Pamuk, The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist pp 67-77, Faber & Faber 2011
Note that he is not denying the premise that readers become immersed through characters. He is saying that character is a product of a wider interplay of forces (what he calls texture) than simply a want. This texture is shaped by landscape, class, gender, and ethnicity. Character brings those forces to life. As a writer who was shaped by successive periods of military rule in Turkey, he is probably more sensitive to historical and political forces than are his Western counterparts.
Neil MacDonald Author 