The inimitable, always-in-demand, Jessica Morrell will be joining us at the Chanticleer Authors Conference
Jessica Page Morrell – Editor Extraordinaire!
We are delighted to welcome Jessica Morrell to VCAC21! One of the primary contributors to the Chanticleer writing blog, Jessica’s tips and advice are invaluable lessons that benefit all authors.
Each year we offer writing craft sessions from the best editors and authors in the publishing industry. This year we are excited to announce that we haveJessica Page Morrellas a teacher of theMaster Writing Class Sessions.
It sometimesdoestake a village to bring a story to life. With that in mind, we’ll discuss the many roles for your story people from protagonist to minor characters, and delineate their impact on the plots and protagonist. However, we’ll also cover the outliers in fiction and the chaos, conflict, zest, and realism they add to your story world. So we’ll be covering anti-heroes, oddballs, wretches, naughty, pain-in-the-butt types, innocents, along with villains and bad and bad ass women.
We’ll touch on other topics—how to differentiate characters via voice, creating characters based on backstories and main traits, and the importance of secondary characters to make things happen. Because living, breathing characters come from readers experiencing them through a specific emotional lens supplied by viewpoint, voice, and a character’s observations.
To further expand our discussion we’ll also cover immersive, intimate viewpoint and narrative distance. Please bring your favorite imaginary folks to the workshop.
If you are not registered for VCAC21, but would like to take Jessica’s Master Writing Class,please click here.
Conference Session: Saturday, April 24, 2021 at 10:15 a.m.
Power Writing, Word by word, sentence by sentence using language to create tension, emotion, action and resonance.
Jessica understands both sides of the editorial desk–as a highly-sought after developmental editor and author. Her work also appears in multiple anthologies andThe WriterandWriter’s Digestmagazines. She is known for explainingthe hows and whysof what makes for excellent writing and for sharing very clear examples that examines the technical aspects of writing that emphases layering and subtext. Her books on writing craft are considered “a must have” for any serious writer’s toolkit. Read some of Jessica’s writing here.
Click here for more information about the 2021 Chanticleer Authors Conference and Int’l Book Awards Banquet and Ceremony.
April Fools’ Day is this week! Will you be a prankster or end up with egg on your face?
A surprisingly old tradition, historians trace the April Fools’ Day Celebration to the change in the calendar after the Council of Trent in 1563, moving the start of the New Year to January and beginning to celebrate Spring in late March rather than at the beginning of April. Those who were slow to adapt and celebrated the wrong holidays at the wrong time were knows as April Fools. For those of you who love a deep dive, you can read more here.
Of course, there have been other traditions of dressing up in costumes and pranking people, but the real question we want to look at is what’s funny in writing?
Humor Writing
At first blush, Chanticleer only has The Mark Twain Award that appears to cater to humor writing, but we all know that humor is key for almost any story. What better way to keep the reader engaged than those laugh out loud moments?
Interested in learning more about the Mark Twain Awards? Click here for more information and here to submit!
We can think of a few common times of humor in writing:
Satire (obviously)
Dark Humor
Situational Humor
Self-Deprecating Humor
Let’s go deeper!
Satire
One of the big keys to Satire is to always punch up. Making fun of people who are already having a tough time often leaves a bad taste in the reader’s mouth.
One classic example of Satire is George Orwell’s Animal Farm which critiques the fascist re-envisioning of Communism by Joseph Stalin through the lens of barnyard animals. This is a darkly told satire with the intention of speaking truth to power.
For lighter Satire, you can always look at Saturday Night Live and see their most recent jokes about whoever holds political power in the US.
Satire often ends up with someone adopting a role they don’t actually believe to expose parts of that belief that don’t hold up well, such as Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”
Dark Humor
Also known as Gallows Humor, Dark Humor looks at terrible situations and finds the irony in them.
This often pops up when someone says “Well, at least it can’t get any worse!”
Situational Humor
This happens when the character’s position in a scene happens to be very funny. For example, in Who Mourns for Morn from Star Trek: Deep Space 9, the Ferengi bartender Quark is harangued by 4 different thieves, all looking for a cut of the estate of Quark’s best customer (now deceased). At one point, all four of them, not knowing the others are there, arrive in Quark’s quarters where he hides each of them from the previous until he has a full house!
Quark at the center of attention with 4 phaser pistols pointed at his head
Self-Deprecating Humor
This often can be seen in Non-Fiction work. Self-Deprecation can make people feel less intimidating and put the reader at ease with a speaker. Possibly one of the best examples of this comes from the prologue of a 1910 Calculus Textbook.
Be careful though! A little Self-Deprecating Humor is a lovely introduction, but too much will quickly tire a reader out.
Final Tips:
Be Personal:
You know what’s funny in your own life. Start there with retelling those stories to see how it works out.
Subvert expectations:
We’ve all seen cliches, and those have their place in all stories, but think about times when a scene did not go the way you expected. One great example is in The Last Jedi when Rey returns Luke’s lightsaber and he immediately tosses it.
Such hope immediately dashed
Rule of Three
This is one of the big places to subvert expectations. You offer two regular, expected ideas, and then follow it up with a third option that surprises
Ex: “What are you up to today? Work? Day off? World domination?”
Obviously, there’s often a little more time between the appearances.
Chanticleer Book Reviews to make you laugh and cry
INSYNNIUM by Tim Cole
Grand Prize Winner for the Cygnus Awards
The dramatic premise explored in a new novel,Insynnium, is a wild, immersive leap into a world-changing (but fictional) drug. In other hands, what could be a dystopian thriller goes one step further in author Tim Cole’s capable hands. He focuses on the humans who first discover and use the drug and weaves his story with a devilish charm.
This is somewhat Bill Murray/“Groundhog Day” territory, a film exploring one man’s reliving a day in his life over and over until he learned new behaviors, new skills and came out of it a better man. Unlike “Groundhog,” Max McVista takes multiple doses of the drug against all advice, then somehow expands time itself in what he calls an “AUE” or “Alternative Universe Experience,” enabling him to spend months and sometimes years becoming or experiencing whatever he wishes. When returning real-time, he’s only missed a day or two. (For E=MC squared fans, it’s basically reverse engineering of Einsteinian physics.)
First Place Winner for the Mystery & Mayhem Awards
Who commits a murder in a crowd of a hundred people relaxing in a park, and how did the Agatha Christie Book Club miss the entire thing from only a few feet away? In the trendy Sydney suburb of Balmain, Kat Mumford, social media interior design star, has been murdered during the inaugural Cinema Under the Stars. Her distraught husband, Eliot, is clearly the prime suspect, but at the time of Kat’s strangulation, he is nowhere near her. In fact, no one was sitting near Kat, and the crowd seems to have been so absorbed by the movie, Agatha Christie’s Evil Under Sun, that no one saw a thing out of the ordinary.
When Alicia Finlay and her book club realize the murder occurred right under their noses, there is no way they can just let the police handle it. When Alicia’s boyfriend, Detective Inspector Liam Jackson, actually calls her for information, she and her club decide to do a little investigating of their own. Despite being told to butt out, Alicia, Lynette, Claire, Missy, and Perry go undercover to find the killer, but the twists, in this case, will lead them down a strange path to find a crafty killer. The club must sift through the suspects: a smarmy barman, a detestable reverend, a pregnant domestic abuse victim, a mystery mustached man, a dead junky, and a hipster hubby. With few clues but many dead ends, the club will meet their most challenging mystery yet!
A bitingly funny collection of life-stories from Christie Nicholls – stand-up comedian, actor, and writer – made all the more piquant by her repeated insistence that she has no short-term memory. Fortunately for us, her long-term reminiscences more than make up the deficit.
Nicholls has divided the book into four parts. In the first, “A Broad Abroad,” she recalls her experiences of traveling to far-flung places, beginning with a summer in Belém, Brazil as a child. She and her brother, for some reason nicknamed Beluga, slept in hammocks and played in a swimming pool, but much of her cherished time involved a German Shepherd named Ferdinand, from whom she learned dog talk. Raucous family bowling in Bologna, Italy, is contrasted with attendance at a staid English wedding. At a later period, Nicholls and her mother went to Sweden, where the budding comic tried her hand at stand-up in newly acquired Swedish, leading to an amusing mix-up of jargon.
Chanticleer Editorial Services – when you are ready
Did you know that Chanticleer offers editorial services?We do and have been doing so since 2011.
Tools of the Editing Trade
Our professional editors are top-notch and are experts in the Chicago Manual of Style. They have and are working for the top publishing houses (TOR, McMillian, Thomas Mercer, Penguin Random House, Simon Schuster, etc.).
If you would like more information, we invite you to email Kiffer or Sharon at KBrown@ChantiReviews.com or SAnderson@ChantiReviews.com for more information, testimonials, and fees.
We work with a small number of exclusive clients who want to collaborate with our team of top-editors on an on-going basis.Contact us today!
Chanticleer Editorial Services also offers writing craft sessions and masterclasses. Sign up to find out where, when, and how sessions being held.
