The curtain rises to show a simple domestic scene of pre-Christmas pandemonium. Downstage a young(ish) woman (LUCIE) sits amid a sea of wrapping paper. She has bits of sticky tape in her hair and is sobbing brokenly into a piece of tinsel.
LUCIE: Less than a week until Christmas Day! How will I ever get it all finished in time? I must wrap all these presents and get them to Father Christmas without delay, yet there is also the laundry and the cleaning and to do that I must find the floor under all this paper. The tree is drooping and the Christmas cake is not made. All I want to do is read a book! (She sobs.)
Enormous flash, stage left. Enter FAIRY GODMOTHER, with Kindle.
FG: Oh, do stop snivelling, woman! Buck up and pull yourself together. You'll get it all done, because you always do, and if you don't, well, quite frankly, does it matter? You don't even like Christmas cake and there's a packet of Cadbury's chocolate fingers in the cupboard.
LUCIE: I've already eaten most of them.
FG: There were two packets, so nil desperandum. Unless you've already eaten both, in which case you are a glutton and I have no sympathy. Now put down that sticky tape -
LUCIE: I can't, it's stuck to me.
FG: I shall ignore that remark. Shut up and listen. While you shall not go to the ball -
LUCIE: Why not?
FG: You're a hermit. You hate parties.
LUCIE: Oh yes.
FG: Where was I? Oh yes. While you shall not go to the ball, you shall have a good book to read over the Christmas period, for - tra la la and abracadabra - Looking for Buttons will be free to download from Amazon for five days, starting on Christmas Day!
LUCIE: Oh.
FG: You're supposed to leap about for joy at this point.
LUCIE: But I've read it several times. I wrote it. And I don't have a Kindle.
FG: Flaming heck, you can't please some people. All right, here's a second hand boxed set of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense. You can have an hour off from the chores to watch the one with David McCallum and then you'll have to get back to work.
FAIRY GODMOTHER waves wand and turns LUCIE into a teapot before turning to beam at the audience.
FG: Meanwhile, those of you who love romance, happy endings and aren't whinging hermits can download Looking for Buttons free from Amazon, 25th-29th December. Merry Christmas!
Showing posts with label happy ever after. Show all posts
Showing posts with label happy ever after. Show all posts
Wednesday, 19 December 2012
Monday, 6 August 2012
At the end of the day, you need clichés
Flick through any guide to writing and the chances are you'll come across advice along the lines of 'Avoid clichés like the plague'. Good advice, but I think that clichés can be useful shortcuts if you handle them properly.
Chick-lit is commonly held to be a grab-bag of hackneyed characters and scenarios: the ditzy heroine, always unlucky in love; the unobtainable perfect man; the all-too obtainable wrong 'un; the wisecracking best friend; the difficult relationship with a parent; the misunderstandings and complications that drive the plot along.
Having written that, my first thought was, "Oh hell, how high does Looking for Buttons score on the clichéometer?" My second, gingerly relieved thought, was that this is the whole point of this post. Yes, there are familiar people and scenarios but using something familiar doesn't make it dull (I hope). The general framework is familiar, I grant you. That's what the reader wants, that's what tells them it's their sort of book. It's what you do within that framework that makes the difference.
When you take a romantic comedy and boil it down, you end up with a fairytale, shorn of its gorier elements. We're brought up on fairytales. Is it any wonder that we still want to read them when (if) we grow up?
Books offer us a happy ever after. If you have to resort to a kind of cultural shorthand to reach that point, is that so very wrong?
[PS This blog has just passed a thousand hits. Thank you very much for reading it.]
Chick-lit is commonly held to be a grab-bag of hackneyed characters and scenarios: the ditzy heroine, always unlucky in love; the unobtainable perfect man; the all-too obtainable wrong 'un; the wisecracking best friend; the difficult relationship with a parent; the misunderstandings and complications that drive the plot along.
Having written that, my first thought was, "Oh hell, how high does Looking for Buttons score on the clichéometer?" My second, gingerly relieved thought, was that this is the whole point of this post. Yes, there are familiar people and scenarios but using something familiar doesn't make it dull (I hope). The general framework is familiar, I grant you. That's what the reader wants, that's what tells them it's their sort of book. It's what you do within that framework that makes the difference.
When you take a romantic comedy and boil it down, you end up with a fairytale, shorn of its gorier elements. We're brought up on fairytales. Is it any wonder that we still want to read them when (if) we grow up?
Books offer us a happy ever after. If you have to resort to a kind of cultural shorthand to reach that point, is that so very wrong?
[PS This blog has just passed a thousand hits. Thank you very much for reading it.]
Sunday, 2 January 2011
Buttons? What buttons?
No, not those sort of buttons. This has nothing to do with haberdashery or electronics, or even bellies. But it has everything to do with Cinderella.
Have you ever wondered if Prince Charming is really the man for you after all? Perhaps you just want someone kind, gentle and caring. Someone who'll unblock your drain or jumpstart you car in the snow, someone who's seen you with no make-up and a temperature of a hundred and three and still won't run away. Someone who's not rich, not flashy, not necessarily drop-dead gorgeous, but always one hundred per cent real.
Maybe you should be Looking For Buttons.
Looking For Buttons - a comedy for the romantically hopeless. A new novel for 2011.
Have you ever wondered if Prince Charming is really the man for you after all? Perhaps you just want someone kind, gentle and caring. Someone who'll unblock your drain or jumpstart you car in the snow, someone who's seen you with no make-up and a temperature of a hundred and three and still won't run away. Someone who's not rich, not flashy, not necessarily drop-dead gorgeous, but always one hundred per cent real.
Maybe you should be Looking For Buttons.
Looking For Buttons - a comedy for the romantically hopeless. A new novel for 2011.
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