Tag Archives: Florence Nightingale

Assumptions Versus Story Telling

Sophie ponders various assumptions that she has had to negotiate in her writing life, including her own

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

This week I’ve been weighing up the problems caused by assumptions verses story telling.

I stumbled over this dichotomy in my very first unpublished story, long before I thought of myself as a storyteller. Then, when it came to showing my first attempt at a publishable ms, l had exactly the same experience. Both times shocked me. Made me re-evaluate my approach, too.

It’s happened a couple of times times since, and now it’s happening again, and I’ve taken a step back to think about it. Continue reading →

Female characters : fun and games with female names

Joanna is having a giggle over female characters…

Charles Dickens had great names for female charactersSomeone, somewhere recommended my old blog on Naming Minor Characters and it resulted in hundreds of hits last week. When I checked, I saw that most of it was about male characters. Certainly the game at the end was about males. So I thought I might do another version focusing on female characters instead.

When I look back at the literary canon, I see more interesting male names than female ones.

There aren’t many female characters with names to rival Mr Pecksniff or Scrooge in Dickens. But search around, and there are some. What about Lady Dedlock in Bleak House? Since much of the plot revolves around the deadlocked court case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, the name seems very appropriate.

But there are others, even better. What about this pair of chancers? Continue reading →