P.G. Wodehouse

Springtime in Words and Music

March 28, 2025 By Allison Symes Leave a Comment

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos

Springtime is one of my favourite times of the year. The other one is autumn, funnily enough. I like both ends of the spectrum. Life as it begins and life as it begins to ebb and fade.

I love spotting the Virginia Creeper in our area and seeing it change colour from red to green and back again. Lovely plant. As I walk the dog it is great to spot the crocuses and other spring flowers emerging, though I am a little saddened my snowdrops have now finished.

It is great being able to walk Lady in the early evening and still be in daylight when only a month or so ago, the same time would have seen me coming back home with her in the dark. It also means we can put her light up collar away for a bit. It is odd walking with a glow in the dark dog (at least around her collar!) though she doesn’t care.

Tags: am writing, Canon in D, creative writing, Four Seasons, ideas for using spring in writing, Kenneth Grahame, P.G. Wodehouse, Pachelbel, spring, spring related books, Vivaldi

Light Writing

March 1, 2024 By Allison Symes Leave a Comment

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos

The best light works do not lay their themes on with the proverbial trowel. As you read the marvellous prose and get behind those characters, you will pick up the themes almost by osmosis. There is no lecturing. You are left to follow the characters on their journey.

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Tags: am writing, books, creative writing, Discworld, genre, Jeeves and Wooster, light writing, P.G. Wodehouse, reading, style, Terry Pratchett, themes, tone, writing craft

Zest In Fiction

July 29, 2022 By Allison Symes 4 Comments

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

I thought this would be a nice cheery way to end my In Fiction series. What do I mean by zest in fiction?

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Tags: am reading, am writing, editing, P.G. Wodehouse, rewriting, support of other writers, The Goon Show, writing commitment, writing craft, writing magazines, zest in fiction

Laughter in Fiction

April 8, 2022 By Allison Symes Leave a Comment

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

Laughter is one of the great joys of life and it has a huge range. This is reflected in fiction too. There are the laugh out loud stories, those wonderful moments of irony, slapstick, the great one-liners and so on. What matters in stories is that humour arises naturally out of the characters and the situations the writer has put them in (and often the greater the height from which the author has dropped their characters in it, the better).

Forcing humour never works. Something is funny or not, as the case may be. When I interviewed Fran Hill and Ruth Leigh on this topic, their insights showed how difficult writing writing humour can be though both ladies manage it magnificently despite writing in different genres. Fran writes memoir with humour. Ruth writes women’s fiction with humour.

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Tags: am reading, am writing, characterisation, creative writing, funny lines, humorous fiction, P.G. Wodehouse, Terry Pratchett

Best Friends in Fiction

January 21, 2022 By Allison Symes Leave a Comment

Image Credits: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

Best friends, often otherwise known as sidekicks, have an invaluable role to play in fiction. They shore up, sometimes literally, the lead character who is struggling with their task. The most famous example of this is Sam Gamgee from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings who did carry both Frodo Baggins and the Ring of Power for a while as the story progressed.

Best friends are there for moral support too and to be a sounding ground for the lead character. Well, we all need someone to sound off with at times, right? And characters in stories reflect us and our behaviour and attitudes (for good and ill), so this aspect is important.

Tags: best friends in fiction, characteristics of lead and sidekick characters, classic detective fiction, Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee, Hastings and Poirot, Holmes and Watson, Jeeves and Wooster, Morse and Lewis, P.G. Wodehouse, sidekick characters, spotting the sidekick character, The Lord of the Rings

Review: Chameleon Theatre Group – Murder with Ghosts

November 12, 2021 By Allison Symes Leave a Comment

Image Credits: Some images created in Book Brush using screenshots and/or Pixabay photos. A huge thanks to The Chameleon Theatre Group for kind permission to use their photos.

It is always a pleasure to see the latest Chameleon Theatre Group production. This one was particularly nice as it was the first time our esteemed CFT editor, Janet Williams, and I have had what is effectively a Chandler’s Ford Today “works outing” since before the lockdowns. And I adore a spoof. So win-win here.

Murder with Ghosts is written by Simon Brett (a big tick in the box) and the plot has more than a nod to an Agatha Christie whodunnit (a HUGE tick in the box here. The first series of books I collected, which I still have, were the Odhams red leather hardbacks of almost all of the Agatha Christie series and novels).

So a spoof written by a renowned crime writer and based on the structure so often used by the Queen of Crime has got to be a winner, yes?

Yes indeed!

Tags: Agatha Christie, amateur theatre, Chameleon Theatre Group, creative arts, entertainment, Murder with Ghosts, P.G. Wodehouse, spoof

Favourite Lines

May 7, 2021 By Allison Symes 4 Comments

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

Do you have favourite lines from books, films etc? I do and I can learn a reasonable amount from them to apply to my own writing. (They also show you what really works in prose. Lines you can recall some time after you originally came across them demonstrate the staying power of well chosen words).

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Tags: books, catchphrases, editing, favourite lines, films, Jane Austen, opening lines, P.G. Wodehouse, repetition, Terry Pratchett, TV

P.G. Wodehouse

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos

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Image Credits: Some images created in Book Brush using screenshots and/or Pixabay photos. A huge thanks to The Chameleon Theatre Group for kind permission to use their photos.

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