Christmas and New Year – December Task [taken from our textbook – these are our guide for November about what to write about for the December meeting]
There is always a big demand for Christmas stories as many magazines have festive specials as well as their regular issues. As with any seasonal story, it’s important to start work on your stories early. January is not too soon. I keep a special drawer in my filing cabinet for Christmas snippets so that when I need to come up with an idea, I have plenty of stimuli to choose from. Into that drawer go Christmas cards, cuttings from newspapers and magazines, stories I enjoyed, stories I didn’t enjoy but which might be useful, outlines of any Christmas films I watched, the December and January pictures from last year’s calendar, in short anything with a winter or a Christmassy theme.
In December, I watch as many festive programmes and films as I can bear. If any ideas start to form, I make a note of them and put them into my drawer. When I want to write a seasonal story, I pull out that drawer and immediately, that feeling of Christmas comes back, whether it’s thirty degrees Celsius or thirty degrees Fahrenheit outside. I aim to write at least five Christmas themed stories every year as I know I will stand a good chance of selling at least one of them.
I use all kinds of ways to kick-start an idea, some of which will be explained in greater detail here.
One of the easiest is to ‘borrow’ somebody else’s idea. There are many classic Christmas stories — films like White Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life and The Grinch, to name just a few. There are also the stories surrounding the nativity, such as the shepherds hearing of the birth, the coming of the three wise men, Mary and Joseph’s journey and, on a much darker level, the massacre of the innocents. All of these can be updated or told in a new and different way. Think about A Christmas Carol for a few moments. There have been so many films made of this story, including A Muppet Christmas Carol, as well as versions starring Alistair Sim, Patrick Stewart and Bill Murray. There is even a musical stage version. Each of these is very different but they all come from exactly the same source. So why not try writing your own version of A Christmas Carol, or that other, perennial favourite, The Wizard of Oz?
The first thing to do is to jot down an outline of the story as simply and as briefly as you can. For example, thinking about The Wizard of 02, I might write this.
A young girl goes to a strange land and wants to get home. To do this, she needs to find the Wizard. On the way, she meets a cowardly lion, a scarecrow who has no heart and a tin man who wants a brain. After various adventures, they get to meet the Wizard only to find that he’s not as powerful as they’d thought. That’s when they discover that they don’t actually need him because they have found all the things they wanted already. All Dorothy has to do is to click her red shoes and she’s back home in Kansas.
Now you have a summary of the plot, all you have to do is start to change things. First, choose who your main character (Dorothy) is going to be. Next, decide what it is that he or she is lacking. For example, you might choose a divorced woman called Susan who wants to find new friends. Now decide how she might go about doing this. For example, she could choose the internet (the Wizard) but she’s not very computer literate and has to find somebody to help her. In steps her widowed neighbour who she’s always found a bit cold (scarecrow) who helps her find a dating site. Faced with having to write a profile, she contacts an old friend to help her. As it happens, that old friend (the tin man) has lost confidence in their abilities since marrying the wrong man. When the heroine decides to meet one of the men from the dating site, she asks her sister (the lion) to go with her. Her sister has never married and has always been nervous of strangers.
It’s up to you what happens next. One or all of them could find they already have what they need, as in the original version of the story, or things could go slightly wrong. You can play with the original plot as much as you like. You should soon find something that resonates with you. If you have your own favourite Christmas story or film, try this technique on it and see where it takes you. I have read several stories that took their inspiration directly from the original Christmas story, the nativity. I have shied away from doing this as I wouldn’t want to offend anyone, but there are plenty of stories out there that prove it can be done. If this appeals to you, one way to add your own twist would be to tell the story from the viewpoint of a minor character, for example, a young boy who helps the shepherds, or the wife of the innkeeper who let Mary and Joseph sleep in the stable.
Other places I might start a Christmas story from being presents (who wanted what and why), parties, both standard and fancy dress, cooking and eating Christmas dinner, shopping, welcome and unwelcome house guests, mistletoe and how to avoid being kissed by somebody you find repulsive, daft games like Charades, Christmas TV, the Queen’s Speech, Christmas number one singles, and so on.
If none of these work for you, try an internet search of Christmas traditions and customs. You will be amazed at the number and variety of things you find, including some of the weird and wonderful things other nations choose to eat on Christmas morning. What if a friend invited you to Christmas dinner and instead of turkey, they served up a piece of salted fish? New Year is another time that is a rich source of traditions and superstitions galore. One of the most well known of these is the tradition of first footing. Basically, this is all about making sure that the right person crosses your threshold first in the New Year. Ideally, he should be a dark stranger, bearing various gifts, often a coin, bread, salt and coal, which represent food, warmth and good fortune. All kinds of rules and regulations govern first footing. For example, the man should not be a doctor, and he definitely must not have eyebrows that meet in the middle. Tradition also dictates that whoever first foots gets to claim a kiss from the ladies. The question you might want to ask yourself is this. How does a medical man, with eyebrows that join up, get to kiss the woman he admires?
