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Hello there, welcome back to Bedtime Stories, BBC Radio 2's 500 words podcast.
The place where you can listen to last year's super stories read by the one, the only the awesome BBC Radio Drama Company.
And today's theme is... Wily words and pesky punctuation.
Ah, what a lovely morning, sunny day.
Ooh, what's this?
A paper plane.
I'm confused.
I'm light as a feather, yet the strongest person can't hold me for five minutes.
What am I?
Lighten the feather.
Yeah, the strongest person can't help me for five minutes.
What am I?
Hmm.
Dom!
Dom!
Dom, where are you?
I haven't seen you all day.
Dom!
I hope you're getting ready for the party.
Hmm, this is very confusing.
I've been trying to solve this all morning.
Ah, there you are.
Why have you still got your pyjamas on?
We're meant to be going to a party.
Come on, we're going to be late.
Shush, shush, shush.
This morning, this paper plane flew through the window with a riddle on it.
I've spent all morning on it since it arrived.
Why can't I work out the answer?
I'm really confused.
It's confused me and I can't leave it.
I have to find the answer and I wish I knew where it came from.
Well, what does it say?
I'm light as a feather, yet the strongest person can't hold me for five minutes.
What am I?
It's easy, mate.
Come on, you should have known now.
What, what, what?
It's your breath.
What?
Yes, your breath.
And I think I know who the culprits are.
The 500 Words Bedtime Stories Podcast with Dick and Dom. speaking with no words.
My pen still jitters round the page but it still remains empty.
Empty and as plain as a page could be.
Each hour ticks by or what feels like hours.
My teacher looms over me expecting a full story.
Write faster, faster, faster.
Words whirl round in my head, creating a wordnado.
The strong floods of words disturb all carefully filed sentences, turning my head office block into a mess of words and punctuation swirling.
My mind becomes cluttered with useless junk and my story ideas get washed away by the tide in my head.
Each word runs through my throat and is stuck in the gateway from the voice box to the world, as my teacher calls.
Why is your page still blank after all this time? couldn't find the words in my voice box to reply.
The class was getting increasingly impatient with me and sweat began to drop onto the desk.
Well, I'm waiting, she snarls.
I felt her fiery breath down my neck.
I'd angered a dragon and now I'd pay the price.
Although I wanted to, there was no way I could reply.
The flood of words continued to attempt to break out of its box, but still there was a huge lump preventing their escape.
I could feel the lump in my throat growing and growing.
Still no words.
Suddenly it hit me.
The words had been there the whole time.
I just had to let them out.
As the key turned in the lock where my story lived, my mind began to whir again, but this time the stream of words flowed down my pen and onto the page.
Within seconds I had my story.
I no longer needed to explain the lack of words to my teachers.
Still, my voice was hidden, yes, but this time I had my best friend to speak for me.
A pen and paper.
It began to tell my teacher of my struggle, of the unorganised office block in my brain and the block in my throat, and even the word NATO.
Her eyes lit up as if a new point of view turned a light on and opened doors in her own office, block in her head.
I suppose you now know of my messy office block in my head and hopefully you, much like my teacher, have a new door opened and new workers in your head.
A new department, if you wish, with new drawers filled with hopefully well-organised drawers of ideas and maybe a pair of floodgates on either side.
BBC Radio 2's 500 Words.
Bedtime stories.
My disc graphic word zoo.
Riddle me this.
Why do words fly in my brain but stick in my hand?
It's beyond frustrating.
I love riddles, mental word games designed to make my brain think around corners.
I love feeling it reach out to grab the answer from millions of thoughts and possibilities.
It's as if my mind is soaring into outer space.
Inside my brain, the words shoot and dart about like celestial swallows.
They dive and race each other, looping and gliding, turning this way and that finally swimming into order like a shoal of silver fish, each obediently slotting into its correct place, safe and happy.
I love riddles, but I don't like writing.
The words, so playful and happy in my mind, transform into stubborn donkeys when they come through my fingers and out of my pencil.
The hee-haw loudly distracting me from my thoughts.
They refuse to move, flapping their fluffy grey ears this way and that, snorting and mocking and stamping their feet.
I hate that capital letters have correct places.
My capitals like to roam all over the sentence like a herd of buffaloes.
They swarm, unstoppable over the savannah, stomping and stopping wherever they fancy.
My brain says, hey, you belong at the beginning of the sentence.
But my hand says, you are buffalo.
Please go wherever you fancy.
And so they do.
Some teachers don't like this, saying, that's not where buffaloes go.
You must stay and do lines till all your buffaloes know their place.
But that just makes me feel sad and stupid.
And the buffalo keeps rampaging across the page no matter how many lines I do.
Actually, getting more cheeky the more lines I complete.
There are snakes at the margins of my English book, where words slither and squirm instead of lining up like obedient penguins.
They don't always bother stopping at the page edges either, leaping like lemmings onto the desk instead.
Punctuation behaves very badly at times, commas and apostrophes popping up like curious meerkats where you least expect.
There are rules, you know, my brain screams, but the zoo doesn't care.
My mum is like me.
She has stubborn words too.
Yesterday, I was at school waiting for the bell and we were playing riddles.
My friend said, a father and son are in an accident.
Each rushed to separate hospitals unconscious.
The son is in the operating theatre.
The doctor arrives and says, I cannot operate on this child.
He is my son.
How can this be?
I look up at my mum and smile and say, the doctor is his mum, of course, just like my mum.
Mum gives my hand a little squeeze and smiles back.
The bell rings and I head inside, my English language zoo all ready to cause a bit of chaos.
But I know I'll be OK, despite my playful words, and maybe even because of them.
The word that wouldn't come out.
I am a word, an ordinary plain word.
I am the word and.
I told you I was nothing important.
I live inside a brain owned by an eight-year-old girl called Bella.
You might not know this, but all words live in a brain pond.
A brain pond is like a normal pond, except there are no fish.
There are only words instead.
The pond in Bella's head is very cramped because she reads a lot.
There are always words falling in our pond, like rain.
When she is reading a good book, the words come down like hailstones.
Me and my friend The like to swim together because we're the same size and we like to avoid big words like because and explosion.
Everyone tries to avoid crashing into words like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
Bella's brain pond is extremely comfy in comparison to most other people's, so some of the words don't want to come out, including me.
This means Bella stutters.
The big squishy, slimy thing comes from Bella's mouth, fishing for certain words, and sometimes it pulls me out.
Bella calls it a tongue.
There are these big white guards just before the exit, and that's where I like to hide.
Bella's tongue wants to push me out, except I don't want to go out.
I like to hide behind the big square guards right at the back.
Sometimes she finds me there and gets the first bit of me out, but then I dart back in again and hide behind the pointy ones right in the middle.
Bella tries again, but I hide behind the rectangular ones at the front.
That means that Bella sounds like this.
When I'm being really tricksy and good at hiding, Bella takes a deep breath and it gets really windy.
I try my best to cling on to the guards in front of me, but it's too hard and I get sucked to the very back of Bella's mouth.
By this time, all the other words in the sentence are getting angry and trying to push me out.
The says, come on, we're getting impatient.
Is says, get out of here.
And Story says, hurry up, slow coach.
I argue with them and the wind gets stronger and stronger until eventually Bella breathes out.
The words behind me push too hard and I come exploding out like a bullet.
And this is the end of the story.
How much longer do we have to stay up this tree?
We've run out of jam sandwiches and it's starting to get dark.
I'm really bored.
Stop complaining.
This was a great plan.
They have totally fallen for it.
They'll never work out the answer.
And they have no idea that, whilst they're trying to work out a super-duper clever riddle, we will have taken their place and go to that fancy dance party we weren't invited to.
Right, you need to think of another one.
Come on, quick.
Oh, what?
No, my brain hurts.
I can't think of any more.
Can't we just go to the party now, lovey?
No, they might work it out.
We need to send another one just to make sure, you know, get them thinking.
Then write it on a paper plane like last time and send it and all that.
I've got nothing to make it with.
What happened to all the paper I gave you?
I ate it.
We went out to jam sandwiches and now I'm starving.
I want to go to the party now and eat all those cakes.
BBC Radio 2's 500 Words.
Bedtime Stories.
The full stop who wanted to be different.
One sunny morning there was a full stop.
He lived on a road of lots of letters and other punctuation, separated by rivers of white.
His neighbour was an E and his friends were Y and S.
He loved the letters Y, E and S because they spelled yes.
Sometimes the full stop stayed outside his house admiring the other punctuation.
He talked a lot to E about the punctuation and about how he wished to look like them and about how much fun he thought it would be instead of being a lonely dot.
The E said emotionally, You're not lonely.
You've got me.
But go off and try something different if you seriously want to.
Excitedly, the full stop bounced into Grandma's grammar costume shop.
He rolled straight to the counter.
There was an old lady with a beard and muscular arms with punctuation tattoos on them.
She had a pink face and grey, tangled hair.
The full stop, stared at her for a moment and then rolled on, trying not to look at her because she looked so terrifying.
Suddenly, the old woman wheezed, What are you after?
Nothing, really.
Just a punctuation costume, whispered the full stop.
The woman answered aggressively.
Go down one lane and turn right into the punctuation room.
He jumped quickly into the changing room and tried on lots of costumes.
First, he tried on the question mark.
Who am I? he asked the mirror.
Where am I?
What is this? he said, pointing to the floor.
Can't anyone answer me?
Should I take this off?
The full stop took the costume off.
He realised there was no point in being a question with nobody to answer him.
Then he put on the exclamation mark.
Ow!
This is really uncomfortable! he screamed.
Get it off!
He took it off and tried on a comma.
I look beautiful, lovely, delightful, outstanding, spectacular, dazzling, and I talk way, way.
He was so dizzy that he took it off before he had even finished the sentence.
Next, he slipped into a bracket.
Hi, my name is Eric.
Actually, it's not.
Hey, where's the other bracket?
I need another bracket costume.
He put one more on and the second bracket appeared in the sentence.
He took it off, grumpily.
I don't have enough money for two costumes, complained the full stop.
Before he could try on another costume, someone grabbed his shoulder.
He turned around and saw the word, Oil Peck.
What on earth is that? wailed the full stop.
The letters scrambled around and formed the word, Police.
Full stop in the name of the law.
We are the police.
Did you know that a full stop is missing?
You're needed outside.
The full stop rushed outside and found the words, the end, with a space next to it.
Maybe it's not so bad being a full stop when you're the hero, he laughed happily.
He jumped into the space and everyone cheered.
The end.
Full stop.
BBC Radio 2's 500 Words.
Bedtime Stories.
500 Words of Literary Hell.
I only stole a couple of words from the library to help me with the story, and now I'm in literary hell.
An assistant librarian was sorting some books and spotted me taking the words.
I grabbed them and ran, with the assistant following closely in pursuit.
I burst into the main hall and tried to blend in with the other readers, but the assistant pointed at me and shouted Catch him.
He's a word thief!
At that point I sprinted but unfortunately ran straight into a tall and bulky reader who had been roused from his story by the shouting.
He gripped my shoulder painfully and pushed me along an aisle towards the chief librarian.
The chief took me down a corridor and shoved me into a small room and locked the door.
The room was cold, dark and, strangest of all, empty of books.
I sat down on the hard floor wondering what was going to happen to me.
Meanwhile, the chief librarian contacted the word police and told them what had happened.
They arrived in a flash and took me away for questioning.
They took me to the great reader.
She was a fierce and terrifying woman.
Her age unknown, but her face was worn like the pages of old books.
The head of the word police told her of my crime and her face darkened with disapproval.
She told me that I was charged with stealing words and that my punishment was to be spent at the word mine to get 500 words.
I was taken to a word house which was to be my home for as long as it took me to mine the target.
That first night was the worst night of my life.
The bed was hard and the thought of mining 500 words filled me with dread.
At dawn.
The other word criminals and I, who included some children, were marched off to work in the word mine.
After descending what felt like hundreds of flights of stairs, we reached the mine.
It was like a stony cathedral, tall and vast, with jet black letters shining in the light of burning torches.
We were each given a heavy pickaxe and set to work to mine words.
I was working in a small corner near the back and didn't find many letters there.
Each day it was exactly the same for me.
There were always too many consonants and never enough vowels to make words.
The irony of my situation was not lost on me.
I'd stolen some words and now I couldn't mine enough to get the 500 I needed.
A young girl, about 11 years old, came up behind me and poked me in my back.
She showed me four of her vowels.
I reached into my pocket and took out a few letters.
She swapped her vowels for four of my consonants, so she could now make her 500 words.
But I still had a long way to go.
Yikes, what's this?
Ooh, a paper plane with a riddle on.
What question can you never answer yes to?
No!
Well, I really enjoyed that party.
Those cakes were delicious.
Oh, yes, me too, mate.
Hey, do you reckon they've worked out the answer to that riddle yet?
Serves them right, the cheeky chaps.
Yeah, the cheeky chaps.
What question can you never answer yes to?
Are you asleep yet?
Brilliant!
Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Bedtime Stories.
Hope you enjoyed it.
Here's a tip from our friends at Oxford University Press.
Avoiding info dumps.
When you're writing, use action and dialogue to drop in details about the world, but avoid the dreaded info dump.
This is where you bury the reader under an avalanche of facts and forget you are telling a story.
The world building that you've done should enrich your story, not take it over.
And, of course, listen next week.
Oh, phew, look at that.
There's home.
The bungalow.
We're nearly back.
There's only one thing left to say.
Indeed.
Good luck and good night!
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