When we announced the winners of the August Global Short Story Competition earlier this month, we passed £10,000 in prize money awarded since we started.
Cash prizes have gone to well over 150 writers from all across the world, who have either won the monthly competition or been highly commended, with a further 450-plus being commended. Many more have just missed out.
So what are they doing right? What makes a good short story? Well, it is all very subjective, of course, but what links them all is an ability to tell a story in a fresh and original way. It may be an ages-old theme but in the hands of the writer, it is recounted in a new way with new insights.
Many of the successful stories also had depth, a sense of substance, and all had believable characters and a strong sense of place, creating for the reader a sense that they were there.
A lot of them evoked reactions in the reader, surprising and challenging and sometimes even shocking.
Many also used humour well, the most successful ones doing it with a light touch, producing the funny lines and moving on.
All were tightly written and all had stories containing words each of which deserved to be there.
We also like to see stories from writers who take risks and push the boundaries of form, using different structures etc.
And they all started well. There’s little time to waste with the short story so it really does need to grab the attention from the first lines. It might be to do with language or subject matter, characterisation or structure, but it needs to draw the reader in right from the off.
Get some of these things right and you’re on the path to success.
Plenty of time to enter the latest competition at www.inscribemedia.co.uk
John Dean
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