More hints on engaging your reader

These are some of the handy hints from our free writers’ toolkit . We’ll be running a few more over the days to come but the full guide can be downloaded from the home page of our website at www.inscribemedia.co.uk




　

Triggering a response from your writing

Continuing my theme of evoking reactions in your reader, I think that good writing is about triggers - words, phrases, images, places, sensations - that reach deep into the reader’s mind.

That reaction will be based on something the reader has actually experienced, or maybe something that the reader dreads ever having to experience. It is why horror and ghost stories work so well.

Yes, you are messing about with the reader’s head, yes, you may be forcing them to confront difficult truths, but isn’t that sometimes what writing is about?

If every story, every book, was about sugary-sweet people in lovely situations, then writing could never really move the reader as it should.

So, yes, writing can, on occasion, make the reader feel uneasy, uncomfortable, scared even, but, let’s be honest, isn’t that sometimes the way we feel in our daily lives anyway? It’s simply art reflecting reality.

Keeping it short

All writing is about every word doing its job but that becomes an even more pronounced skill when you are writing something short, like a poem or a story.

We do receive entries which are not 2,000 words long but 200 words instead - and that is an art form in itself.

The length means that the writers had to make every word do its job and discard every word, every thought, every element of the story that slowed it down. Those stories were stripped to their basics.

Did they lose anything for that? Not really. They may have left the reader to work out a lot, think through what they were being told and where it was happening, but many of them remained powerful pieces of writing for all that.

So when people send in requests asking how long their story should be, we always remind them that our top limit is 2,000 words (for ease of reading by our judge) but as to the bottom limit? Well, it is how many words you need to tell the story. That’s the true of storytelling and always will be.


Tackling the difficult subjects
One of the things apparent in the stories that come in to our competition is the way writers tackle difficult subjects.

There are various reasons for this, one of which is, of course, that difficult subjects make for dramatic stories. A story about two people getting on really well for 2,000 words can tend to be a touch on the boring side. Introduce something spiky into the narrative and your story comes alive.

Another reason writers tackle tough subjects is because their words can have an effect on those who read them, that they can, in some small way, challenge the way people view the world.

It is not the same for every writer - some stories are there purely to entertain, to make the reader laugh, to make the reader smile, without challenging them at all.

But for those who do tackle difficult subjects, there is one rule above all: keep it real. It makes sense to write about what you know. If you have not got that experience, research you subject before you start writing.
John Dean