Another quiet start to the October Global Short Story Comp. Good time to have a go at the £100 first prize. More at www.inscribemedia.co.uk
Monday, 14 October 2013
Time running out for free poetry competition
Five days to enter our latest free poetry competition (£50 prize) at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Inscribemedia/183385438479538
Are you sitting uncomfortably?
I am always struck by the way many writers are drawn to the very toughest of times in people’s lives and it is a theme to which I return after an entry into the October Global Short Story Competition over the weekend.
Brilliantly told from a first person point of view, it went into the head of a person whose thoughts were so disturbing that they made the skin crawl. And if the reader is so engaged it’s a powerful read, uncomfortable or not.
Story after story entered into our competitions focuses on tense moments, difficult encounters and powerful emotions and draws you into the drama so that you can feel the tension, experience the pain and empathise with those in the story (or recoil at their mindset).
I am always heartened when I read writing like that. Sometimes, you read a story and think, good set up, decent writing and yet something is missing. Something essential.
For me, if you are going to tackle a tough subject - serious illness, death, betrayal, separation - the best writing is the writing in which the author plunges him or herself deep into the action and drags the reader with them whether the reader wants to go or not.
And after that cheery message, a reminder that there is plenty of time to enter our October Global Short Story Competition at www.inscribemedia.co.uk
John Dean
Brilliantly told from a first person point of view, it went into the head of a person whose thoughts were so disturbing that they made the skin crawl. And if the reader is so engaged it’s a powerful read, uncomfortable or not.
Story after story entered into our competitions focuses on tense moments, difficult encounters and powerful emotions and draws you into the drama so that you can feel the tension, experience the pain and empathise with those in the story (or recoil at their mindset).
I am always heartened when I read writing like that. Sometimes, you read a story and think, good set up, decent writing and yet something is missing. Something essential.
For me, if you are going to tackle a tough subject - serious illness, death, betrayal, separation - the best writing is the writing in which the author plunges him or herself deep into the action and drags the reader with them whether the reader wants to go or not.
And after that cheery message, a reminder that there is plenty of time to enter our October Global Short Story Competition at www.inscribemedia.co.uk
John Dean
Friday, 11 October 2013
So what makes our winners winners?
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
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
Thursday, 10 October 2013
Prize a shot in the arm for the short story
How brilliant that a writer best known for her short stories has today won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Making the announcement about Canadian author Alice Munro, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, called her a "master of the contemporary short story".
The 82-year-old, whose books include Dear Life and Dance of the Happy Shades, is only the 13th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901.
Presented by the Nobel Foundation, the award - which is presented to a living writer - is worth eight million kronor (£770,000).
Mr Englund said: “She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection."
Munro, who began writing in her teenage years, published her first story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, in 1950. She had been studying English at the University of Western Ontario at the time.
Making the announcement about Canadian author Alice Munro, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, called her a "master of the contemporary short story".
The 82-year-old, whose books include Dear Life and Dance of the Happy Shades, is only the 13th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901.
Presented by the Nobel Foundation, the award - which is presented to a living writer - is worth eight million kronor (£770,000).
Mr Englund said: “She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection."
Munro, who began writing in her teenage years, published her first story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, in 1950. She had been studying English at the University of Western Ontario at the time.
Tuesday, 8 October 2013
Getting back to basics
It’s always useful to go back to basics and refresh our memories from time to time. Here are some thoughts:
The rules of writing
Some general rules as you develop your story
* Consider the reader - do not write for yourself, always write for the reader.
* Be disciplined - you may wish to pack lots of information in but does the reader need it?
* You may not have put enough information in - you can imagine where a scene is set but have you given the reader the information they need? You may have drawn a character but can your readers see them?
* Be brutal - if you have overwritten, chop out the fat.
Rules of the short story
1 . The best stories are the ones that follow a fairly narrow subject line: too many plotlines and you end up with a novel!
2. An effective short story often covers a very short time span. It may be one single episode that proves pivotal in the life of the character.
3. Don't have too many characters. Each new character will bring a new dimension to the story, and too many diverse dimensions dilute the theme. Have only enough characters to effectively tell the story.
4. Make every word count. There is no room for unnecessary expansion in a short story. If each word is not working towards putting across the story, delete it.
John Dean
The rules of writing
Some general rules as you develop your story
* Consider the reader - do not write for yourself, always write for the reader.
* Be disciplined - you may wish to pack lots of information in but does the reader need it?
* You may not have put enough information in - you can imagine where a scene is set but have you given the reader the information they need? You may have drawn a character but can your readers see them?
* Be brutal - if you have overwritten, chop out the fat.
Rules of the short story
1 . The best stories are the ones that follow a fairly narrow subject line: too many plotlines and you end up with a novel!
2. An effective short story often covers a very short time span. It may be one single episode that proves pivotal in the life of the character.
3. Don't have too many characters. Each new character will bring a new dimension to the story, and too many diverse dimensions dilute the theme. Have only enough characters to effectively tell the story.
4. Make every word count. There is no room for unnecessary expansion in a short story. If each word is not working towards putting across the story, delete it.
John Dean
Putting together a short story
So how do you put together a good short story? Here’s some thoughts:
Beginning your short story
However you start your story, the beginning should have The Question, something that hooks your reader. You need to grab them from those first lines.
One way do to this is intrigue the reader. For instance, “Bill Bloggs was dead” may give the end away but the readers wants to find out why he died and if he deserved it.
The dropped introduction can also work: “Betty was a pleasant woman. She would do anything for anyone. Everyone liked old Betty. A true angel, they used to say. Which was why it was such a shock when she was killed by a Mafia hitman.”
There is another way of hooking readers, in which the writer can draw us in with the sheer quality of their writing, as in books like Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee.
Whatever you do, remember that all stories begin in the middle - the people you write about have already plenty of history. What you are doing is catapulting the reader into their life.
The middle of the story
The middle is there to keep the story going, fill in gaps, create tension and allow the story to develop but it should only be as long as if needed, not overwritten or underwritten.
Write your short story in a series of episodes, maybe only a few lines long. Short stories are a series of small chapters, maybe only a few lines but representing a development in the story.
The end of the story
There are all sorts of ways of ending a short story but the most popular is some kind of twist, something that startles the reader, or perhaps makes sense of the rest of the story.
On the other hand, you may go for a poignant ending. There is also a growing trend for stories that simply stop.
Any of these is fine.
John Dean
Beginning your short story
However you start your story, the beginning should have The Question, something that hooks your reader. You need to grab them from those first lines.
One way do to this is intrigue the reader. For instance, “Bill Bloggs was dead” may give the end away but the readers wants to find out why he died and if he deserved it.
The dropped introduction can also work: “Betty was a pleasant woman. She would do anything for anyone. Everyone liked old Betty. A true angel, they used to say. Which was why it was such a shock when she was killed by a Mafia hitman.”
There is another way of hooking readers, in which the writer can draw us in with the sheer quality of their writing, as in books like Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee.
Whatever you do, remember that all stories begin in the middle - the people you write about have already plenty of history. What you are doing is catapulting the reader into their life.
The middle of the story
The middle is there to keep the story going, fill in gaps, create tension and allow the story to develop but it should only be as long as if needed, not overwritten or underwritten.
Write your short story in a series of episodes, maybe only a few lines long. Short stories are a series of small chapters, maybe only a few lines but representing a development in the story.
This requires really effective writing because, whereas in a novel you might have eight or nine pages to recount an incident, that luxury simply does not exist in a short story.
If you take our competition, our limit for a story is 2,000 words. Sounds a lot but not if you let your episodes run too long.
So, how do you achieve such tight writing? Well, it might be that you describe a location in a line rather than a paragraph, produce only sparing details of your character or recount a conversation in four snatches of dialogue rather than a page.
Many winning short story authors in competitions around the world have been those who achieved such effective writing.
All of this is not to say that when you write a novel, you can waffle on to your heart’s content. Indeed, the disciplines of short story writing can be invaluable when you tackle a novel. Whatever you write, every word must do its job. it’s a good mantra to live by.
The end of the story
There are all sorts of ways of ending a short story but the most popular is some kind of twist, something that startles the reader, or perhaps makes sense of the rest of the story.
On the other hand, you may go for a poignant ending. There is also a growing trend for stories that simply stop.
Any of these is fine.
John Dean
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