In a Flash

Last week I entered a story into a competition. As I've said in a previous post, writing to competition rules is good discipline and a great (and you never know, possibly profitable) way of practicing the craft of writing.

With a 1000 word limit, this particular competition qualified as flash fiction and, my word, that was tough! I am naturally verbose and this spills over into my writing, but the risk I take with rambling on is that I bore my readers and they put down my writing, never bothering to finish reading the story. So writing to a tight word count is my way of training myself to cut the crap out of my writing. And as a proofreader for several publications, I know just how much of what people write and think is essential, can be cut out, the effect of which is often to tighten a piece of writing until it right to convey the message with maximum impact. Less is more, so they say and in this respect, "they" are right. 

So  here are some of my thoughts on how to write a concise story. This can be applied to other types of writing: features, letters, reports, monologues, scripts, blog posts...

• Write your first draft freely, then work on it - this lets you freely explore your ideas and lets the creativity flow
• Then rework the piece taking all unnecessary words out - these are words that don't add anything to the meaning of the sentence. Like "very" or "really".
• Use strong nouns and verbs and you can get rid of adjectives that don't add to the sense of what you are writing. Try it out, it works.

• Do you need to elaborate on how someone was talking when using dialogue? Readers can become distracted when faced with a variety of ways of speaking. Have them focus on what is being said rather than on whether they whispered softly (how else would you whisper?), or shouted loudly (ouch, too much!). "Said" is often all you need.
• Pick a key emotion on which to hang your story.
• Limit your images: one or two strong images make a more lasting impact than many crammed into a tight word limit.
• Pick a key theme and stick to that one - there is no room in 1000 or fewer words to elaborate or complicate.
• Limit the number of scenes since world building and context setting can take up much of your word count.
• Limit to just one or two characters - make it personal and make it focused and the reader will be swiftly hooked, engaged and rewarded.
• Use a small idea for a small story and reserve big ideas for longer pieces of writing.
• Limit the viewpoints - one character, one viewpoint tends to work best.

Final tip? Just write and enjoy the process. Work hard enough and you may be rewarded for it in a competition win or publication.

Writing for Competitions

A quick browse on the Internet will soon trawl up writing competition after writing competition - short stories, poems, novels, flash fiction, one act plays, and more. Some offer huge prizes and some more modest. Some only go as far as to offer publication in an anthology for the winners and this alone is enough to tempt the writer who yearns for publication. Some come accompanied by fees, some are free to enter. Is it worth while entering work in a competition, was a question recently asked of me by a fellow writer.

That gave me food for thought. I have occasionally entered writing competitions. I've won some, came runner up or highly commended for some, never even heard of the results of numerous others. But I do believe there is value in submitting pieces of writing to competitions that go beyond the obvious one of possibly winning a prize (hopefully a rather chunky cheque, maybe a residential writing retreat and publication to boot).

Firstly there's the discipline of writing to a theme, where there is one, or searching for a theme that inspires you to write and then voicing the story or poem that the theme sparks off. There's the word count to be aware of, the rules that must be followed (every rule needs to be followed, from the layout and font size to submission details and total number of words, otherwise you run the risk of having your entry disqualified before it is even read). You may  have to write to a particular genre or style and this requires focus and discipline so you don't wonder off the track that is laid out for it. And then there's the time element: the dreaded deadline. They are usually set in stone, and cannot be changed, as is the case in most parts of life. 

For the writer who works alone, from home, without a boss or manager to answer to, the regular application of the discipline of meeting a deadline and set requirements that come from entering writing competitions helps to hone your skills as a writing professional. Just because you want to practise your art and perhaps sell it, doesn't mean to say you can get away with shoddy presentation, ignoring important details and not working to precisely what your editor wants - in the case of competitions, it is what the judges and organisers want that you work to meet.

The other benefit of entering writing competitions is to work the creative muscle. It isn't hard, when working on a long project, to get bogged down and stale. Taking a break and writing in a different style or genre is almost like taking a holiday and works to refocus and energise your creativity. You also experience the satisfaction of challenging yourself, writing to completion and submitting your work to be read.

Okay, so that last bit, having your work read, can feel a bit intimidating. But if we're not writing for our words to be read, understood, thought about, reacted to - why are we writing at all? For writers who are still working on developing their craft, or who have never had the courage to submit work to a publisher or magazine editor, it is a way of gaining confidence. When entering competitions, especially if you are sending your work out online to another town or country, you can feel a degree of anonymity. You have never met the judges, you are never  likely to meet them, so what they think of your work doesn't really matter. 

At which point, it's worth remembering that judges of writing competitions are evaluating the writing. Many competitions do not have the work identified by name when it is passed to the judges - they judge the writing in front of them, and a jolly laborious task it must be to pick out a winner from perhaps hundreds or thousands of entries. It is not you as a person or writer that is being judged, it is the piece that you have entered. If you don't win, it is not always because it was not a good piece of work - often it is because on that particular occasion, someone entered a piece of work that was a bit better.

The lessons that can be taken from entering competitions, even if you don't win are various, and they can help you increase in confidence. The more you write, the better a writer you become, so entering is a way of helping to focus your writing even while you work on your magnum opus. If you get feedback on your entry - which some but not all competitions offer - use it to make a better attempt at the next one. If not, read the winners and see what it is they did that made their work rise above yours, and then apply it to your work.

I think there is tremendous value in entering competitions when you can. I say that as a writer who has recently had one of those polite emails of the type: 'thanks for sending us your entry; better luck next time'. But at least I can go back to the keyboard with a dose of reality swallowed: there were 13,000 entries to that particular competition and I can now work on a way to make my next stab at it stand out above that crowd.

Do you plan before you write - or just write?

Always a subject of debate among writers: do you plan out your work first? Do you lay out a structure so you have a road map, a route to your destination? Or are you more impulsive, let your fingers move over the keyboard and let them take your story to wherever it is meant to go?

I find a bit of planning helps me out. If nothing else, since I tend to write in short spurts as and when I get time to and in a race before deadlines, just to jot down a few bullet points at the start of a piece helps me to focus my thoughts. It helps to outline the angle of entry, the pathway through the theme, the sequence of events and drives me towards the conclusion, which, if all goes well, is a natural summing up of what went before in non-fiction and a tying of loose ends, a resolution, in fiction.

The extent of planning is influenced in part by how complex the piece you are trying to produce. A thoroughly researched piece of political history, a detailed biography of a famous figure, a complex crime thriller are each likely to need a thorough road map much more than a short story with a small cast of characters and a single theme plot. Then again, preferring to plan or not plan, and the extent of details in your plans can be influenced just as much by your personality as by the requirements of what you are trying to write.

I am, in collaboration with another writer, very slowly working my way through a non-fiction book. We began our work with some basic reading around the subject and then discussed an outline of what we wanted the book to be about. From this, we put together a basic plan. This has been reviewed a number of times, reworked and refocused as the research threw up information that we wanted to integrate, and identified irrelevant details that we decided to throw out. As we write, the plan is modified, but essentially it has helped us to focus and to organise what is a vast amount of information that we could have got lost in for years without ever typing a word.

For me, this approach works quite well with non-fiction. Even when I write short articles for magazines, a very basic plan helps me to organise my thinking. 

It works quite well with creative writing too. I remember from decades ago, our English teacher recommending writing a rough plan in pencil at the start of each of our answers before taking the plunge. It's the writing equivalent of warm up exercises before a rugby match to make sure you get the best performance from your muscles: in a writer's case, the mind muscle. What I found used to help the most, was a kind of release of creativity that seems to come when you force your thoughts down the nib of a pencil (you can do it electronically, but pencil works best for me). 

A rough plan doesn't restrict your work, it just helps to shape it. Many a time I've planned out a story to find that as I write, characters suddenly seem to take a life of their own, carve out their own path. Sometimes, it feels that I am writing what they are doing, rather than orchestrating their actions from my writing. It's a weird mental space that writers inhabit!

Which is where non-planning and writing on the wing comes in. Once the creative flow starts, writing seems to happen through you rather than by you. It's as if once you have found the "real" story - that mystical story that exists in the Platonic world of ideas rather then springing from the grey matter between your ears, that story that was just lurking in the ether waiting to be caught and fastened to paper (or translated into digital form) - the story simply materialises. So, I might be sounding a bit metaphysical here, but that's how it feels. 

What actually happens is that by writing freely, with only a vague suggestion about what you want to write, you release the creativity in your brain and it will create the story as you go along. It's quite a liberating way to write, a little exciting, and even a touch disturbing if you are one of those writers who likes complete control over their work.

Whether you plan your work first or not, whether you follow your plan or let yourself get carried along by the power of the story, all writing needs to be revised and polished so that it makes some kind of sense to the reader. Stories without meaning are not stories at all, just a collection of phrases. But revision is a whole other ball game. I'm off to plan a story in the hope I'll actually write one worth submitting to a competition or for publication somewhere. For what is the point of writing if no-one is going to be able to read and understand your work?