Show #7

Stories from Phil de Burlet and Martin Sorrell

Workshop News
I didn't have time to mention this on the show but thought it might be of interest. One of our featured writers, Phil de Burlet, passed on the details of a workshop to be run by Clare George, the writer in residence at Exeter University. Entitled ‘The Sea, The Sea’ the one day workshop takes place on Thursday 19 May as part of the Daphne Du Maurier festival in Fowey, in Cornwall. It costs ten pounds and looks very interesting, aiming to explore our relationship with the sea and the plants and animals that live there, and taking an imaginative and sometimes lighthearted look at the ways in which this relationship may change in the future. here is the link:

http://www.dumaurierfestival.co.uk/devents.php?session=1928825&ev=128

Competition News
I thought I should plug the Bridport Prize. For anyone who doesn’t know the Bridport, it is one of the country’s leading short fiction competitions and has categories for flash fiction as well as poetry and short fiction up to 5,000 words, which is a pretty generous length. The deadline is the end of June.

www.bridportprize.org.uk

Thoughts on Competition Judging
Writing competitions can seem a strange thing, at odds with the ethos of art. How can stories compete? On what basis can one be rated higher than another? Is there such a thing as a ‘competition story’, that piece of work designed to tick all the boxes?

The novelist Simon Mawer was this year’s judge for the Fish prize, another major short story competition, and this is his take on the process, which might be instructive to anyone considering an entry.

"Short story writing is a bit like painting in water colours. It's an art of precise strokes in which you need to be deft, accurate and sensitive to the faintest imbalance. And if it's good then the finished whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts. On the other hand, novel writing is more like painting in oils. You can layer, rework, scrub things out, move near, stand back, live with the thing in your studio for a year or more, counterbalance a lapse here with a successful passage there. And all too often the whole is somehow less than its various parts. As a writer I feel I can do the oil painting, more or less; it's the water colours that make me feel inadequate.

So it was with some trepidation that I received the stories that had made the cut in the Fish Short Story competition this year. No committee decision from now on: it was up to me alone. Aside from being a novelist I have also been a teacher - not of English or Creative Writing but of workaday Biology - and as soon as I turned to the first story I found the teacher in me asking questions: what are the criteria? where is the mark scheme? how can you be objective about this? The answer is, of course, you cannot. Assuming all the stories are competently written (they were) any further judgement must be purely subjective. So, feeling guilty, I threw years of pedagogical conditioning out of the window and sat down to read. I wasn't a teacher marking exams, I was a writer doing the impossible: trying to rank works of art. And the only way I could do it was by deciding which of these stories I liked best.

What struck me forcibly was the preponderance of family anguish stories. Isn't this theme a trifle hackneyed? Perhaps it comes from that injunction of the Creative Writing course, that you should write about what you know. I'd say, write about what you imagine. Let your imagination take you to places and inside people whom you couldn't possibly otherwise have known. Imagination is the key, the crux, the hinge on which all art turns.

Good advice, I’d say.

Show #6

Stories from Ken Ashby and Julia Howarth

Competition News
I think it might be worth publicising competitions that listeners might want to try their luck at. Obviously they tend to be a bit of a lottery but they are also an important outlet for writers, with many competitions also publishing anthologies of the shortlisted entries.
One that has been brought to my attention is the Aesthetica Creative Works competition - deadline is 31 August and has categories for short fiction and poetry. Further details at http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/submission_guide.htm

Feel free to contact the show with details of competitions,magazines and journals that accept short fiction and I'll post the details here.


A Note on Submissions
On the show I made a quick point to clarify the submissions process. In answer to several queries I have received from writers who have sent work in to me, I’m afraid I cannot reply to submissions with a critique of the work. I promise I will read everything sent in and obviously I’ll let an author know if the piece has been accepted and when it will be broadcast, but I regret not having the time to go beyond this. One thing to bear in mind though, if your piece has not made it through the selection process this is not necessarily a reflection on the quality of the work. Often it is simply because a piece does not necessarily read aloud well. There may be too many viewpoints involved, for example, or too many voices. Sometimes the text simply seems too complex. These are the stories that can work for a reader, who has the luxury of being able to go back over any passage they do not instantly comprehend, but for a listener who only gets the one chance to grasp a story such complexities can lose them.
One thing to consider, and I think this is a good piece of advice for any form of writing, whether or not it is intended for broadcast, is to incorporate a read aloud of the story as an essential part of the revision process. I don’t mean reading the story to an audience, but just to yourself. I always do this and, no matter how finished I think a story might be, first draft or fourteenth, when I hear the story voiced I always seem to find some weaknesses that would otherwise have been missed.
If you read your work aloud and find yourself struggling over a sentence or a paragraph, you can usually be pretty sure that your reader will struggle too. Not only things like needless repetitions and overlong explanations, but subtle effects like rhythm and pace, that deeper pulse of a work that, when properly attended to, can really elevate prose.

Remember the new listen again service on mixcloud. See the top of the page for the link.

Listen Again

The show now has an internet-based listen again service. You can now hear all the episodes of Soundart Stories at your convenience on the mixcloud site.

Either follow the link at the top of the page or simply go to the mixcloud site and type in a search for Soundart Stories. I am not sure yet about how long I will keep each episode up on the site, but there appear to be no time restrictions so I have no immediate plans to take any down.
Enjoy!