Stories from Jane Sawyer and Hana Sklenkova
I mentioned a web-based short story competition that might be well worth considering- the deadline is September 15 and the word limit is a generous 5,000. Details can be found on the website www.theshortstory.net
Also, there is an opportunity to hear one of tonight's authors, Hana Sklenkova, reading some of her work as part of the Collective Perspectives Project, drawing inspiration from local sites to inform a variety of pieces and performances. Hana will be reading at Kingsbridge Community College on July 15/16.
One more show to go before the summer break but please keep the work coming in. It would be great to have a solid pool of stories to draw from for the autumn season.
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
Wednesday, 15 June 2011
Show #11
Stories from Dot Spink, Alan Brown and Carolyn Eddy.
Two of the stories were a product of a Soundart Radio workshop helping writers work with sound recording - there will be another one of these workshops in the Autumn so contact Soundart Radio if you are interested. (www.soundartradio.org.uk)
Also, details of the writing competition held by the Kingsbridge Oxfam bookshop can be found at www.addmysupport.to/oxfamkingsbridgebooks/
For more information on the Chudleigh Literary festival on Wednesday 13 July, which looks like being a great day, and includes a morning workshop with poet Chris Waters - who I can highly recommend - email huxbear_barton@btopenworld.com
For anyone interested in the book I recommended on the show - it is The Art of Writing Fiction, by Andrew Cowan - out in paperback now.
Two of the stories were a product of a Soundart Radio workshop helping writers work with sound recording - there will be another one of these workshops in the Autumn so contact Soundart Radio if you are interested. (www.soundartradio.org.uk)
Also, details of the writing competition held by the Kingsbridge Oxfam bookshop can be found at www.addmysupport.to/oxfamkingsbridgebooks/
For more information on the Chudleigh Literary festival on Wednesday 13 July, which looks like being a great day, and includes a morning workshop with poet Chris Waters - who I can highly recommend - email huxbear_barton@btopenworld.com
For anyone interested in the book I recommended on the show - it is The Art of Writing Fiction, by Andrew Cowan - out in paperback now.
Wednesday, 1 June 2011
Show #10
A story-packed show tonight - two contrasting and powerful shorts from Anna Lunk and a trip back to wartime Dartmoor and a farmyard crisis in The Cowman by James Stevenson.
Now up on the listen again service.
Now up on the listen again service.
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Show #9
Stories form Martin Sorrell, Barbara Butcher and Jennifer Moore.
Recommended Reading
Two bits of recommended reading on the show.
There is an abundance, perhaps an overabundance of material devoted to the art & craft of writing, including a fair few magazines. I have shelves full of books on how to write, but I only subscribe to one magazine, which, surprisingly, is one supposedly published specifically ‘for women who write’. The magazine is Mslexia and I have always found it a useful resource. Not just for the articles and exercises, some of which are very good, others not so very good, but definitely very good is the extensive directory and listings section at the back, which has up to date details of hundreds of magazines accepting submissions, closing dates and submission guidelines for competitions, info on courses and events. And not many writers have yet found a way to be published without submitting anything, at least, not while they still live. So, Mslexia, highly recommended. It comes out quarterly and is priced £6.95.
And remember, if there’s anything out there you’d like to recommend for our listeners, just send in an email and I’ll publicise it.
Paris Review
As I mentioned above, I have hundreds of books on writing and how to write. Why? Because there it is, on the bookshop shelf, promising it holds the secret to my writing desires, assuring me it will turn me into a bestselling author for just ten minutes a day.
Well, no, perhaps even I’m not gullible enough to be taken in by that. But I think I do use these books as a sort of displacement activity, as if by reading them I can skip past a few of the thousands of hours of actual writing that I need to do to get there.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against these books, not really. I believe creative writing can be taught, as long as there is some desire and talent there in the first place. I wouldn’t have spent so much time either teaching or being taught myself, otherwise. The growing number of universities offering Creative Writing MAs and such like would seem to back up the idea. And if a subject can be taught, we need textbooks.
A few, and only a few, of the books I own on creative writing truly are excellent, inspiring works. Some others are very good, and well worth reading. The vast majority, however, are dull and repetitive with little new to say, while many others are so bad they do more harm than good, stifling any natural ability with clichéd exhortations and overly prescriptive writing rules, demanding a formulaic approach to the craft, suggesting that writing success is simply a matter of solving a puzzle.
And, what is more, and this should be a dead giveaway, these writing books at the lower end of the scale are always written by people I have never heard of, and certainly never read. Which, rather circuitously, brings me on to my next recommendation.
I believe you can’t be a decent writer without being a decent reader and the best books from which to learn to write are the novels and stories that inspire us in the first place. And if I want to hear writing advice, I prefer to hear it from writers I respect. Which is why I love the Paris Review Interview books.
The Paris Review started life as a small literary journal set up by a bunch of expatriate Americans in Paris in 1953, including George Plimpton, who edited it until his death in 2003. As well as growing into a major literary journal, publishing many great authors, it also became famous for its long running series of interviews with writers, often conducted by other writers. The results are usually meticulous and fair and tend neither to eulogise or criticise, but simply give the author the chance to reflect on the writing life: his or her habits, routines, processes and concerns, and as such they provide a true insight into what goes into producing a final manuscript, and show how different every author is. (although noone so far has revealed they got their first break after reading "How to be a Bestselling Author for Ten Minutes a Day".)
The best of these interviews have been compiled in various publications: the old Writers at Work series and, most recently, a polished set from Canongate, published from 2007 onwards. Featuring interviews with authors as varied as Hemingway, Oates, Faulkener and Stephen King. Can’t recommend them highly enough – truly inspiring, and you can probably pick them up pretty cheaply second-hand now, particularly the Writers at Work editions, while some of the interviews are available for free from the Paris Review website.
Here’s a taste, one of my favourites, part of an interview with EL Doctorow in 1983.
The interviewer mentions that Doctorow had once told him that the most difficult thing for a writer to write was a simple household note to someone coming to collect the laundry, or instructions to a cook.
To which Doctorow replies
What I was thinking of was a note I had to write to the teacher when one of my children had missed a day of school. It was my daughter, Caroline, who was then in the second or third grade. I was having my breakfast one morning when she appeared with her lunch box, her rain slicker, and everything, and she said, “I need an absence note for the teacher and the bus is coming in a few minutes.” She gave me a pad and a pencil; even as a child she was very thoughtful. So I wrote down the date and I started, Dear Mrs. So-and-so, my daughter Caroline . . . and then I thought, No, that’s not right, obviously it’s my daughter Caroline. I tore that sheet off, and started again. Yesterday, my child . . . No, that wasn’t right either. Too much like a deposition. This went on until I heard a horn blowing outside. The child was in a state of panic. There was a pile of crumpled pages on the floor, and my wife was saying, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this.” She took the pad and pencil and dashed something off.
I had been trying to write the perfect absence note. It was a very illuminating experience. Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
Recommended Reading
Two bits of recommended reading on the show.
There is an abundance, perhaps an overabundance of material devoted to the art & craft of writing, including a fair few magazines. I have shelves full of books on how to write, but I only subscribe to one magazine, which, surprisingly, is one supposedly published specifically ‘for women who write’. The magazine is Mslexia and I have always found it a useful resource. Not just for the articles and exercises, some of which are very good, others not so very good, but definitely very good is the extensive directory and listings section at the back, which has up to date details of hundreds of magazines accepting submissions, closing dates and submission guidelines for competitions, info on courses and events. And not many writers have yet found a way to be published without submitting anything, at least, not while they still live. So, Mslexia, highly recommended. It comes out quarterly and is priced £6.95.
And remember, if there’s anything out there you’d like to recommend for our listeners, just send in an email and I’ll publicise it.
Paris Review
As I mentioned above, I have hundreds of books on writing and how to write. Why? Because there it is, on the bookshop shelf, promising it holds the secret to my writing desires, assuring me it will turn me into a bestselling author for just ten minutes a day.
Well, no, perhaps even I’m not gullible enough to be taken in by that. But I think I do use these books as a sort of displacement activity, as if by reading them I can skip past a few of the thousands of hours of actual writing that I need to do to get there.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against these books, not really. I believe creative writing can be taught, as long as there is some desire and talent there in the first place. I wouldn’t have spent so much time either teaching or being taught myself, otherwise. The growing number of universities offering Creative Writing MAs and such like would seem to back up the idea. And if a subject can be taught, we need textbooks.
A few, and only a few, of the books I own on creative writing truly are excellent, inspiring works. Some others are very good, and well worth reading. The vast majority, however, are dull and repetitive with little new to say, while many others are so bad they do more harm than good, stifling any natural ability with clichéd exhortations and overly prescriptive writing rules, demanding a formulaic approach to the craft, suggesting that writing success is simply a matter of solving a puzzle.
And, what is more, and this should be a dead giveaway, these writing books at the lower end of the scale are always written by people I have never heard of, and certainly never read. Which, rather circuitously, brings me on to my next recommendation.
I believe you can’t be a decent writer without being a decent reader and the best books from which to learn to write are the novels and stories that inspire us in the first place. And if I want to hear writing advice, I prefer to hear it from writers I respect. Which is why I love the Paris Review Interview books.
The Paris Review started life as a small literary journal set up by a bunch of expatriate Americans in Paris in 1953, including George Plimpton, who edited it until his death in 2003. As well as growing into a major literary journal, publishing many great authors, it also became famous for its long running series of interviews with writers, often conducted by other writers. The results are usually meticulous and fair and tend neither to eulogise or criticise, but simply give the author the chance to reflect on the writing life: his or her habits, routines, processes and concerns, and as such they provide a true insight into what goes into producing a final manuscript, and show how different every author is. (although noone so far has revealed they got their first break after reading "How to be a Bestselling Author for Ten Minutes a Day".)
The best of these interviews have been compiled in various publications: the old Writers at Work series and, most recently, a polished set from Canongate, published from 2007 onwards. Featuring interviews with authors as varied as Hemingway, Oates, Faulkener and Stephen King. Can’t recommend them highly enough – truly inspiring, and you can probably pick them up pretty cheaply second-hand now, particularly the Writers at Work editions, while some of the interviews are available for free from the Paris Review website.
Here’s a taste, one of my favourites, part of an interview with EL Doctorow in 1983.
The interviewer mentions that Doctorow had once told him that the most difficult thing for a writer to write was a simple household note to someone coming to collect the laundry, or instructions to a cook.
To which Doctorow replies
What I was thinking of was a note I had to write to the teacher when one of my children had missed a day of school. It was my daughter, Caroline, who was then in the second or third grade. I was having my breakfast one morning when she appeared with her lunch box, her rain slicker, and everything, and she said, “I need an absence note for the teacher and the bus is coming in a few minutes.” She gave me a pad and a pencil; even as a child she was very thoughtful. So I wrote down the date and I started, Dear Mrs. So-and-so, my daughter Caroline . . . and then I thought, No, that’s not right, obviously it’s my daughter Caroline. I tore that sheet off, and started again. Yesterday, my child . . . No, that wasn’t right either. Too much like a deposition. This went on until I heard a horn blowing outside. The child was in a state of panic. There was a pile of crumpled pages on the floor, and my wife was saying, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this.” She took the pad and pencil and dashed something off.
I had been trying to write the perfect absence note. It was a very illuminating experience. Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
Wednesday, 4 May 2011
Show #8
A packed show this week, with stories from Anne Willingale and Carolyn Eddy, an interview with Martin Sorrell about his approach to writing flash fiction as well as another great example of his work in this form.
Don't forget the listen again service on mixcloud - see above for the link.
Keep those submissions coming in!
Don't forget the listen again service on mixcloud - see above for the link.
Keep those submissions coming in!
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
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.
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.
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