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.