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.