Short 'n' Sweet by Ann Evans

Our latest anthology

It's all been about short stories recently. Belonging to the Coventry Writers' Group, we decided to put together another anthology of our stories to publish ourselves and to have as an ebook.

Coventry Tales 2 came hot off the press last week, and the group celebrated with a launch at Waterstones last Saturday and a launch party at our main library on Tuesday evening.

We all know how isolated it can be at times when you're a writer, so its nice to belong to a group of like-minded people. Of course it doesn't always work out, but happily over the last few years our lot have really got their act together in making good use of our work.

A couple of years ago, after running a Christmas short story competition, it was decided to compile them into an anthology. Fortunately for us, one particular member is a dab hand at publishing his own non-fiction books and runs a small publishing company. (Yes, we know we're dead lucky in having him as a member!) So he (Mike Boxwell of Greenstream Publishing) was the driving force behind our efforts at getting an anthology together.

Another member of the group was a qualified proof reader and copy editor, and a friend of yet another member is an artist - who volunteered her services to do the cover - again.

For some members of the group that was the first story they had ever published, so it was quite a big deal for them. Plus we all got involved in marketing and promoting the book (definitely good practice) as well as doing some leg-work in calling in at local newsagents and other outlets to see who would like to stock the book for us. One member even went along to the Lord Mayor's office and sold him some books. Seems he was delighted to have a local Coventry book available to give away to visiting dignitaries as gifts.

That anthology Coventry Tales was followed up by a free ebook called Christmas Tales. While another industrious member entered our anthology into a national competition for anthologies – which went on to take the first prize of £250!!

As another promotional event, which was also great fun, we held a performance at a local amateur theatre. We offered it free and put on refreshments as bribes! Then more recently we indulged in a writers' group breakfast at a local pub paid for by the anthology competition prize winnings.

Naturally, we decided to repeat the whole thing, so earlier this year we ran another competition, the theme being fact or fiction and linked to Coventry. During the Coventry Literary Festival we staged another performance (with costumes) at the local theatre which was great fun. And more recently we got all the stories together again, and Mike (bless him!) has once again turned it into a lovely book.

Some of the Coventry Writers' Group rehearsing for
our anthology performance

Following a press release, local radio stations became interested in our latest escapades which resulted in invitations to two radio stations and pieces in local papers. Plus the Coventry library were again fantastic in promoting Coventry Tales 2 and letting us do a launch party, which took place on Tuesday.

Then if that's not enough about anthologies, there's another one on the go, with a totally different group. Around January last year I started up another writing course, called Focus on Fiction. It was intended as a 6-week course, and I had about 10 students. After the six weeks were over, eight of the group were enjoying themselves so much and finding it really useful and supportive, they wanted to continue meeting up – and so the course continued – and continues...

As winter approached we decided to write some short stories with a winter/Christmas theme with the intention of reading them out around Christmas. And then we had the great idea of compiling them into an anthology and producing it as an ebook.

We needed to give ourselves a name, so we played around with names before coming up with The Wordsmiths. And now Winter Tales by the Wordsmiths is about to be launched on the world via Amazon Kindle... and the group are fantastically excited about the event, and so am I.

Only two of this intrepid group have been published before, and I am so impressed by the work and effort they have all shown in writing their stories, and working hard in proof reading them, it's just been absolutely fantastic. Plus knowing they are being published has boosted their confidence in themselves as writers, that they have all visibly upped their writing so impressively that I can't wait to tell everyone about our anthology.

I've only just uploaded it on Kindle, so at the time of writing I can't give you the link. But if you're browsing at any time, please take a peep at Winter Tales by The Wordsmiths.

The link to the Coventry Writers Group's latest anthology is: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Coventry-Tales-2-Writers-Group/dp/190767036X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386782610&sr=8-1&keywords=Coventry+Tales+2

And my website is: www.annevansbooks.co.uk

The Short Story Tradition Savita Kalhan

The recent announcement by BBC Radio 4 that the short story slots were being cut was met by an outcry by writers and listeners alike. The new controller, Gwyneth Williams, intended to axe them in order to make room for more news, specifically a longer World at One programme. She felt that the programme wasn’t long enough. In her words, “Stories now develop faster and need a fresh eye by lunchtime. Parliament sits in the morning now and WATO needs to cover emerging issues." Many people disagreed with her. Yes, current affairs are important, but is fifteen minutes every other day too much for a small slice of fiction?

A campaign began to save the short story slots. A petition was started and signed by almost 6,000 people the last time I checked. To sign – No More Short Story Cuts - please follow the link below.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/noshortstorycuts/

The campaign has already helped bring about a small U-turn. Radio 4 have said they will keep two short story slots instead of one.

Short stories suited radio, and Radio 4 championed them for many years. But why is the short story so suited to radio?

Maybe because the short story has its roots in oral tradition. Long, long ago, short stories were told before they were read aloud. They had their origins in fables and anecdotes in many cultures across the world. But the same is true of the intervening years and it’s even true of the present day. The short story has been around since before Aesop. Chaucer wrote a linked collection, The Canterbury Tales. The short story covers every genre from crime to science fiction, and every age group from toddlers to adults.

If you’re lucky to have had parents who read aloud to you as a child, you will probably have been read short stories, and before that stories told from pictures. In school you will have been taught how to write compositions for English exams. They were basically short stories. As you got older, those short stories may have become longer.

For me, listening to a short story on the radio is an oasis in the day. I won’t know where I will be taken or how far it will take me, or how much I will enjoy it, or become involved in it. But I know the voice in the story will transport me to a very different place, to a different experience, and that is something I look forward to.

I wasn’t one of the lucky ones whose parents read to them as a young child because my mother was illiterate, but, like generations before her, she retold the stories that had been handed down to her by word of mouth...

An Awfully Creative Adventure - Meg Harper

I’m laughing this morning over Andrew’s 6 monthly skips! So that’s why our garage is stuffed to the gunnels! I’ve missed a trick there! I’m also taking a welcome break from the huge task of getting a house that has been ‘lived in’ (ehem) by 4 teenagers ready for the market. Anyone wanting a large family house in Warwick, step this way! It has new carpets throughout except, of course, in my study – another place stuffed to the gunnels and impossible to empty for the day. So my new study carpet is – guess where? In the garage!
Today, however, I really want to write about a school project that I’ve been engaged in intermittently all academic year. This was at Limehurst High School, a middle school in Loughborough which is definitely the pleasantest, happiest secondary school I have ever encountered and where it was a privilege to be the visiting author. There are times when I question the value of author visits. If it’s a case of the ‘author talk’ delivered to every class in the school, I wonder what lasting benefit there will be. I am far more excited by being invited in to run workshops or, as in this case, to be a partner in a long-term project.
The brief at Limehurst was to run a workshop with a small group of year 8s, teaching them the nuts and bolts of story writing so that they could teach a slightly larger group of year 7s, who would then write a story suitable to be turned into an animation for year 2s from a local primary school. Nothing too complicated then! As so often, I found myself deconstructing what I do myself (principally by instinct in my case) in order to make the vital elements clear enough for young people to absorb and cascade down to their juniors. Fortunately, I often write short stories, not simply novels, and I also have some very limited experience of writing animations – so I felt competent enough to know where to start. As so often, however, I learned as we went on. I was there as consultant when the years 8s taught the year 7s and was alongside them as they thrashed out their plots and wrote and edited their stories. I sometimes think I don’t know very much about creating story but as we worked, I appreciated that I really do know what I’m doing. I know where to cut and prune, I know what’s needed to lift a plot and to keep the pace. I know how to create the crisis and how to satisfactorily resolve. And I realised what a mammoth task the young people were facing – and yet again, how ludicrous it is that year 6s are expected to write short stories for their SATS in a mere 45 minutes. Grrrrrrr!
In the end, the year 7s had the barebones of two workable stories so we asked if they could animate both. Fortunately, the lovely Leo and Theo of Lunchbox Films were ready to give it a whirl and the school was confident they could provide funding – so the year 7s set out on the laborious task of animating their stories. A couple of weeks ago the big moment arrived. The year 2s from the local primary school arrived for the premiere – and so did I! You can see the results below. (Well - maybe not - I've tried to post the links and they're showing on the dashboard version but not on the blog - but here are none hot links if you're interested!


http://www.lunchboxfilms.co.uk/project.php?url=goldilocks_baldilocks

http://www.lunchboxfilms.co.uk/project.php?url=tanes_tremendous_trumpet)

My next task is to see if my agent’s interested in submitting the original stories to publishers. I’ve edited them in conference with the young people and have kept as much of their original wording as I can. I was thrilled by how engaged they were with that process – but then, we were doing what I wish schools could do more. A real task for a real purpose. There were lots of really memorable moments but it all felt very worthwhile when one of the participants said, ‘I used to think I was no good at English but doing this project has made me realise that I really am.

www.megharper.co.uk

The Weather in Your Head; Penny Dolan

For a few years, I’ve written a short animal story for a seasonal anthology. The first few were for Winter anthologies for the Christmas market but this year a Spring anthology is being published: The Little Bunny. The cover is perfectly suited for the likely audience, and it's definitely not gritty urban ranting or farting pants gags.

I must admit I do enjoy writing these stories, although the work doesn’t bring much money or great personal acclaim. It’s not even “my” title. My name is shown as part of Amazon's product details.

On the other hand, it’s fun reading through the authors listed on the back cover and discovering which other writer friends have been sharing the story-making task.

The tales are good for the spirit too, especially when one is battling with a longer book or other troubles. Also, despite the “sweetness” of the subject matter, the editors are briskly helpful and precise - in the kindest way of course - which is good for all of one’s writing.

The editors are always reasonable, too. I have been asked to change names so the collection doesn’t end up with more than one Mollie. I have been nudged gently so that a similar plot device doesn’t appear twice in such a short set of tales. That’s fine by me. Writer for Hire.

Once or twice I've received slightly concerned emails about “my animal facts” versus “your animal facts”. As long as I had my own evidence, there was never any problem. It's quite comforting to know the editors do consider the factual basis of the animal stories, no matter what touches of story fantasy were added.

But there is one thing about this work that is most odd.

The anthologies, like editions of Vogue, are written well before their season. So, last year, when the ground outside was thick with December’s ice and snow, my head was full of a story about sunshine and blue skies and blossom and daffodils.

Now, as the gardens green and fill with flowers, I have been deep in a tale about a poor little creature lost amid biting wind and freezing snow. It will probably come back to me for revision work in the sweltering heat of mid-July.

When my head is in these stories, that world is almost real to me. I “feel” the weather and the temperature, but the contrast between “in here” and “out there” can be giddy-making when I'm suddenly called back to real date matters.

Maybe that’s the reasons I’m never quite sure what the day today actually is, or which season we’re living in, Officer.

So what’s the weather in your head?

Penny Dolan

www.pennydolan.com

Out now: A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E (Bloomsbury)

Once upon a time... the end

In my past life, as a teacher, one of my most disliked tasks was marking. Not because I didn’t like reading my pupils’ work (though I often didn’t), but because having to assess a piece of writing against a set of increasingly arbitrary assessment objectives sometimes made me think it was all about jumping through hoops rather than the actual rules of good writing.

When I sat down a few weeks ago to judge a short story competition, I delighted in the fact that this time I was setting my own objectives, and they were pretty simple. Does this story work? Does it draw me in and keep me hooked? Do I feel confident in this writer’s hands?

I’ve won quite a few short story competitions, and it was flattering to be asked to judge this one. It was a fairly small, but very professionally-run competition, organised by a magazine. The magazine is Ireland-based, as am I, but attracted entries from all over the UK and the Republic of Ireland. The stories had been pre-shortlisted and were judged anonymously. Not knowing anything about a writer really makes you focus on what’s important in the story.

I’ve often read judges’ reports on competitions which say that the winner announced itself in the first few sentences, and I know agents and publishers often say that they can tell almost at once if a book is going to impress. This wasn’t my experience. Instead, though I found it easy to choose the winning story, several stories promised a great deal in the first paragraph, only to disappoint as the story went on. Some writers had put so much emphasis on that all-important hooking of the reader that they forgot to reel her in, and she was left dangling.

Several of the stories contained fantastic writing – really imaginative use of language. Heart-stopping moments. Intense character identification. Yet none of these stories was placed. Why? Because great use of language isn’t enough – a story has a job to do, and if it doesn’t do that, if it doesn’t take a character from A to B, it doesn’t matter how delightful its metaphors are. 

I write young adult fiction, and it’s normally a 70,000 word novel as opposed to a 2,000 word story. Yet I found the experience of assessing these stories really helped me to look dispassionately at my own work. Young adults, like short story judges, are hard to please. They aren’t fooled by metaphor-fur-coat and no story-knickers. They won’t keep going if a story doesn’t live up to early promise.

I enjoyed assessing these stories, and I’m looking forward to meeting the winners at the ceremony in November. But even more, I enjoyed being reminded of the nuts and bolts of good story-telling, and I hope my own readers stand to benefit from that.

Past Perfect Sheena Wilkinson

I have a secret other career.

Though I’m most known – insofar as I’m known at all – as a writer of contemporary YA, I have since 2006 (four years before my first novel was published) been writing, and publishing, short stories for adults, mostly historical, almost all about World War One or its aftermath. 

Now I’m having the chance to combine my two great writing passions – realistic YA and historical fiction – as I have a story included in Walker’s forthcoming anthology The Great War (pub. 3 July 2014). All the stories are inspired by actual artefacts, and my story, ‘Each Slow Dusk’, is inspired by a collection of 1914-19 school magazines, from the school where I taught for nineteen years. I curated an exhibition based on these magazines in 2004, so in a way this story has been ten years in the making.

school magazines from WW1 

 I fictionalised details of the school’s war effort, foregrounding the experience (often overlooked in war literature) of a schoolgirl, sixteen-year-old Edith, whose dreams of higher education are shattered when she has to leave school to care for her older brother, invalided out of the army with rheumatism. It’s very like the rest of my World War 1 stories, apart from the fact that the main character and the intended readership are younger.

Historical fiction always produces tension between wanting to evoke the period so that it comes alive for the reader, but not recreating it so systematically that it lapses into pastiche. The story must work as modern fiction, so it has to feel fresh, especially to a teen reader, who is likely to baulk at anything that feels worthy or schooly. This was a big challenge for me: there are no battles, no gore; the story takes place in a single day in a Belfast suburb. How could I make duty and quiet desperation interesting to a modern teenager?

music from the period

Unlike the intended readership, who are likely to have a prolonged period of young adulthood, the teenage characters in ‘Each Slow Dusk’ are children at school one minute and adults the next – not only leading men into battle, but, in Edith’s case, taking an adult caring role. Notions of duty are much more pronounced than they would be today, and Edith seems both older and younger than a modern sixteen year old.  How could I make her voice and choices accessible to a modern teen reader without compromising the sensibilities of the 1917 narrator?

In trying to evoke the Zeitgeist of 1917 I was scrupulous, but not heavy-handed, about period detail, and about ensuring these details are used only when it is natural to do so – when it would be equally natural to mention them in a story set in modern times, rather than have them come blazing signs shouting Period Detail. Being a geek, getting every detail exactly right matters to me, but accuracy isn’t always enough. In ‘Each Slow Dusk’ Edith and her friend Maud pass notes in class, and in one note they use the @ symbol – Meet you @ break. I spent some time checking that this sign was in common usage in 1917, and was pleased to find that it was. I liked the fact that it looks so modern, and hoped it would be one of the many small details to help bring 1917 alive for my reader. My editor agreed – but in the end the @ sign had to go. Why? Because, although I and my editor knew it was correct, it was flagged up at the copy-editing and proofing stages as looking anachronistic. And it only takes one little detail to break the reader’s trust in you. On the night before we went to print, @ was replaced by at.

I once started to read a novel set in the thirties, where the characters’ sexual attitudes were anachronistically modern. When they gathered round a television to watch the coronation of George VI, I flung the book away in disgust, saying ‘Wrong coronation! Can’t even get that right!’ Later I discovered that it was technically possible, if highly unusual, to have watched the 1937 coronation on television, but by getting the tone wrong in other areas, the writer had compromised my trust. Once that compact between writer and reader is broken, all the accurate period detail in the world will not restore it.

the first in Wilson's excellent Victorian series 

I’ve been thinking a lot about historical fiction recently. I’ve just finished Bring Up the Bodies, where Mantel established that trust so confidently that she could have told me anything about the 1530s and I’d have believed her. Last month I blogged about temporarily abandoning an academic paper in favour of a week’s uninterrupted first-draft scribbling: that paper was a chapter about Jacqueline Wilson’s Victorian novels for a forthcoming Casebook study of Wilson. It’s now finished and submitted, and the whole process was invaluable to me, even though it kept me away from my real work for weeks on end. I loved the Hetty Feather books, and thought Wilson dealt deftly with all the tensions I’ve noted above. This week I’m coming back to the present, for a big edit of my next novel. Set in 2014. I hope I get the details right.