I’ve mentioned a couple of times over the last week a stunning book which I’ve read by Natasha Carthew, ‘Undercurrent’, and how it made such an impact on me, not only as a reader but as a writer. As well as being a fascinating, thought-provoking and a beautiful read, it also made me take a mental step back and think about my own writing. The previous week I had read another incredible and beautifully written book, ‘Landlines’ by Raynor Winn. Both these books are autobiographical and also brilliantly and vividly bring the natural environment and landscape leaping off the page.
Friends have been mentioning writing competitions for ages, and they have entered many themselves, but somehow, in my usual way, dithering and procrastination have got in my way of doing the same. I have loads of short stories, but most of them I have “published” here and many competitions don’t allow entries of work which have been put out into public view. This is why over the past few months I may have written about my stories, but I haven’t shared them here so I could, if I found the right competition (write comp!!) then I could post them off with fingers crossed.
I came across a writing competition and determined that this time, yes I would enter! If you’re not in it you can’t win it! I looked at the rules and saw that entries had to be within 2,000 and 5,000 words; my stories are usually shorter than that between a thousand and fifteen hundred. However I did manage to find one which I though matched all the criteria, but I’d written it a while ago and another rule said stories had to have been written within the last three months. Luckily, if you entered one which fitted that criterion then you could also enter an older one.
This set me the task to write a new 2,000+ word story. I’ve recently tried to cut down on padding and unnecessary verbiage, so then to write more but not have it bloated with needless waffle was one more challenge. So I was trying to write more descriptively – but in a subtle way; I was trying to be pertinent and focused, and I was trying to write a complete tale which didn’t meander unnecessarily. I imagined two sisters, maybe middle-aged, maybe older, who went back to a place they used to stay every summer holidays. The younger one had a vivid memory of an old, deserted place they and their young friends used to go into and play – the elder sister had absolutely no memory of it at all. In a way it was quite a simple story, but I tried to be subtle, and I tried to be descriptive. It was hard to write because I didn’t want unnecessary detail, but I needed to reach the target word count!
Story finished, both it and the other older one checked, double-checked, spell-checked and polished, and I filled in all the details of the entry, paid the fee, and sent them off! I’m very unlikely to win, there’s a lot of fabulous writers out there, but I’m very pleased that I actually entered!
Lois Elsden 