Words Unlimited

Summer of Writing

Want to breathe some fresh air into your writing?

The recently launched, Longworth Editors, provides reports on manuscripts for agencies and publishers but also offers editorial advice to individual writers.

If you're getting a manuscript ready to submit, a report from Longworth aims to give an honest appraisal of its merits, along with advice and guidance on how the work might be improved.

Longworth is offering 20% off an editorial report if you submit before 1 September and quote 'summer of writing' with your submission.

They are also seeking out new talent with a short story competition.The Summer of writing offer lets you enter the short story comp for half price. Find out more, here.

Short Story News

It's been a good week for the short story with a publishing revolution, a new collection from Helen Simpson and a new competition for first-time writers. 

Fiction on your phone? I've never quite understood why publishers say short stories don't sell. You'd think something that could be read at one sitting would suit our culturally congested lives. But how to get the words before readers when so much competes for our attention? Enter a new application for the iPhone - The Ether Short Stories App. Seen at this week's London Book Fair it promises to revolutionize our commuter reading habits and create a huge market for stories.

So, you may want to enter the new short story competition, Perfectly Formed. Judges are looking for the best unpublished writer in the country who can create a story that is small but perfectly formed - 2,000 words or less.  Stories can be on any subject and in any fiction genre, be it drama, comedy, crime, historical or modern. What they are looking for is punchy, original and imaginative. Winners and runners up will be published. More on how to enter, here.

Meanwhile, in conventional book form comes Helen Simpson's new collection In Flight Entertainment. Did she have prior knowledge of Iceland's volcanic activity? You can also hear some of the stories read on Radio 4 this week.

For Short Story Writers

In case you haven't stumbled across it yet, The Guardian Book Blog has an excellent series - 24 parts to date - on individual short story writers, written by Chris Power.

The first of these reflects on the work of Anton Chekov, the 24th, and latest one, features the work of experimental American writer, Lydia Davis.

In between you'll find articles on Alice Munro, Saki, Ray Bradbury, Donald Barthelme, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, Grace Paley, Raymond Carver, Mavis Gallant and more.

The series calls itself A Brief Survey of The Short Story, it packs a lot in and is well worth a look.

Where to Send Your Short Stories

Short story writer, Tania Hershman, has done an amazing review of all the mags in UK and Ireland that accept stories. Poets might also want to check this out. She's generously posted her findings here. Thanks, Tania.

Short Story Award

What makes a winning short story?

Find out by listening in to the podcasts of the five stories short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Award, 2009.  All five will also be broadcast on Radio 4 this coming week. The podcasts are available for the next two weeks.  

Why not write a short story? You could start with either of the writing prompts above and below. Better still - What's the connection between the two images? What's the story?

Short Story Masterclasses

How do you write an effective short story?

How are you going to grab your reader with the first sentence and keep them hooked to the end?

How do you write something accessible and engaging but with much more going on underneath – a story that will live on in the reader’s imagination?

How do you get to write something strong enough to be published in The New Yorker?

To create effective fiction you need to immerse yourself in the effects created by the best practitioners. This means reading as writer not as a literary critic – there is a difference. Reading as a writer you’re always asking – How did they do that? Why did that work?

Better than any ‘How To’ book is simply to read widely and read as a writer.

Here, in no particular order, are a few authors that every would-be short story writer might want to dip into: Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O’Connor; and more recently William Trevor, Grace Paley, Amy Bloom, Joyce Carol Oates, Rose Tremain, Haruki Murakami, Tim Winton, David Foster Wallace, Ali Smith, Lorrie Moore, Jayne Anne Phillips, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Alice Munro, George Saunders, A. M. Homes.

So it’s wonderful to come across The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, the backlist of which contains several writers on my roll call. Each month a leading fiction writer selects a short story – previously published in The New Yorker – they read it and then talk to NY fiction editor Deborah Treisman.

I’ve just listened to Joshua Ferris reading George Saunders’s story “Adams” – afterwards he talked about how Saunders had voiced the piece and more.

Each month a new author/story is added, and, its FREE.

I’ve just subscribed and have the entire backlist in iTunes – quite a library. I’m off to find a hard copy of the Saunders’s story. I can’t wait to read it on the page.