Observations on the Ringwood Publishing Writing Competition 2023

 

For the past three years I’ve been lucky enough to be a judge in the Ringwood Publishing short story competition. I’ve written about the stories in the first two years before but this year we had a bumper entry and a few common themes emerged. The following comments are not intended to be critical – the standard this year was very high – but hopefully I can offer some pointers to help authors in future years.

The biggest issue that struck me this year – in terms of the sheer number of stories which fell into this category – is that so many of them feel oddly distanced. A lot of action is relayed to us second-hand, in retrospect, all described through omniscient narration, rather than the point of view of a main character. It’s like most of the action takes place outside the story. In extreme cases, the story actually reads like a summary of the story. This happened. That happened. Then this. That means the reader can’t get involved. There is a lack of immediacy, of connection, of drama. And, ultimately, of interest.

Books on writing craft talk about starting in medias res, in the middle of events. This is the problem with the stories I’m talking about here. We’re never in the moment, living the scene as it unfolds. We’re hearing about it afterwards, or from the margins, from a distance. We’re never with the characters as their lives unfold.

In medias res is vital for the opening of your story and, again, a lot of stories this year suffered from weak openings. Looking through my notes, in story after story I’ve written “first paragraph could be removed” or even “first page is redundant”. In maybe a dozen stories, there was actually a brilliant first line, except it wasn’t in the first line, it was buried at the bottom of paragraph three or four. If everything up to that point was cut, we would have a very powerful opening. So read your stories again. Is there a stand-out sentence, something like the famous Iain Banks line, “It was the day my grandmother exploded”? There were genuinely a few examples of equally striking lines in this year’s stories, and if they’d been the opening lines the stories would have been immeasurably improved.

Too often, though, the introduction was devoted to a description of a scene, or backstory (which the reader isn’t going to care about because we aren’t invested in any characters yet) or explanations of who the characters are or, worst of all, a character preparing to do something – getting dressed, walking to a destination or the like. The story needs to start where the drama starts. Character and plot then flow from there.

In many stories, the main character was well-described and felt like a real person, but the characters around them were little more than names (and, in some cases, not even that). A lot of characters seemed to be there purely to move the plot forward, without contributing anything themselves. Every character should have a purpose, and the reader should have a sense of what all the principal players are like as individuals.

A lot of this can be done through dialogue and some stories missed opportunities here. This is linked to the point I made about stories feeling distanced. If we found things out through dialogue, rather than an omniscient narrator telling us, that pulls us into the story and makes it feel real. It is much better for a reader to gradually understand the thematic point the writer is looking to make from the characters talking to one another than to have it explained through omnisicient narration.

However, read your dialogue out loud. Does it sound like something a real person would actually say? If all you’re doing is taking a lump of omniscient narration and putting it in quote marks, that doesn’t make it dialogue.

A bald truth is that a lot of stories weren’t ready for submission. It was frustrating that quite a few stories which had the potential to be excellent were submitted before they’d been adequately edited. Let me tell you a giveaway. Whatever the word limit is for a competition – ours was 3000 – there will always be a high percentage of stories that come in ten words or fewer below that limit. I always check the word count before I start reading and this is an immediate red flag. It isn’t always the case, of course, but often it does mean that a writer has edited their story just enough to get it under the limit. That usually means there’s a lot more editing still to be done. Redundancy, cliché, repetition. They will all be in your early drafts and that’s fine. No one has ever written a superb first draft. But you should be refining and reworking your words over and over until only the most precise and perfect ones remain. There are several stories this year that I would like to see again, after proper editing.

I got the impression that half a dozen or so entries were excerpts from novels. There is nothing wrong with that. I’ve won a few competitions with stories that were taken from my first novel Cloudland and, indeed, our winning story last year was adapted from a novel which Ringwood Publishing liked so much it will be publishing this year.

But, if you do this, the short story you write is a completely different entity from the novel from which it’s been adapted, and you must read it with completely fresh eyes. Things you know from the novel are unknown to the reader of the story. Either explain them or, if they don’t add anything to the smaller scale of the plot, remove them. In one story, a character called Mary utters one line and never appears again. In the novel, she is probably a clear and important character, but in the short story she is an inexplicable presence. Who is she and why is she there? The story has to work in its own right, so you will have to change some things.

I hope I’ve managed to indicate some technical points which could help tighten your writing. But the final point I want to make is this: take risks. Don’t play safe. Don’t write something that’s already been written. If you want to write a Saki-esque story that’s fine, but make it your Saki-esque story, not a parody of the real thing. If you want to write a gritty Scots-dialogue drama, great but leave the Irvine Welshisms to Irvine Welsh. If you want to be experimental, experiment. You only have 3000 words to make your story stand out. That means every one of them has to do something important.

Good luck to everyone who ever writes a story and submits it to a competition. If you didn’t succeed this time, don’t give up. Every time you sit down and write you’re learning and improving. Your words matter. Let the world read them.

 

Some thoughts on writing a short story

Having recently finished a second stint as one of the judges of the Ringwood Publishing Short Story Competition, I thought I’d make a few observations on the stories I’ve read and perhaps give a few pointers for people looking to enter future competitions. 

Firstly, to everyone who entered the Ringwood competition, or who has entered any writing competition at any time, congratulations. Congratulations twice over. Once for conceiving, starting and finishing your story. And once more for having the courage to enter it for a competition. That isn’t easy, I know, and the sense of disappointment when you don’t win or get on a shortlist can be dispiriting. So well done, and thank you for sharing your work with us. Please don’t give up. 

Now, looking at the stories this time round, I have to be honest and say my first observation is that quite a high percentage of the stories entered weren’t ready. In many, there were simple punctuation, grammar or spelling mistakes which point to a story that hasn’t been fully edited. That alone isn’t enough to eliminate a good story from contention, but alongside those mistakes there were, in many instances, clear signs that the story needed more work. 

No story will be a finished article on the first write. Even the second write. Third write. Fourth, fifth, sixth. Short stories are an unforgiving medium because they allow for no wasted words, no longeurs, no unnecessary scenes or scene-setting. Get into your story immediately. Tell that story as concisely as you can. Then leave the story at the first moment you can safely escape, your story told, the point made. You can only do that when you’ve written and rewritten and rewritten it, removed every unnecessary word, distilled the plot to its essence, left nothing but the hard, sharp form of the tale itself. 

There’s no doubt a high percentage of stories would be immediately improved by deleting the first two, three or even four paragraphs. So many stories began with a protagonist going somewhere, or preparing to do something. Nobody cares about that. Start when the action starts. 

Read your story aloud. How does it sound? Are the moments of tension tense, the moments of love tender, the moments of humour a relief? And, more importantly, does it sound like a story from your head, or is it like any other story you might read on the web? 

Years ago, when I was in Alex Keegan’s Bootcamp, an online writing forum, Alex used to do an exercise where he would take a paragraph each from up to ten stories by different members of Bootcamp and stitch them together. Naturally, the story made no sense, but what was notable was that although the plot was nonsense the voice was consistent throughout. In other words, we were all writing in the same way, with a generic voice (usually Raymond Carver’s), with nothing distinctive, no way of grabbing the reader and saying to them “listen to this, listen to me, this story is amazing.” 

Voice is such an important aspect of storytelling. It’s about the way your sentences work, the words you use, your tone, the rhythms of your sentences, the ebb and flow of emotion. Voice is the way you tell your story. No one else can write your story. You are unique and your story is unique so make it sound unique. 

When you do that you will start to see your story crystallise on the page. It will become specific, real, an imagined world made flesh. Your characters will be more than names, your locales will be more than streets or hills or enchanted glades. They will be Ash Harker, young and frightened and alone, travelled 5,000 miles in search of truth; they will be that street, Milnab Street, the street where you were born in your big brother’s bed; they will be the Knock hill, trees and heather and blaeberry bushes, stretching high over Crieff and nestling between the Grampians and the Ochils; they will be the enchanted glade where you fell in love, where your life truly began, where the wonders of the world were revealed. Everything in your story will be real. Specificity is everything. Without it there is no story, just words. 

Take chances. Be bold. Search for that perfect, beautiful phrase, one that nobody’s heard before, one that sings, soars, hits you in the solar plexus. Make mistakes. That’s okay. You’re still learning. Ray Bradbury said the first million words was your apprenticeship. I’d rather read something where the author’s tried too hard and it hasn’t come off than something where they’ve settled for the first description or action that came to mind. I want to go on a glorious adventure with you, my mind and yours perfectly in union. 

To end where we began: congratulations on your immense good fortune in being a writer. It’s a grand business, and I wish you all the very best of luck in making your writing wonderful. Hopefully, we can do it all again next year.