I’ve just been writing, and enjoying it.

This is weird for me because I usually hate it. I love the idea of it. I love having done it. I quite like the editing process, especially if I’m weeding out the excess words to make a flash hit its limit. But I don’t normally love the writing itself. But at the moment I am.

I think it’s partly because I haven’t done any for ages so I’m coming back to it fresh. Partly it’s that I’m trying to follow this idea I read about where you do 20 mins a day and stop when you hit the time limit, even in the middle of a sentence. Especially in the middle of a sentence as that gives you somewhere to pick up on.

Actually I’ve done more than the 20mins for the three nights this week that I’ve been doing it. At least my ‘writing time’ has been up to 2 hours and more but time actually spent on a personal project has been 20mins – or a little more. The rest has been reviews and crits and reading others stories and writing forums. Also tonight I spent some time organising my folders and creating a document template for the Eurofiction ‘house style’.

I’m also at the beginning of a lot of things. I’ll list my current projects in a second, but it feels like I have all this time stretched out in front of me. Days and days before I have to hand anything in. So I can spend a few minutes noodling around and brainstorming and well, playing, without having to worry about forming it into a story. But actually that’s ok. Because all joking aside if I avoid the 10 days of procrastination and 2 days of actual work of my “stages” then even actually putting ideas down at all gets me one step ahead. If none of my ideas are formed, at least outlined, as real stories by this time next week then…

Current Projects

Eurofiction Task 1 – got the prompt for the first round of EF 2009 last night just after midnight. A choice of three settings for an argument. I’ve sketched out vague ideas for all three and real possibilities for a couple.

AFO September Challenge – this one’s a good one. There are about 5 required elements – Travel, Alcohol, Loss, Dialogue and something Jaw-dropping. Except that none of them are required if you really don’t want them to be as long as the story’s good. So they’re more jumping off points, inspiration. I’m glad the challenge setter took this approach. Sometimes these multi-requirement challenges can be more about puzzle than prompt. Which is fine but I do the challenges to improve my writing not to prove I can fit 14 Beatles lyrics into a 500-word story about ducks. Anyway I’ve got an idea for this and I like it.

TWI Monday Flash – a 250-word flash competition that runs from Monday evening to Friday night. I’ve got a 270-word rough draft of an idea that’s fun but silly. I’ll polish and bring it up to 300 and then pare it back down to the needed 250.

It’s interesting because if you look at deadlines etc then I should work on TWI (tomorrow at 9pm) then EF (13 days and a couple of hours) then AFO (a whole month, nearly) but it’s measure of how much I like my AFO idea that I’ve worked on it tonight anyway. Though to fend off potential guillt I have in fact worked on all of them tonight.

Oh and I wrote in my blog

😉

One Competition Finishes…

So SlingInk’s Eurofiction is over. Actually for me it’s been over for more than a week but I finally got the final scores. For those that don’t know Eurofiction is SlingInk’s annual short story competition. 10 rounds over 20 weeks with the scoring following a ‘Eurovision’ model (top story gets 12, next two get 10, next two 9 and so on).

My goals for Eurofiction were simple:

Finish it i.e. hand in a story for each round (I only managed two rounds of the Whitaker 2008)
Write a new story each round

Well I finished and did complete each round. I wrote 9 new stories and only re-worked an old for one round because of a last minute work thing that meant I didn’t have as much time as I’d hoped. Once I realised what the scoring system was and that there were 32 entrants I added an extra goal:

score in each round

I did score in each round though by round 6 all that required was that I kept entering due to the number of people no longer submitting. I didn’t win a round but I scored 10 twice. My lowest score was 2 (in round 2).

Lessons Learnt

What did I learn from SlingInk?

That I am capable of not only finishing stories but doing so regularly
That deadlines are great – they motivate you to finish stuff
that deadlines are evil – they stress you out and cause you to hand in any old crap
that what I like and what scores highly aren’t necessarily the same thing. My favourite stories of mine scored 2 and 6. My least favourite scored 10.

So Let’s Do It Again

In about 30 minutes[1] Whittaker 2009 starts and I’m entered. This is the short story competition of The Write Idea forum. I entered last year but dropped out due to lack of persistence. However buoyed by my success – in terms of finishing – in Eurofiction I’m going into this quietly excited. Plus I like the fact that I’ll be back on the deadline treadmill again. Like as in also hate it that is.

Whittaker’s similar to Eurofiction but there are a few differences:

Only 9 rounds
There’s a 2500 word limit – Eurofiction has no limit and in 2 of my entries I went over 2500.
The scoring is based on a 100-point system with so many for character, plot etc. I prefer this as I can see where I’m doing well. (though Eurofiction did have very helpful constructive feedback)
The scoring is based on the story itself not relative to the others. In theory all entrants could score exactly the same.
The prompts in Whittaker tend to be a bit more cryptic – but they are there more for inspiration than anything.

New Competition, New Goals

My goals for Whittaker 2009 look a lot like my ones for Eurofiction:

Finish – enter each round
Write new stories for each round
Make the quality higher – write stuff you’re actually proud of.
Win a round

Those last two are obviously linked. The incentive to win is that the winners get published in an anthology and whilst its the kind of thing largely bought by the writers and their friends and family, last year’s was really well put together.

But aside from winning I really want to make this about writing better. The great thing about the deadlines was it made me finish stuff on a schedule. The bad thing was that by the end of the competition I’d get to a deadline and all I cared about was having something to hand in. If this is to be about learning to write then I want these stories to be better.

How To Write Good

How am I going to achieve that? Simple really. My new rule is that I won’t allow myself to hand in a first draft. I sort of had this last time but in the end I was polishing the first draft, mainly for typos and spelling and calling it a second draft and entering that. This time I really won’t hand in draft one because the rule is I have to write draft two from scratch.

I did this with a couple of my first stories. I wrote an entire first draft then started again with a blank document. It works because you already know something about how the story should go. Any good bits, any really nice bits of writing, snappy dialogue or effective description you’ll remember anyway. Plus it allows you to just write without worrying about where it’s going because you already sort of know. Not that I’ll not re-configure the plot if that seems like a good idea.

I’m going to try to make “first week = first draft” my motto too – but I know the power/curse of deadlines – everything gets done, but it gets done last minute. We’ll see.

[1]or probably already has by the time I finished writing and formatting this post.[2]

[2]yep it has!