Authors Electric

I recently started writing short stories for the Reedsy Prompts weekly contest . This is a fantastic competition for kickstarting your writing if/when you feel blocked. The prompts are always thought-provoking with great scope for exploration. The best part is that you get to read the other stories submitted to the contest once the winners are announced. Exploring hundreds of different ways to interpret the same prompt is a wonderful testament to human creativity, as well as reassurance that AI is not going to steal all of our jobs just yet.  In all my years of entering writing competitions, I’ve never won a single thing. I don’t take it to heart. It’s a writer-eat-writer world out there (I’m kidding—I love learning from other writers. I’m also a vegetarian and not a cannibal). But in all seriousness, I enter these contests not with a hope of victory, but with the knowledge that it’s a great way to improve my craft.  Well, dear reader, guess what? The very first story I entere...

I’ve been enjoying myself with short stories recently. It’s how I (and I suspect a lot of other writers) first started. I’ve not really written much in the short form over the last few years, though, preferring to concentrate on the books. However, I was in the pub few weeks back and was discussing writing-related matters with a couple of friends. One of them casually tossed out a suggestion to write about the current raft of AI and smart gadgets. (Slight aside here – why is it always non-writers who come out with such lofty suggestions but no comprehension of the technicalities? The words were something along the lines of, ‘You should write a short story about it, bet it’d sell dead easy and wouldn’t take long. Easy money for you.’) So, I politely made noises of ‘possibly’ whilst thinking, ‘Not on your nelly.’ I considered pointing out the time involved in first outlining a story, then researching things, followed by a revised outline to fix all the impossibilities in...

I see a lot of posts on social media about   whether  to write in first person or third person, if a story   should  be in past or present tense or if it’s   OK  to use one or more of the above at the same time. I’m not sure why anybody thinks they need permission to do anything. You can do what you like how you like and when you like – although in my opinion it does help to know what the rules actually are, so that you can break them properly and carefully, as opposed to driving a tank through them and leaving the poor little rules squealing on the ground in pain … I find with novels, I’m best using third person past tense. I can’t really sustain anything else for the length and depth of writing that a novel really needs. I have a lot of admiration for writers who can gallop along in first person without tying themselves up in knots, but I can’t do it. I like to get up close and personal with my characters, but they are not me and writing first person seem...

As a short story writer I'm often asked what is a short story? Well, here's my attempt at answering that question. If you were to follow the example written by A. J Chilson then just five words is a short story: “In bed, struggling, he succumbs.” Or there's this example by Ernest Hemingway which uses just six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” This type of story is known as nano-fcition, flash fiction, sudden fiction, micro-fiction and even the postcard story. But there are forms for example prior to Twitter increasing the length of a tweet some writers took on the challenge of attempting to write a story using just 140 characters, these unofficially became called 'twisters.' Here's an example by Ron Gould: "Time travel works!" the note read. "However you can only travel to the past and one-way."  I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill. Or these samples from Simon Sylvester : “She insisted they call ...

          The first thing most writers ever tackle is the short story. Either because it’s something they do at school, or because it’s less daunting than a book. It’s the preferred form in creative writing classes, as a number of them can be read out during the course of a two-hour lesson. It’s also one of the staple exercises of the creative writing degree, as once again it can be marked without too much tutor time being used up.           The print markets aren’t as widespread as they used to be, and competitions may be the only outlet for the more literary story as they don’t specify subject matter. But there’s a distinct possibility of an electronic rebirth. Dr. Who isn’t the only one who comes back in new disguise.  Short fiction on the Kindle may be the discerning commuter’s alternative to the computer game.             The fi...

It Only Happens In Stories    A short story that is growing into a long one ...           Last year I wrote a longish short story and published it on Amazon as a free giveaway over the Christmas period. The idea was to try and use it as a way of introducing myself to potential new readers and hopefully regenerating interest in my (paid for) collection of short pony stories.           I meant to take it off again after the five days free promo, but being busy with other stuff, I forgot until a couple of weeks later. When I remembered, I checked - as one does - to see if any had been sold, and was pleasantly surprised to see that far from sales plummeting after 400 odd freebies had been downloaded, it was actually doing quite nicely, thank you. And what was more, it had garnered more reviews than any of my other books, whether digital or paper. All of them nice: the only ne...