New Skills and New Hope

Sunday 3rd March 2024, edited two short stories and 50 pages of With Everything I Know, 0 new rejections, 0 new agent queries, 0 competitions entered, 1 flash fiction and 1 short story being published in The Fold this week (available at the Utter! Lutonia event), slow reading progress with The Islands of Abandonment and The Appeal by Janice Hallett, 0 new book purchases, 2 coffees, 1 lemon and ginger tea, and an almond croissant

This week my ability to stay motivated floundered. I recorded my mixed emotions in my notebook but despite promising to share my ‘warts and all’ story to publication here, I have decided the words will stay where they are. They lack the positivity I usually show and it is suffice to say the words involved some self-pitying, wallowing and frustrated rambling and this overflowed to more than one sympathetic ear during the week so thank you if you had to listen to my melancholic moaning.

Despite the motivational set back, I have not given up. This weekend I have been editing like a surgeon with a knife, removing excess words from potential competition entries. I need to get a 10,900 extract from my WIP, With Everything I Know, down to 8,000 and a 2,600 short story down to 1,700. With my initial cuts I am down to 8,900 and 1,998 so with two weeks until the deadlines hit, I still have some trimming to do.

Not only have I not given up, I spent Sunday morning re-organising my blog. As I wanted to delve into sharing fiction with you (one of my new year promises), I needed to find a way to distinguish these posts from my regular blog. I started with a Google search and was soon out of my depth. Fellow blogger/writer and AWG member, H J Worthington-Smith, came to my rescue and after a couple of hours of editing my WordPress page she has created a new look and structure that has transformed the way I will be sharing my writing. Tweaking blog pages and dealing with socials is a whole other art form that I need to master.

Short stories are a masterful art form too – their truncated nature makes it challenging to wrangle them into shape. George Saunders offers useful and insightful advice in the book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, where he picks apart classic Russian short stories. Finding a satisfactory ending to a short story can be one of the biggest challenges – too abrupt and you might disappoint your reader, too ambiguous and you might annoy them.

Flash fiction and short stories require the most crafting because like poetry every word counts. Chekhov, renowned for his short stories, also wrote the drama Uncle Vanya. After watching the National Theatre Live production of Vanya with Andrew Scott on Friday, I was reminded of the power of brevity. The suspense in the opening scene as he makes tea with his back to the audience was palpable. Rationing the detail in a scene or a story can increase its impact. Scott mesmerises the audience where he, without a single costume or scene change, switches between the nine characters of differing genders and ages with seamless ease. Chekhov, the master of the short form, gave Scott his material but his rendition of each character used a subtly of detail that is pure Scott. The holding of a necklace, the bouncing of a ball, the caress of his own face – all render the audience entranced.

Ensuring a narrative arc and a satisfying denouement in the short stories I am currently editing will keep me busy next week as I try to decide what is necessary and what is redundant. In the event these pieces are not chosen as ‘winners’ they will be shared later in the year here. In the meantime, here is a humorous flash fiction piece (not my usual genre) written for FlashNano 2023 in response to the prompt – write a story in the form of an advertisement. It didn’t win a recent competition but if it brings a smile to one reader’s face it will have been worth posting.

Kate

P.S. If you do like the new ‘face’ of my blog please show your appreciation and subscribe to Helen’s blog at https://hjworthingtonsmith.com/ – Thank you Helen. I couldn’t have managed this without you!