Debbie and I are both entering a local short story competition. It's for Kapiti residents and is starting up this year. The conditions are pretty open - write a short story of no more than 500 words. Be a resident of Kapiti. Pretty simple really :-) It's actually kind of hard to know what to do with such a blank canvas but I'm pretty happy with the story I came up with. The result of the contest won't be announced until August. I had a head-scratching think about it a few days ago (Friday?), slept on it, then wrote the story on Saturday. Debbie gave me some very good feedback and I made a few minor tweaks, and it was good to go. I actually wrote two drafts of it really, as I wrote one in a notebook in the lounge when Dom was up early, then typed it up when he was having a nap. For the most part I typed without looking at the notebook, so it really was a second draft rather than a transcript of the notebook version. I think the handwritten version pretty much mapped out the beats and turned up one or two nice phrases, but the crafting and sparkle was 90% second draft stuff.
5 comments:
I like yours more than mine. Intriguing to hear that you handwrote a draft first. I'm completely out of the habit of writing rather than typing. Did it feel easier/harder/different to write by hand? I'm afraid that I can't write fast enough
I found it quite hard to write by hand. I don't actually write much at all longhand these days.
When I've done writing exercises earlier in the year I've handwritten them and the pace tended to be such that thinking about what I was writing was not possible. That worked OK for me. Scribbling down ideas at full pace was only slightly limiting (I think I can type faster than I can hand write by a fair margin, but found that scribbling down sentences I could mostly manage a pace that was close to the flow of ideas).
When I sat down to write this story I already had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to happen in the story, so as I was writing I was quite mindful of the style I was writing in and the economy of language (thanks to the 500 word limit). This was a real pain as I got about 3 sentences in and started to find that I wasn't happy with a word, a phrase, even a whole sentence. I crossed out a few things and rewrote them but found it a massively inconvenient not being able to easily change stuff.
After the first couple of paragraphs I decided to try to ignore crafting and just put down whatever my first crack at each sentence was. This was slightly lame as I knew there were clunky sentences and stuff but had to live with them.
When I typed it up I barely looked at the first draft, but the process of writing it certainly helped the second draft be better.
And I think your story is awesome :-) They're very different kettles of fish, both as strong as each other.
That whole crossing out thingy when you write is VERY frustrating - and very clumsy. Do you need a reader for your short stories? - she says hopefully.
Yes please! I shall email them through when I get home. At less than 500 words each they shouldn't take too long to read (actually mine is exactly 500 words, not including the title. I had to cut it down from 512).
Thank you!
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