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Josie's Short Stories

See an article I wrote at www.theshortstory.org.uk

I have four unpublished novels. Each one has taken anything from three months to two years to write, then longer to edit, proofread and be happy with, and then I have to send it out to agents and publishers. It all gets a bit much when years of work is rejected, dejected and sitting in my drawer gathering dust. It begins to feel as if it's not worthwhile.

During the summer of 2006 I decided to have a break from writing novels for a while and concentrate on short stories. I found that I could get a quick turn-around and this helped with motivation. I trawled through Writers News, Writing Magazine and Mslexia, all of which have very useful pages of competitions and calls for submissions, and made a list with dates, wordcounts, subject (if any) and fee or free. It helped to have deadlines, I believe that nothing really helps more with motivation than the competition deadline.

I've had bursts of short story writing before, but had not submitted to this degree. I entered every national competition I could find, including the Orange, Asham and Bridport, and some smaller local competitions as well, for example Mere Festival. I tried not to spend too much money on entering, restricting myself to two or three per month of the competitions that required payment.

Each story that I wrote seemed better than the last, and I became more adept at editing, especially with cutting to a wordcount. My prose became tighter and sharper and I believe that this has helped now that I've returned to novel writing. It didn't matter that the stories weren't winning any prizes, what mattered to me was that I produced something that I was happy to submit within the deadline. This was my measure of success. It was all a bit of a blur and I didn't even keep count, but if I go back to my 'Competitions and Submissions' folder on my laptop I find twenty stories completed over the May-November period with the highest concentration being four in June.

One of the June stories was accepted, and this was published in February 2007 in an anthology entitled Seven Days. This is extremely exciting, and worth all of the effort of writing the other stories. Now I not only have a publication in book form, but a portfolio of other stories just waiting to be snapped up by eager editors.

Wondering what to do with these stories, I decided that I’d make some of them available online as a public portfolio. I’ve entered them into various online competitions and this has brought more feedback and more motivation to continue writing. See my Writing Portfolio for links to these and other writing. I still have some unpublished stories that I’m saving for the right moment, and still writing more, though not at such a rate of knots as I have other writing going on (broadcast scripts, poetry, again see my Portfolio).

To anyone feeling flattened by lack of motivation, I would recommend submit, submit, submit. There are plenty of places to send your work, in the UK and in the States. Don't be shy or self-conscious, just keep on plugging at it. I go by the law of averages, sooner or later you're going to hit lucky. If like me you work best under pressure, then enter these competitions, if not then many magazines have open submissions policies. Check it out. It's going to be worth it in the end. Without my summer of shorts I wouldn't have burst through the quagmire of self-doubt, and I wouldn't have got published.