Category: reviewer

How To Win A Writing Competition

~ JacciGoodingAuthor ~ 1 Comment

Or at least stand a chance. Having been the curator and administrator of several writing competitions over the last few years I understand what comp organisers mean when they ask for ‘new voices’ or ‘new ideas’ or ‘fresh perspectives’. What they are politely saying is please don’t send us any more stories on death, divorce, dementia, aged parents, losing children, losing your mind, nostalgia, what you did at school, how the old days were better and absolutely nothing that involves the wearing of rose tinted glasses. Sometimes the old adage write what you know is not necessarily a good thing. The list above is of course a list of life events but does everyone need to read about yours? Or if they do, can you write it in a different way? Can you step out of your comfort zone and write something set in the future for example? Or, if you are sci-fi writer, write an historical piece?

If you enter a lot of competitions but seem to get nowhere, there has to be a reason, right? Do you read previous winners and runner-ups? Can you see the difference in what the winner has written and your entry? Do you have a favourite piece of your own work that you enter in many comps but get nowhere with? Dare I say there has to be a reason for that. I know, brutal, and after all, one judge’s opinion is just that, their opinion – because they didn’t choose you doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t like your work, they just liked someone else’s more. But there is a good chance that it failed at the first hurdle because the subject chosen was commonplace and there could be fifteen other entries written on the same subject. Do not be so in love with your story that you can’t see its flaws.

A long time ago I read a winning short story about a wake. Oh here we go, I thought. Same old same old. But no. The setting was Belfast in the 1970s and a bomb exploded just outside where the wake was taking place. Consequently nearly all the action of the story took place from a child’s perspective as they hid from the chaos underneath the bier. The story stuck with me because I pre-judged it as being the usual death/funeral story with the usual mourners with no doubt a stereotypical end. And it wasn’t any of those. If the writer is still out there and reading this – your work worked! I can still recall it now, many years later.

I’ve entered a few competitions in the last few months and not reached any longlists, let alone short lists. But it always serves as a good shake to my writing. Simply, write better! I know what I must do.

Tips!

1. Always read previous winners. How many include the life events mentioned earlier? If none, and yours does, maybe think twice before sending it in.

2. Buy anthologies – good ones. Professional writers’ groups and small publishers will print their winning collections and they are a good place to start.

3. Spare a thought for the organisers, readers and judges receiving your work. They are not therapists! Yes, your work can be emotive, but don’t slip into self-indulgence or melancholy.

4. Choose a subject different from your usual choice. Used to be a teacher so feel compelled to write a school-based story? Or a dentist, just itching to write about customers and their teeth? Stand back, take a deep breath, and walk the other way.

5. Ask for beta readers. Ask me, if you like!

6. Here’s a prompt for you: You are in Peru. You see a small artefact on the ground and pick it up. What happens next? 800-1000 words; no life events!

7. Check out unconscious bias – you might surprise yourself.

A Landscape with Birds by Beth Brooke

~ JacciGoodingAuthor

This wonderful collection of short verse from author Beth Brooke is poignant, clever, and expressive. Beth brings the landscape to us, presses us to acknowledge we are linked to it, part of it, draws out of us our unacknowledged place in the world today. Simple lines can hit the mark and make us think of places we would rather be. In Ploughing, April 2020, we are on the sidelines watching a farmer plough a field, seagulls diving toward the turned earth. Yet in an instant we leave the rich winter field, those seagulls transporting us from the bucolic to the ocean in six simple words. We are there, we can feel the salt on our skin and the tang in the air because we know what it’s like to miss the sea, somehow we understand that intangible desire the sea arouses in us to be near it. And it is the much maligned seagull that takes us there.

Beautiful imagery, like a classic film or an assortment of incredible art, plays throughout this collection, pushing to the forefront birds and their landscape, from the opening poem Jackdaws (and you know it’s true!) to the feathery, flitting, daring nonchalance of sparrows and the oh so sad kauai o’o bird. Every poem demands a second read – sometimes a third – and returning to the book a month or so later, you’ll find yourself wanting to read them all again at once.

We Take Our Son to University is a lovely lovely poem, so neat, so gentle, touching. And you can see that red kite, skimming across the page as you read the words. In Betrayal, the flight of ravens articulates the words that cannot be said; they speak for anyone wounded by duplicity.

            If you like birds, nature, the landscape all tied together in beautiful poetry, then I would recommend a read of this book. It’s not a big book, coming in at only 31 pages, but each poem is patiently observed and crafted. An absolute gem.

A Landscape with Birds is published by Hedgehog Poetry Press, Bristol.

http://www.hedgehogpress.co.uk

Review and Author Interview

~ JacciGoodingAuthor ~ 1 Comment

Mya Roberts, Song of the Sea

Mya is a Guernsey author and the sea has always been an essential part of her life. Last year she completed her first novel, Song of the Sea, and will be appearing at this year’s Guernsey Literary Festival. I met Mya many years ago on a writing course and it was there she read the first few captivating chapters of what was to become Song. The first question then Mya, and of course the most obvious, what is your book about?

My story starts on Guernsey in the Channel Islands in the 1700s. My main character, Elise, has a pioneering spirit and is about to leave the only home she’s known in order to join her fisherman husband, Thomas, in Nova Scotia. We follow Elise across the Atlantic Ocean and into the arms of her husband and her life as a fisherman’s wife. Her adventures exceed her expectations, the splendours and extremes of her environment are beyond her imaginings; her trials and fears challenge her courage to the full.

That sounds a very interesting story – where did the idea come from?

Some years ago, my husband Ian and I were exploring Nova Scotia, Canada, in a 32ft recreational vehicle we named ‘The Beast”. On The Beast’s aerial we proudly displayed a little Guernsey flag. The area is spectacular, the campgrounds were a delight and the people were warm and generous. We were having the time of our lives. In our travels we discovered Isle Madame and on Isle Madame we came upon a harbour named Arichat. We saw two cannon pointing out towards a small, unimposing island. A plaque read, “Jersey traders, who were French-speaking British citizens, settled on Jerseyman Island off Arichat in the late 18th century. The island was later attacked by American privateer John Paul Jones, forcing the inhabitants to move to Isle Madame.”  I’m a writer. Need I say more?

Indeed not! What great inspiration. And of course coming from an area where the sea is part of everyday life, did you find it easy to start writing Song?

We do possess some of the most beautiful coastline you can imagine, though on a much smaller and in general less rugged scale than in that part of Canada. I was born by the sea, and have lived with the sea most of my life. To my mind the sea does speak and the range of its voice is extraordinary. 

How quickly did your main character form?

Elise and Thomas grew slowly and surely as the story developed. Marcel was more of a wild card. Each of my three main characters surprised and challenged me as they evolved. It was rather like producing and at the same time acting in play. You start with a story outline, which develops and you enrich your characters, and they enrich your story and your story enriches them.

How much research did you do?

It was endless and I loved it. Like a treasure hunter I sifted and pried. I went to Jersey to investigate the archives, and I interviewed experts, and, best of all, returned to Nova Scotia (and the 32ft Beast) to follow Elise’s journey, make notes, take photos, and undertake more interviews. It was difficult to leave great quantities of that fascinating material on the ‘cutting room floor’. I had to accept that my reader may not be as enthralled with the drying and salting process of fish as I had become.

Well Mya, you might be surprised there! Many authors of historical fiction read works by other historical fiction writers – who knows what one author can learn from another.  Once you’d done all your research and gathered all your lovely facts, how did the editing go? Do you see it as a necessary evil or something you enjoy?

A bit of each. The torment of a scene or a chapter that doesn’t work is deeply frustrating. The sculpting of a book when it blossoms on the page is a joyful thing.

Did you let the book stew – say, leave it for a month and then come back to it to edit?

It stewed to the point of extinction many times.

Well I’m glad you persevered! Now, tell us about that gorgeous cover.

The cover started life rather Beige. A beige sea. I suspect my publishers were testing the ground by offering me a starting point. I was afraid they’d transform Elise into a double D, bodice ripping, lip-pouting glamour girl. Instead they offered that vivid startling sea, the glorious sunset and the galleon. It was love at first sight.

And so from cover to publishing – how are you publishing this book and why?

I have enough rejection slips to paper at least one wall. But I realise now that Song was rejected for good reasons. I dried my tears, stopped sulking, then started over. Only better.  Cranthorpe Millner accepted Song just weeks before Christmas 2021, and only weeks after I’d just completed major surgery followed by a gruelling course of Chemo. The offer was a good sign for the future, perhaps?  After all, I had to be around for book signings, didn’t I?

You most certainly do. Do you have a strategy for finding reviewers?

I gave my publishers a list of possibilities and they took it from there. A handful are in Canada, and they are very enthusiastic and supportive. I think I’m going to be big in Canada.

If you could have been the original author of any book, what would it be?

Something amazingly clever. Something that looks like it flowed from the  author’s brain to their keyboard in one smooth, electric stream: All The Light We Cannot See, Where the Crawdads Sing, JK writing as Robert Galbraith, or a Hillary Mantel, perhaps.

And finally…

What advice would you give to your younger self?

You’re worth more than you think, more talented than you feel and cleverer than you believe: now go for it.

Song of the Sea is the account of Elise’s journey – real and metaphorical – from her sheltered upbringing in Guernsey to Nova Scotia, Canada in 1755. Once reunited with her fisherman husband Thomas, she faces the unforgiving realities of life as a fisherman’s wife. Before she departs her home of Guernsey however, we see glimpses of the life she is leaving behind, of her gift as a herbalist that could end up seeing her hanged for witchcraft, a gift her grandmother made her promise to keep secret. As Elise’s new life unfolds in Nova Scotia there are distant rumblings of war, the threat of how her and her husband Thomas’s life could change forever. There is love, and loss, but also achievement and triumph as we travel with Elise to a time and place about which very little was known. She experiences motherhood, brutal war, and endures the horror of attack on her husband, and hopes in time to nurse him back to some sort of health. Throughout, Elise has to call upon strength she did not know she had. As her fortunes twist and turn Elise becomes a respected herbalist, a teacher and more. She becomes an independent woman in an age of great turmoil when women had very little choice over the lives they led.

We see her grow, and age, embracing one last challenge before her time is done, at one with the song of sea.

Reading Writing Reading Some More

~ JacciGoodingAuthor

A little late to the party with this one, (15 years), I picked up John Banville’s The Sea recently because I wanted to know what made a Man Booker prize winner. And I wasn’t disappointed. A phenomenal read, it is so easy to relate to, to understand, to actually read, with language that is both lyrical and straightforward at the same time. I have to confess, this is the only book that actually took my breath away as I read the last page.

             Mourning the recent loss of his wife, protagonist Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he and his parents would stay during the summer holidays – in the cheaper holiday accommodation on offer – and where he met wealthier brother and sister Chloe and Miles. As we journey with Max in real time on his road of grief, we are also given retrospective insights into his growing pains as a boy, of lessons learned but not understood until many years later, of the slow yet steady crossing of the threshold from boyhood to early manhood. In The Sea Banville gives us intelligent observation, humour, grief, understanding. Oh, I realised as I finished the book, that’s what makes a Mann Booker prizewinner. Breathtaking. So if you get the chance, give it a read.

            Another couple of books that have kept my sanity levels from dropping off the scale have been And Nothing Remains and Somewhere This Way, both short story collections from The Fiction Desk.  Both books have a lively mix of stories, each author’s voice coming through loud and clear, but IMHO, Thirteen Wedding Dresses in And Nothing Remains is by far the quirkiest, sweetest, most unusual story, written by Scots author Douglas Bruton. As it’s a short, I won’t give too much away, other than to say a wedding dress has gone astray before the big day… 

            All this reading has perhaps returned to me the urge to write again. Who else out there found themselves floundering at the keyboard as every go-get ‘em idea withered and died before the end of the sentence? Who else has taken the opportunity to look through all those WIPs and bin the Doesn’t Stand A Chance & I Have NO Idea Why I Thought It Would files? Although.. maybe… they were just ideas…prompts if you will… perhaps I should retrieve them after all… 

            But for now, I shall take pot luck and browse the hundreds of books on the shelves of charity shops and see what else I can find. I know. A Man Booker winner ending up on a charity shop bookshelf. Kinda puts everything into perspective doesn’t it.