Design James Walker.
Today has been a day of short stories. Not written ones, I haven’t done one of those for a while. No, today has been about other people’s short stories, two competitions in fact. The first involves the Saturday Night, Sunday Morning competition we ran as part of the Alan Sillitoe Memorial Day. You would think that drafting up a brief, promoting it and allocating a judge would be pretty straight forward but it is far more complicated than that as I am learning. Without going into details I’d like to share a few pieces of advice so that if you attempt something similar, you can keep the drama to the page. Firstly, if this is run by a voluntary group then be clear about specific roles and criteria. For example; where are entries sent to, who collates them, have you consulted the judges as to whether they need a shortlist or if they will read the lot, paper copies or electronic, what timeframe are you working to, who consults losers and winners, whose monitoring submissions and keeping up promotion if standards or quantity drop, etc. Yer get meh? As we say in Notts.
There’s loads of other stuff you need to think about but you’ll have to figure that out for yourself. On the bright side, problems can always magically turn into solutions. This doesn’t come from ‘thinking outside the box’ or ‘creative thinking’, it results from pure panic when you realise what a monstrous time-consuming beast you’ve just created. So let’s say you expected ten entries and you got five hundred, what to do? Get them libraries involved, you know the ones that the government want to close down, they can enlist the services of local reading groups to sift through them. Or perhaps some students on a local MA need some practical experience of the literature scene to bolster those CVs. Then there’s other local organisations like the Nottingham Writers’ Studio who may gain added experience to include in future funding bids, to build into a mentoring scheme. Etc. Writers use words to alter situations and moods, we can be magical too.
The other short story experience today is a new branch of the LeftLion writing arm. We have started a ‘creative writing’ feature and hope to have one illustrated story published online per month. This could potentially lead to a ‘best of’ collection – if we ever find the time to go for funding, or we may decide to publish the magazine monthly in which case we will finally have space to welcome fiction onboard. Then of course there is the new website which should go live pretty soon and will have a dedicated page for literature. So we’ll be looking for audio files as well as making little films of those wonderful stories you’ve just started to send through. But sorting all of these things out will take time – as will reading your entries, but it will happen, trust me. I don’t sleep. We don’t sleep. It’s the first rule of Write Club.
And so in offering to give up even more waking hours to reading I have also found a solution for a problem I’ve been thinking about for a long time. We need to change the name of our spoken word event ‘Scribal Gathering’ because someone has already bagged it. And here it is, unintentionally falling onto my laptop. Write Club.
The first rule of Write Club is quality spoken word events. (repeat three times on stage with a menacing grimace). By the way, this scrap will take place at the Nottingham Contemporary on April 2nd as a warm-up to that feisty word minstrel Kate Tempest. So get yer gloves on and come and ‘ave a go if yer think yer hard enough.