Thinking of entering our short story competition?

Short story competition prizesYou’ve seen the prizes, you’re read the rules, and you’re raring to go. Right?

(If you haven’t seen the prizes or read the rules, here’s where to look.)

Well. we want to give you as much help as we can with writing your story. For instance:

1) Over on the Glengoyne Blog, we’re publising weekly short stories and tips, like these top five pointers from Clio Gray.

2) Bloody Scotland co-founder Lin Anderson is blogging “a series of writing tips I wish people had told me” in partnership with Gerard Bianco here  and here.

Effective beginnings need to do three things

  • The chief of these is to get the story going and show what kind of story it’s going to be and the tone you’ll use to tell it.
  • The second is to introduce and categorise the protagonist
  • The third is to engage the reader’s interest in reading on. (They have to want to turn the page)

A beginning can do more than this i.e. establish a mood, a setting, a norm. But it should always do the first three. The most economical way of handling these three jobs is to find a way of doing all three at once using a scene. Why? Because a story is a character in action. You reveal the character by what they do in a situation.

Not to be missed – click here to visit Lin’s blog.

3) And Gordon Brown is about to publish a short story in weekly chunks of 250 words on Glengoyne’s site! We’ll let you know the moment it starts.

So…

No excuses. Get reading, get writing, get entering… and good luck!