The Rejection Diaries

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Bath Novel Award, Fiona Mitchell

The Bath Novel judges have started releasing ‘teasers’ for their short list – and many, like myself, will doubtless be desperately persuading ourselves that our plots somehow resemble those described below. Try as I might, however, it can’t be done. Another competition entry bites the dust…

There is, however, much to be learned. My book isn’t actually bad (it’s been long listed in one competition and came third in another), but clearly it isn’t good enough. My opening page in particular lacks the impact to stand out against competition like this: 

• ‘Stranded time-traveller misfit goes on the run.’
• ‘Two families bound together in the aftermath of tragedy.’
• ‘Young care leavers are re-homed in a remote Cornish resort.’
• ‘Spare and tenderly written story of siblings reunited in rural Ireland.’
• ‘Tightly written tale of a divided community. Interesting, vivid characters with exceptional sense of place.’
• ‘A summer fling, an affair and an unexplained death during a family holiday.’

There is a pattern here: strong and well-written characters combined with drama and a vivid sense of place. Something that reaches out from the page and grabs the reader.

I wish the writers of the above books every success and am enjoying a frisson of vicarious pleasure at imaging how they must feel at the moment. Well done to every one of them.

A member of ninevoices recently drew our attention to an excellent post by Fiona Mitchell on what can be learned from rejection. She wrote amusingly of her ‘Folder of Doom‘, containing a sheaf of rejections, but listed five positive things that she’d learned from them. Well worth studying. So I’m not about to make a drama out of not getting on this short list. Nobody died. Nobody took out a big pointy sword and threatened me with it. I simply need to give my opening a bit (maybe even a lot) more welly and keep my sense of humour handy. And there are plenty of other competitions out there.

 

Check out Fiona Mitchell’s encouraging piece here: https://fionamitchell.org/2018/05/09/5-types-of-rejection-letters-and-what-you-can-learn-from-them/

The Rejection Diaries

No member of ninevoices is allowed to have a short story lurking in a drawer without eight strident voices demanding it be entered into something. In consequence, a tale of mine that began life (and was rejected) as Party Girl was revised and given a tighter ending and a more intriguing title: Twenty-Six Little Bones. The tweaking must have helped, since I’ve been thrilled to learn this week that it has not only been shortlisted in the 2017 Hysteria Writing Competition, but will go into their anthology at the year end.
This highlights the fine line there can be between a win (or placing) and a thumbs down. Your cherished but rejected story might be teetering on the brink of success, so never give up on it. Revise, polish, revise, then polish again. And maybe devise a more titillating title. All this confirms what we already know: writing is hard graft and there is no substitute for persistence. For re-visiting, rewriting and polishing our work.
The Hysteria competition was, incidentally, included in my monthly Competitions to Enter post, back in August. Perhaps my experience will encourage you to take a close look at our Competitions to Enter in November, due soon, to see what opportunities it might give you.

The Rejection Diaries

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Flash 500 Novel Opening Short List

This hasn’t been a particularly dazzling year for my writing. A short story that I dared to think promising hasn’t been placed, despite being entered in two separate competitions. The best it could do was to scrape onto a shortlist in Writer’s Forum.  Another competition entry – to the Flash 500 Novel Opening Competition, run by Crooked Cat Publications – made it onto their long list, but subsequently failed to reach the short list.

This is sadly familiar territory, but following the advice of the eminently sensible Christopher Fielden  (to grab whatever advice on your writing that you can) I took up the offer of a critique offered as an optional extra with Flash 500 – and was SO glad I did so. Lorraine Mace not only gave me valuable advice about my sadly inept synopsis, but said some incredibly positive things about the opening of my novel, remarking that if she’d browsed through my first pages in a bookshop, she’d have been at the till buying the book! I seriously think I’d rather have that comment of hers than the £500 earmarked for the winner.

Her words of encouragement will certainly keep me going. The short story will be dusted off and sent elsewhere, and the 80,000-words that I’ve completed of the novel should have edged up to my target of 95,000-words by Christmas. I will also work on improving those opening pages until a whole panel of judges are impressed by them, rather than a single reader.

Rejection? Just another step on the way to publication.

A helpful rejection

Some ‘generic’ rejections are a lot more constructive (and encouraging) than others. Mslexia Magazine’s recent letter to writers not longlisted for their children’s novel competition was, I thought, particularly helpful and (with their permission) I’ve reproduced it below. In case you don’t have time to read the whole thing, I was particularly struck by their saying that many more women than men give up submitting their writing after just one rejection:

Our judges commented on how challenging they found the challenge of whittling down submissions for the longlist. ‘My “yes” pile kept growing and there were far too few on my “no” and “maybe” piles, so I ended up having to eliminate a lot of good material,’ one told us. ‘There were so many “nearly there” manuscripts,’ said another. ‘So I hope those that weren’t longlisted won’t feel too dejected.’

Most submissions featured female protagonists; often feisty, or geeky, or bullied or with some kind of superpower – sometimes all four! One judge suggested a more complicated central character might have been more effective. And those written in first person, with a strong and idiosyncratic voice, often grabbed their attention. Where a boy was the main character, he was usually ‘rambunctious’; so, again, a bit more complication would have been welcome.

Another comment concerned the depiction of magical, fantasy or dystopian characters. Our judges wanted to stress that it’s not enough for someone to have a strange name and a special power – a believable personality is far more important.

Many of the novels were set in the familiar terrain of school or home. Where the story was also set in the past, or the future, this worked well. But by and large the more unusual settings were the ones that stood out, especially those in which the setting was integral to the plot. ‘Historical stories tended to be better explored, more original,’ was one comment. ‘I liked it when the writer seemed knowledgeable about the strange world they were creating,’ was another. These comments suggest to me that a light rewrite with a fresh setting might be something you might consider.

A lot of novels began with a prologue, which often consisted of a dramatic and intriguing scene. Unfortunately this was sometimes followed by a rather ponderous Chapter One, occasionally with a different set of characters – so ‘the momentum of the beginning was lost’. Our judges wondered whether the writers could eliminate the prologue altogether and substitute a first chapter that catapulted the reader immediately into the story. ‘Mysterious openings worked from the word go,’ one told us.

I am so sorry not to be able to give you specific feedback on your entry, but I hope that these comments, general as they are, will be of some help if you decide to redraft your novel – which I hope you will. I’m sure you’re aware that the vast majority of published novels are the result of a huge amount of rewriting – changes to the order, the tense, the narrative voice, the main protagonist… What feels like a finished draft is often just the beginning.

That’s not to underestimate what a huge achievement it is to complete an entire manuscript – a survey we conducted a few years ago found that only 24 per cent of women who start a novel have managed to finish it. So we salute you for getting this far.

We also found out recently, in another survey, that many women – many more than men – give up submitting their writing after just one rejection. I do hope that this letter won’t have that effect on you, and that you will see it as an almost inevitable part of the writer’s life. And that, when the dust has settled, you will let us see some more of your work.

I’m not going to Hull this year

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Black comedy, Christopher Fielden, Dark humour, Office parties, Santa Claus, To Hull & Back Competition

Hats off to all those shortlisted and longlisted in the 2016 To Hull and Back competition! See http://www.christopherfielden.com/short-story-competition/results-2016.php for those fortunate names – and for their photos and biographies if you follow the links.

I scanned down the list hurriedly in order (I confess) to see if my name was there. It wasn’t. Then I looked again, for any other of the ninevoices. Alas, no. So my rather nasty story, about a bully at an appalling office party who gets his comeuppance when dressed as Santa Claus in our local shopping centre, will have to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.

This comp has got quite a few mentions on this blog. We must wait until next month to learn the winners. And then there’ll be an anthology – last year’s included some remarkably quirky stories. (‘Quirky’ is an understatement for many of them … ) In Chris Fielden’s words, “there needs to be some element of humour within the story, even if it’s just one brief amusing moment. Black comedy and dark humour is fine, as is fluffy kitten mainstream amusement.”

Well done the eventual winners.

The Rejection Diaries

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Bridport Novel Competition

The Bridport Novel Competition published their longlist this past weekend – and I wasn’t on it! I must confess to being full of hope, not of winning, but of maybe scraping through as the bottom manuscript in the hopeful pile.

It was not to be. But congratulations to those talented people who succeeded. Their names will doubtless be on everyone’s lips in the next year or two. I don’t begrudge them their current happiness. (Well, not VERY much…)

What I’ve gained from the process is greatly increased productivity. With a deadline in view, I discovered I could (fairly easily) tap out something like fifteen hundred words on a good morning. Keep that up, and my book will be finished by the end of the summer. That’s a result in itself.

I guess you also need an intriguing title. Below are the longlisted novels (the author names haven’t yet been revealed) to whet your appetites:

44 Stones

Zazou and Rebecca

Lights out at the Electric

Mirror, Mirror

How to Save a Brain

I Wanna Be Your Dog

Still

Far Beyond Those Woods

The Commune by the Park

The Unbelonging of Taksheel Chaturveydi

Starfish

Half of You

The Letters of Junius

Out of the Forest

SUPERficial (sic)

The Sydney Harbour Suicides

Bellevue

Transgressions

Orphaned Leaves

If Hamlet was a Girl

 

 

 

 

The Rejection Diaries

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BBC Scriptwriting, Connie Booth, Fawlty Towers, John Cleese, LitRejection

This is usually the place for my personal crash-and-burn stories. I’m actually preparing for an imminent rejection from the Bridport Novel Competition people, since they publish their long list at the weekend.

HOWEVER (by courtesy of the LitRejection twitterfeed – which I hadn’t the expertise to transport into this blog) I give below the text of a rather historic BBC email:

To:  Comedy Scriptwriter, Light Entertainment, Television
Subject: FAWLTY TOWERS by John Cleese and Connie Booth

I’m afraid I thought this one as dire as its title.

It’s a kind of ‘Prince of Denmark’ of the hotel world.  A collection of cliches (sic) and stock characters which I can’t see being anything but a disaster.

Gives one’s writer’s heart a warm glow, doesn’t it?