Dr Samuel Johnson on Writing

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1, A thousand words a day?, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Dr Samuel Johnson, Procrastination, Writing Targets

“A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.”

Dr Samuel Johnson, March 1750

Struggling to write those 1,000 words a day? Or even half a dozen sentences? Dr Samuel Johnson has a lesson for us all, on the days when we are tempted to make excuses for writing nothing at all.

Imagine things Czech or Slovak …

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British Czech & Slovak Association, Czech, Freedom, Me-Too, Slivovice, Slovak

The closing date for the British Czech & Slovak Association’s 2022 writing competition has been extended.  It is now midnight on Sunday July 31.  So that gives you and your writerly friends and relatives another month to come up with 2,000 words that will interest, amuse, irritate, educate or otherwise entertain the eminent judges. £400 lies the other side of those eminent judges – plus publication in the British Czech & Slovak Review. The runner-up gets £150 (plus publication).

This year’s suggested (but not compulsory) theme is Freedom – in any aspect.  The interpretation is yours.  Personal freedom, freedom in relationships, the freedom of nations, democratic freedoms, or just the ending of lockdown?  You choose.

The 2021 competition brought in some impressive creative writing, including such gems as:

An entertaining account of a Scot’s postgraduate year in Czechoslovakia in 1972, which included a wedding missed because he was drinking slivovice to celebrate the release from prison of the father of a hitchhiker he had picked up en route.

A topical entry on the Me-Too theme that took us to a trial of a celebrity accused of sexual assault, with the simultaneous thoughts of the judge and the two victims.

A moving account of a young Englishwoman’s visit to Slovakia for her Slovak father’s funeral. (This won a runner-up prize.)

You can feature here!   Fiction or fact – either is welcome.  What is essential is that all entries must deal with either (1) the links between Britain and the lands now comprising the Slovak and Czech Republics, at any time in history, or (2) describing society in the Republics since 1989.  Topics can include, for example, history, politics, sport, the sciences, economics, the arts or literature. 

Entry is free.  Submissions are invited from individuals of any age, nationality or educational background.  Entrants do not need to be members of the BCSA.

Entries should be submitted by post to the BCSA Prize Administrator, 24 Ferndale, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN2 3NS, England, or by e-mail to prize@bcsa.co.uk.  The closing date is now midnight on July 31 2022.

The submission guidelines can be seen on the BCSA website at https://www.bcsa.co.uk/2022-bcsa-writing-competition/ , or on application to the BCSA Prize Administrator at the addresses given above.

Creative Writing Competitions to Enter in February

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Christmas Love Story Competition, Crime Writers Association Margery Allingham Short Story Competition, Debut Dagger Award, Fish Flash Fiction Prize, Spread the Word 2021 Life Writing Prize, The Globe Soup Winter 2020 Flash Fiction Competition, The Scottish Arts Club Short Story Competition, Writers' & Artists' Short Story Competition 2021

Why not distract yourself by entering one of the following competitions:-

The Spread the Word 2021 Life Writing Prize is inviting entries for original, unpublished life writing up to 5,000 words from unagented UK writers. Entries may be a standalone piece or an extract from a longer piece – but must be based on the author’s personal experience and must not be fiction. The first prize is £1,500, plus an Arvon course, a writing mentor, two years’ membership of the Royal Society of Literature and an optional development meeting with an agent or editor. Two runners-up will each receive £500, a writing mentor and an optional agent or editor meeting. The top twelve will be published online and in a booklet. Entry is FREE, and the deadline is 1 February. Details: http://www.spreadtheword.org.uk

Writers’ & Artists’ Short Story Competition 2021 2,000 words on any theme. The prize is a place on an Arvon residential writing course, plus publication on the site. Entry is FREE, but you must register at their website to do so.Deadline 12 February. Details: http://www.writersandartists.co.uk/competitions

The Penguin Michael Joseph Christmas Love Story Competition. This competition is to give new writers from the UK and the Republic of Ireland the opportunity to have their novel published in the run-up to Christmas 2022, with the winner receiving a contract with Penguin Michael Joseph and the opportunity to ‘connect with an agent’. Send a Christmas Love Story pitch of no more than 200 words, plus 1,000 words of your manuscript. Check out full entry details at: https://www.penguin.co.uk/company/publishers/michael-joseph/penguin-michael-joseph-christmas-love-story. Deadline 14 February.

The Globe Soup Winter 2020 Flash Fiction Competition is looking for an 800-word short story featuring a secret location. Writers entering the competition will be sent details when they have paid their entry fee and all entries must be set in that location. Globe Soup is a travel website, but stories do not need to feature travel. The winning entry will receive £1,000 and the entry fee is £5. Closing date: 11 February Details: http://www.globesoup.net

Spotlight First Novel Competition. A one-page synopsis plus the first page of an unpublished novel. Prizes: mentoring package. Entry fee: £16. Closing date: 14 February. Details: http://www.adventuresinfiction.co.uk

Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger Award for crime novels: first 3,000 words plus a synopsis of up to 1,000 words. Prizes: £500. Entry fee: £36. Closing date: 26 February. Details: http://www.thecwa.co.uk

Crime Writers Association Margery Allingham Short Story Competition for stories up to 3,500 words fitting Allingham’s definition of a mystery. Prizes: £500, two passes to CrimeFest 2022. Entry fee: £12. Closing date 26 February. Details: http://www.thecwa.co.uk/ShortStory/rules.html

Fish Publishing Flash Fiction competition. Send up to 300 words on any theme. Prizes: 1,000 Euros; 300 Euros; an on-line writing course. 10 entrants to be published in the annual Fish Anthology. Entry fee: 14 Euros. Deadline 28 February. Details: http://www.fishpublishing.com

The Scottish Arts Club Short Story Competition wants entries of original, unpublished short fiction up to 2,000-words. Entries may be on any topic and do not have to be set in Scotland or have Scottish themes. The first prize in this international competition from the Scottish Arts Trust is £1,000, and there are second and third prizes of £500 and £250. The Isobel Lodge Award will be given to the best story by an unpublished writer born, living or studying in Scotland. Winning stories will be published in the next Scottish Arts Trust Story Awards anthology. The entry fee is £10 per story, and the closing date 28 February. Details: http://www.storyawards.org/shortstoryaward

Please note that because of our current situation, some competitions have been obliged to make changes to their arrangements/entry dates/prizes – so double-checking everything before entry is especially important.

We know reading is good for you, and believe that putting words down on paper can also be therapeutic, so why not either dust off an old manuscript or compose something completely new?

Good Luck!

The Writer’s Life

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Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell

Suffering from Writer’s Block? Take comfort from the following – from the biography of a well-known writer – about her own struggles to put pen to paper.

“…it was not every day that she could write. Sometimes weeks or even months elapsed before she felt she had anything to add to that portion of her story already written.”

Some writers can regularly produce a thousand words a day, but they are in the minority and most of us need to acknowledge there is no shame in putting a project aside until ready to take it up again.

Nor did the above writer’s pain end with lack of inspiration. Even after her work was finally completed to her satisfaction, she bewailed the inevitable disappointment of rejection letters:

“…often not over-courteously worded…and none alleging any distinct reasons for rejection.”

We have all been there. Rejection is bad enough, but if we must be rejected we do yearn for constructive feedback: were the characters weak or was the prose too florid? Did the manuscript need to be cut back, or developed further? Was there anything about it that they liked?

Instead we are all too familiar with:

“I am sorry we don’t feel 100 per cent certain we could sell your book to publishers.”

Or the almost-dismissive:

“If you haven’t heard within 8 weeks, assume not interested.”

Writing is not for the faint-hearted. Sometimes even one’s nearest and dearest reveals lukewarm belief in your writing talent. Here is a conversation between our lady writer and her father. She must surely have been tempted to either flounce out of the room, or throw something at the insensitive man:

Papa, I have been writing a book.

Have you, my dear?

Yes, and I want you to read it.

I am afraid it will try my eyes too much.

But it is not in manuscript: it is printed.

My dear! You have never thought of the expense it will be! It will be almost sure to be a loss, for how can you get a book sold? No one knows you or your name.

If you have not already guessed, our author was Charlotte Brontë and the biographer was Mrs Gaskell. The book in question was Jane Eyre.

Maggie in Historia magazine

Our Maggie, winner of Historia Magazine’s Unpublished Novel Award, is featured in this month’s edition of Historia.

Read the article here…

9 June 2020 By Maggie Richell-Davies

How I won an award and stopped being an unpublished novelist

Maggie Richell-Davies is the winner of the first HWA/Sharpe Books Unpublished Novel Award. She tells Historia about her now-published novel, The Servant, and her journey to publication by Sharpe Books: “Be persistent,” she advises. “But above all find competitions that put your story under the nose of someone who loves the past.”

Congrats to The Servant

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18th century, London, squalor

The Servant – the book we hope to be reading soon!  Many congratulations to ninevoice Maggie Richell Davies, who has won the Sharpe Books/Historical Writers’ Association Unpublished Award 2020.

The other eight ninevoices have heard this book progress (and change form) for some time now and we know how good it is.  We’re in 1765: and, to quote the HWA website, “Fourteen-year-old Hannah must go where she’s sent, despite her instincts screaming danger. Why does disgraced aristocrat William Chalke have a locked room in his house? What’s sold at the auctions taking place behind closed doors?”   The story evokes 18^th century London and its squalor and brutality and also its redeeming features. 

It’s clear from the descriptions of the short- and longlisted novels how strong a field the judges had to choose from.  Our congratulations to all those authors in those lists!  See http://www.historiamag.com/hwa-sharpe-books-unpublished-novel-award-winner/

Make a resolution

At ninevoices’ annual Christmas lunch we make writing resolutions for the coming year. Well, resolutions, like rules, are made to be broken as we find the following year.
However, that said, we shouldn’t be discouraged to start again. If your aim is to enter writing competitions in 2020, and perhaps you had a go at our 2019 Summer Competition, may we pass on some thoughts?
We settled down on a November day to discuss the stories that had received the most votes from our individual readings. Skipper was there as an impartial observer. What he learnt was that we did not agree. It has been said before we have varied reactions and likes.
The overwhelming consensus, however, was that we are lucky to belong to a group. Simple inconsistencies, spelling and grammar mistakes and typos are seized upon by our sharp-eyed colleagues.
So if you are setting out on the writer’s lonely path, we would persuade you to find the company of others to work with you. These others, and here we are unanimous, do not include your family and close friends.
A Happy New Year and good luck with your writing in 2020.

Oxford delights: Jilly Cooper and Barbara Pym

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19 magazine, Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Georgette Heyer, Harriet, Jane and Prudence, Jane Austen, Jilly Cooper, Lisa & Co, Nancy Mitford, Oxford, Petticoat magazine, Virago

What’s the connection between Jilly Cooper and Barbara Pym apart from them being quintessentially English and writing splendidly funny novels?

Jilly Cooper’s introduction to the 2007 Virago edition of Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence, first published in 1953, tells the story of how she borrowed the novel quite by chance from a library and fell in love with it. ‘I shamefully lied to the librarians that I had lost it, paying a 3s 6d fine … over the years, as Barbara Pym replaced Nancy Mitford, Georgette Heyer, even Jane Austen, as my most loved author, I devoured all her books, but Jane and Prudence remains my favourite.’

Jilly Cooper was therefore the perfect and altogether delightful guest at a magnificent tea in Oxford, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Barbara Pym Society, as part of the Society’s weekend conference featuring Jane and Prudence.  Some of those attending might never have read a Jilly Cooper novel; others like myself have delicious youthful memories of revelling in her stories serialised in magazines like 19 and Petticoat, some of which were subsequently expanded into short romantic novels named after their heroines.

It’s in Harriet, partly set in Oxford and published in 1976, that we get a rather endearing echo of a scene in Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence; in both novels young girls remark to each other that thirty sounds so old but forty must be worse… whereupon they brood silently upon this horror!

Jilly Cooper might be more famous now for her ‘bonkbuster’ novels, starting with Riders in 1985, but perhaps the older among us will always have an affectionate soft spot for the irresistible heroes and scatty/naughty/dreamy/kind-hearted/unselfconfident/innocent heroines of the early romantic novels Bella, Emily, Octavia, Prudence, Harriet, Imogen and her collection of short stories Lisa & Co, first published as Love and Other Heartaches. They offered the escapist, romantic, comfort-with-comedy reading we sometimes needed when growing up.

As Jilly Cooper wrote of her short stories in 1981 ‘I cannot pretend that these stories are literature. They are written purely to entertain… Their mood is rooted firmly in the sixties, where we all lived it up… when the young were still optimistic about marriage, and believed that God was in his Heaven if all was Mr Right with the world.’

Jilly Cooper met Barbara Pym just once – at the Hatchards Authors of the Year Party in 1979 – a wonderful memory she will always treasure. I know I will do the same after meeting Jilly Cooper.

Things I heard Simon Mawer say

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'The Glass Room', 1968, Arthropods, Czech Centre, Czechoslovakia, HG Wells, Hitchhiking, Man Booker Prize, Mendel's Dwarf, Moody Blues, Oxford, Prague Spring, RAF, Simon Mawer, Warsaw Pact, Zoology

This week I heard the author Simon Mawer speak about writing: specifically about his novel Prague Spring, but also his other Czech-based books The Glass Room and Mendel’s Dwarf. Prague Spring is set against the events in Czechoslovakia in the fateful summer of 1968, leading to the invasion by the armies of the Warsaw Pact.

Four things of writerly interest in my mind from that talk:

He was asked what effect having The Glass Room shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009 had for his career. It benefited hugely, he said, sales went right up, though not as much as if he’d won! He was easy about not actually winning that year, he assured us, though he was just a bit galled when Hilary won it again two years later …

One good thing about being a novelist, he told us, is that you can reinvent your own life. The example he gave was how in the summer of 1968 he had hitchhiked around Europe with a male friend. When in Bavaria they had discussed whether to cross into Czechoslovakia, then enjoying the best days of the Prague Spring, but had decided to go to Greece instead: a decision he had ever since regretted. In Prague Spring two of his main characters set out from England to hitchhike across Europe – a male student (as he had been) James, but this time with an attractive female companion, Ellie; and this time events lead them to cross the Iron Curtain (and thus into the story) rather than go to the Italian sun as planned.

He used more of his own direct experience in James and Ellie’s story. When he and his friend had been hitching they were given a lift by a German lady harpsichordist who interrogated him where he was studying, and when he gave the name of his Oxford college she asked if he knew a particular law professor there, whose friend she was. In Prague Spring he retells this story, with James and Ellie meeting a lady cellist who, likewise, is a friend of a don at his Oxford college.

Perhaps less commonly for novelists, Simon Mawer has a scientific background: his degree was in zoology and for many years he worked as a biology teacher. This shows in a remarkable simile in one of the extracts he read to us on Tuesday: a Russian tank lost in the streets of Prague is likened first to a Martian in HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds but then, more uniquely, to a reptile or arthropod, the muzzle of its gun being a proboscis, which “shifts back and forth, as though sniffing the air, perhaps even trying to work out where the humans have gone.” Not an image that would have occurred to those of us with English literature or history backgrounds, perhaps.

In thrillers, he reminded us (and in whodunits, come to think of it), everything that happens must be related to the plot. But life, of course, isn’t like that. Lots of things happen that don’t link up with anything else. But in a novel you can explore these, and tell them for their own sake. One bizarre episode that features in Prague Spring but is not essential to the plot is the appearance of the Moody Blues. They actually were in Prague at this time, and the day before the Russian invasion they were filmed performing on the city’s famous Charles Bridge. Their appearance in the novel adds colour and interest and tells a true story, and you’re glad it’s there, but in a thriller you’d be wondering what its significance was.

(You can see this surreal performance on YouTube – go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4_xCA4IO7U , to see these Brummies miming Nights in White Satin to adoring fans on an otherwise empty Charles Bridge for a Franco-Belgian TV programme. It’s strange to think that 24 hours later that area was busy with invading soldiers.)

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction Dept: In his interview Simon Mawer asked us to reflect on the fact that once the invasion happened, the British Embassy somehow arranged for the Moody Blues to be flown out of the country, apparently in an RAF transport plane. How was it, he asked, that in all the chaos and busyness of those events, someone managed to persuade the new Warsaw Pact controllers of the country to allow an RAF plane into Czechoslovak air space to evacuate a group of British pop singers? Would you dare put such an unlikely happening in a novel?

The interview was organised by the Czech Centre at the Czech Embassy in London. Simon was interviewed by Prague-based journalist David Vaughan, followed by a lively Q&A session with the audience.  Thanks, Czech Centre!

Prague Spring was featured on this blog at https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2018/12/10/prague-spring/ and The Glass Room at https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/the-glass-room-revisited/ . You can listen to all of Simon Mawer’s talk at https://soundcloud.com/czech-centre-london/simon-mawer-prague-spring .

Barbara Pym – more please

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Barbara Pym, Finding a Voice, Short stories

In a radio talk recorded in February 1978 and transmitted on BBC Radio 3 in April, less than two years before she died, Barbara Pym described a favourite television quiz game, where panellists were asked to guess the authorship of certain passages read out to them. ‘There were no prizes for guessing, no moving belt or desirable objects passing before their eyes, just the pleasure and satisfaction of recognising the unmistakable voice of …  whoever it might be. I think that’s the kind of immortality most authors would want – to feel that their work would be immediately recognisable as having been written by them and by nobody else. But of course it’s a lot to ask for!’

It might be, but Barbara Pym’s voice is entirely and delightfully unmistakable; it’s unlike any other author, however longingly we search. There just isn’t enough of it for us readers – if only she’d written more! Blame her publishers who rejected her seventh novel An Unsuitable Attachment in 1963. Thank goodness she went on writing during the following fourteen years of rejection – though probably not as much as she might have done…

One of the joys of Barbara Pym’s novels is the way characters reappear. They are our old friends… Here in WRITINGS is a short story written as a light-hearted tribute to Barbara Pym featuring some of them:  Tread Softly in the Ladies.