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Page Seventeen 2015 Competition Shortlists

August 31, 2015

It’s been months in the making, but we’re finally closing in on the release of Issue 12 of page seventeen. And how do we always kick off this last leg? Why, by announcing the competition shortlists of course!

The entries here have been selected from all the competition short story and poetry entries to feature as the competition shortlists in Issue 12. We won’t reveal the winners and runners-up until the issue launch event at the end of the year – details will be posted here closer to the date, so watch this space!

So without further adieu, here are the shortlists, listed by author surname:

Short Story

‘Cold Currents’ by Susi Fox
‘Rooms Without Doors’ by Willa Hogarth
‘Ships of the Desert’ by Carmel Lillis
‘Macalister’ by Paul Mill
‘Louis’ by Edie Matsuda

Poetry

‘The Glass Reverie’ by Virginia Danahay
‘Oral Sex’ by Judith Green
‘Ironing’ by Jenny Macaulay
‘Alice and Edward’ by Janine McGuinness
‘In Defence of the Bodhran’ by Leonie Needham
‘Beginning with a Given Line’ by Rodney Williams

Firstly, congratulations to everyone listed here – all these stories will be available to read in the new issue. To everyone who wasn’t able to make the list this year, I’m sorry we couldn’t make room for everyone in what was a tight race – keep faith in your stories and your own writing, and opportunities will always present themselves.

In the meantime, spread the word! Issue 12 is coming and it promises to be a great collection of prose and poetry, a real something-for-everyone package. I hope you can all celebrate it with us.

Beau Hillier | Editor, page seventeen

First Impressions

August 13, 2015

So you’re going to submit to a publisher, and have – according to the publisher’s guidelines – only a single chapter to hook them.

This first chapter is pivotal because it will be the publisher’s first impression of your book. You don’t make a great first impression, that will be it. They’ll either dismiss you, or you’ll be struggling to win their favour.

So how do you make your first chapter as tight and sparkling as possible?

Here’s some things to look out for …

Clichés
Cliches are phrases like, ‘In the blink of an eye’, ‘As quick as a flash’, ‘left me with a broken heart’, etc. They have become so overused in today’s vernacular that they’ve lost all meaning.

When you need to describe something – like the suddenness of something happening, or somebody dealing with the pain of a relationship breaking up – look for original ways to communicate what’s going on.

Overwriting
Writing is a field where less is more. Don’t take pages delving into a character’s emotional state, or describing a setting. If you’re trying to build up something awesome, don’t think spending one thousand words on it is going to make it any more awesome. All that happens here is you’re diluting what’s going on.

Use specific details and impress the reader with how distinct they are.

Predictability
It’s harder and harder to be original nowadays. Most stories have been done, so people know what to expect. For instance, the formula of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl live happily ever after isn’t going to cut it anymore. Now, more than ever, it’s become a case of how you go about your story. If it’s predictable, the reader will grow bored and switch off.

Bad Spelling and Grammar
It’s astonishing that so many writers won’t run a simple spellcheck. Reread your work and iron out issues with grammar. Get other people to read it.

It’s very hard to get into a piece of writing when you stumble on spelling errors or grammar issues. They jar the reader out of the writing, and shake their confidence in the author moving forward.

Repetition
As with overwriting, be wary of repeating yourself. If you’re describing a storm, you don’t have to tell us every sentence that thunder’s booming, lightning’s flashing, the wind’s howling, and the protagonist is cold. We get it. There’s a storm. Pounding it into us doesn’t make the storm any more ferocious.

Or the repetition might happen over pages (or chapters). On page one, you might explain how distraught the protagonist is. On page three, you might do it again. You’re not writing an infomercial, so we don’t need to be told the same thing over and over.

Trying to introduce too much
You don’t have to try to supply the reader everything they need to know at once. This can often result in lengthy digressions, or just so much happening that it’s impossible to keep track of it all. Take your time. Be patient. Seed (and foreshadow) the information as required.

Using Metaphors and Similies that have no relationship to anything
Going with something like, ‘His anger rose, like my dog’s when the neighbour’s cat comes into the yard’, isn’t exactly evocative for a reader.

Overdramatic speech attributors
The attributors are things like ‘said’ and ‘asked’. There’s a school of thought that’s all you should use, and if your dialogue is written well enough, the reader will infer the tone. Some like to use adverbs, e.g. ‘he said angrily’. Some look for a stronger attributor, e.g. ‘he demanded’. Just don’t overdo. E.g. ‘he obliterated’.

Story mightn’t begin in the right place
If you’re going to run a race, or play some sport, you’ll usually do some warm-up exercises to get you ready. Writing often involves the same principle. When we’re starting something new, we’re often feeling our way into the story. Many people struggle with openings. Because of this, some of the early prose – whether it’s a matter of sentences, paragraphs, or pages – is just warm-up before we launch into the real thing.

Look at what you’re writing, and ask whether it’s starting at the right place, or whether it was just warming up before you started at some later point in earnest.

Fluency of dialogue
Dialogue doesn’t reflect real life. In real life, we stutter, we ‘um’, we begin a sentence and then cut-off midway and go in another direction. If we tried to do that in a book, it’d be frustrating for the reader.

Book/story dialogue is the essence of how we speak in real life, and yet tries to capture all the nuances and affectations.

For some bizarre reason, a lot of writers introduce dialogue with ‘Well’. Most times it can be cut. Writers also lose contractions. We’d say ‘don’t’ and ‘can’t’ in real life, but in writing it becomes ‘do not’ and ‘cannot’. These are just a couple of things that happen in written dialogue.

Read your dialogue aloud. Emote it. Act it. Find out how natural it is.

Looping
Many writers introduce the premise, e.g. a woman walking at night to a rendezvous. Mysterious? Exciting? But then they loop back to what brought the woman to this point, and give us her back-story – she’s unhappily married, and after dinner she said she was going out with friends but is actually meeting her lover, but she’s feeling guilt because yesterday her husband spontaneously brought her flowers, which is the first bit of affection he’s shown her in years … Um, do you remember where we came in? Be wary of how much exposition you’re offering to try set up your premise. Either start your story back where all this exposition began and show the action unfolding as it’s happening, or seed it in subtly.

They’re just some things to consider when submitting.

You have one chance to make a first impression.

Do all you can to make it the best first impression you can!

The Evolving Idea II: Adaptation

July 30, 2015

Last year I waxed lyrical on how ideas can evolve and change over time, even within a single short story that can become something totally different to its original intention. I was mostly talking about a single project going through its own individual course of development, but the natural progression from that is the idea being recrafted into a totally different medium. Adaptation. Sometimes it’s a dirty word; other times it’s the salvation of an idea previously struggling to find its groove.

Adaptation can be, to put it eloquently, a real bugger. Movies built from an existing story or IP are the main subject of criticism here, but changes in material for a new medium can run up and down the chain. The idea can come from anywhere and can become anything. Les Miserables started as a book, then became a musical that had more influence on the 2012 movie adaptation than the actual source material.

The 2012 film is an interesting point of discussion as far as adaptation is concerned, because it begs the question of whether it was an appropriately adapted project. The result was a musical crammed into a feature film format – many critics rated it well, which is hardly a surprise, but the reaction was more polarised among regular moviegoers.

And then there’s content that just will never fit into a certain medium, no matter how much you try to fit it in there. There’s never been a proper video game made of Les Miserables, just as most video games don’t make good movies (especially if they’re directed by Uwe Boll). A computer game can have a good story, although it’s often a mess to take that story to a new medium and keep it compelling.

But let’s narrow this down a little to talk about adaptation in different forms of writing – it may seem smaller in scale, but the same issue of compatibility arises.

The difficulty in jumping between prose and poetry is self-evident – the two forms of writing require completely different disciplines and priorities. What works well as a story may work as a poem if stripped down to its core ideas and emotions and retold accordingly, and vice versa if the right details are filled out into compelling narrative with story and momentum. Either way it’s a tough exercise.

And even across different forms of prose, it’s difficult to take an idea and transmogrify it into something else. Often the concept seems pretty simple. Take the fairly common practise of turning a chapter from a manuscript into a self-enclosed short story. Chapters are supposed to have their own internal mechanics and structure, so clean up around the edges and it should make a solid short story, right?

Wrong – initially, at least. It’s been done with success many times before, but even if it’s the first chapter being tapered at the end to add a more complete ending, it’s not a clean process. The cracks will show. Ideas that were meant to be seeds for later discussion will become pointless distractions. And the ending will likely be unsatisfying because there was meant to be more content to fill out the conflict and mystery evident in this episode of a greater story. Open endings are all well and good, but not if there are still loose ends that don’t close the natural arc of the story and the events that play out as a consequence of the inciting actions.

There are lots of anecdotes about short stories being expanded into novel-length publications. And hey, it works. But only if it’s a storyline constructed for the novel length. Rarely does the short story just get slapped on as a first chapter. The entire narrative is deconstructed and grown from scratch.

It’s also not as clear-cut to jump between fiction and non-fiction. Sure, the two mediums often blur together, but the point of fiction is to entertain and the point of non-fiction is to educate and enlighten (yes, that’s a gross oversimplification, but every ‘rule of writing’ carries at least some contrivance). So the focus needs to change, even if just a little. Non-fiction is typically bound by design to require more of a ‘point’ than fiction, which can exist clearly to entertain only.

So with all these problems and incompatibilities, is it a bad idea to try to take an idea in one form and adapt it into another mode of expression? Of course not.

I do it a lot myself, as a prose writer. A couple of dead manuscripts from my university days have been dismembered into a suite of short-form projects. One finally made it to publication in the latest issue of the online journal Communion. But only after a massive renovation that saw the original chapter stripped down to half its length and the remainder practically rewritten. The rest of my attempts there are pretty much dead ends – for now, at least. Like with any evolving idea, sometimes it just needs time to find the right mode of expression – and the enthusiasm to make the idea fit the medium, instead of the other way around.

Never be shy about experimenting with ideas, exploring different modes of expression to find the best way to carry a specific story or concept. But adapting something for a new medium is about as much work as writing from scratch. It’ll be laborious, but it might be worth it.

Beau Hillier | Editor, page seventeen

Take Some Pride in Your Work

July 9, 2015

I have a headache.

A pain, like somebody thrust a spear through my right eye and forced it out the back of my head.

This pain is not a migraine.

It’s not a tumour.

It has no medical-based cause.

It comes from reading stuff sent out into the world before it’s ready.

It’s tantamount to sending a six-month-old foetus out into the world and expecting it to thrive.

You see, you’re only as brilliant as your reader’s capacity to understand you.

So your premise could be mind-blowing. It could, in fact, be the most brilliant idea that’s ever been conceived in the history of brilliant ideas. But if you send it out half-cooked, poorly articulated, or badly punctuated, then it means nothing.

Any narrative is a guide providing the reader a tour through the story. The tour itself might force the reader to think, might be disturbing or thought-provoking, it might be hard to digest and you might even wish you weren’t taking it, but at no time should it be incomprehensible.

Your writing’s not going to win readers over on potential. Some people just don’t get this. They think their writing can be horrifically punctuated and the grammar appalling, but that their idea is so mind-blowingly brilliant, that they themselves are so mind-blowingly brilliant, that it doesn’t matter, we’ll forgive them, love them, and love what they’ve written.

Uh uh.

The majority of readers will not persevere with writing that grandly suffers any (let alone all) of these flaws. What it really demonstrates is that the author hasn’t bothered to put all due care into their work, so why should we bother investing our time into it? Why should we read something that’s going to require constant deciphering? Life’s too short.

And taking this further, why am I going to invest again in you as an author? If anything, in a situation like this, you’re only damaging your own reputation – your own brand. If you’re running a business, and releasing literature of this quality as a promotional tool, you’re not likely to win clients, because you’re writing is going to be a reflection of you – if this is how you write, how do you conduct business?

If you’re a baker, would you leave your pastries on muddy shelves? If you’re a carpenter, would you sell chairs with uneven legs? If you’re a plumber, would the pipes you fix constantly leak, or pump water to the wrong places? If you’ve answered ‘no’ to these questions, why would you treat your writing any differently?

The advent of e-publishing has made it is easy for people to self-publish. Digital publishing has made self-publishing cheap and simple. But just because publishing has become so accessible isn’t a reason to not take the utmost care with what you’re releasing. You need to polish it to a standard that people won’t be complaining about punctuation and/or grammar, and will thus be free to focus purely on content.

You have one chance to make a first impression. Screw it up, and many won’t give you a second chance. Those who do will be harder to win over, waiting for you to trip up.

Take some pride in your work.

Don’t send it out in the world until its ready.

LZ.

An Update on P17 #12

June 25, 2015

Page seventeen’s submission window for the 2015 issue is still ticking along and taking submissions (as well as waiting for yours if you haven’t submitted yet!). But in the meantime, we have a couple of announcements on the new issue … don’t worry, nothing bad. You might even nod approvingly.

Firstly, it didn’t seem fair that this submission window ended up a little shorter than previous years, so the deadline will be extended. Both general and competition submissions will now be accepted for Issue 12 until Friday 17 July.

Secondly, Issue 12 will be the first issue to be made available exclusively as an e-edition. This means greater exposure for included writers, and greater ease of purchase for anyone wanting a copy. Considering that the main purpose of page seventeen has always been to promote new writers, it’s a natural move to prioritise internet-based exposure and make the issue more readily available to anyone with an internet connection.

We will still be having a ‘launch’ that will have details announced closer to the date, but look out for it closer to the end of the year.

For anyone who still hasn’t entered for inclusion in the latest issue or a chance to earn a prize in the competition categories, you’ve gotten an extension but don’t dally! Be confident in your own work, and be bold. Write something that demands attention – that screams to be heard. Write something that declares you to the world. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry – we want to see you, and we want to hear your voice in the lines on the page.

Best of luck all who have already entered, and to all who are planning to submit to page seventeen. Maybe you can help make Issue 12 the best yet. I’m looking forward to hearing your voices.

Beau Hillier | Editor, page seventeen