Tips for Writing Winning Short Stories

Writing Wining Short Stories

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:14:26 +0100

One of the keys to entering – and winning - short story competitions is taking your time to find out who the judges are, finding out what they write, and looking at previous competition winners work to see if there is a theme to the type of stories that win.

When I entered the RTE/Poolbeg ‘Do the Write Thing’ short story competition, I very deliberately set out to write a character-centered story. Poolbeg are renowned for publishing women’s fiction – they launched the careers of some o...

How Short Stories Can Lead to Bigger Things

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 22:25:14 +0100

Finally, when I’d exhausted all possible outlets, I accepted the truth. My first novel, Turning Heads, wasn’t going to be published. Even now, five years later, typing these words leaves me cold. I loved that book - still do – but unfortunately it just wasn’t good enough.

With acceptance came realisation. I needed fresh material, another project. Very tentatively, I created a new Word file and typed two words – Chapter One! I had a new story in my head, one I was very excited about...

How to Make Your Own Luck with Short Stories

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 22:21:34 +0100

Over the years, I’ve won various awards for individual short stories: among them, the Hennessy Award (the year that Ian McEwan was a judge); the Francis MacManus Award; and more than a dozen miscellaneous awards for short fiction in England and Ireland. But it was the Irish women’s magazines that blessed me with the awards that served me best. My first computer, an Amstrad 6128, was a prize from IT magazine for a Mills and Boon type story. Then Image magazine twice presented me wi...