Are YOU Britain’s next chick lit STAR? says the blurb for this contest, which is being run by Novelicious along with Avon (HarperCollins) and Books and the City (Simon & Schuster UK).

It’s free to enter (so nothing to lose) and you only need to submit 3,000 words (and thankfully they don’t demand a pesky synopsis either). Closing date is 3rd April 2012.

There will be two winners:

The People’s Choice Award Winner - the top twenty entries as judged by the Novelicious team will be put to a public vote in June. The entrant with the most votes will win a full manuscript critique with Avon Commissioning Editor Caroline Hogg over tea and cake in their London offices. This will be your chance to get feedback on your novel and ask any questions you have about publishing. Plus the winner gets a host of other goodies (listed on the competition website here).

The Books and The City Choice Award Winner - will be chosen from the top twenty entries by the Fiction Editorial department at Simon & Schuster UK. Their choice will win a full manuscript feedback from the editorial team at Simon & Schuster plus author mentoring and meeting with Sunday Times Bestselling author of RSVP Helen Warner, along with a couple of other things listed here.

I do have one reservation about this competition and that is the public vote for The People’s Choice Award Winner. From my own, and other people’s, experience I know that these votes can turn into a popularity contest rather than an objective judgement on the writing. The person with the most friends on Facebook or access to a large email address list tends to do better because they can encourage all their contacts to vote for them. But maybe this downside is compensated for by the other winner being chosen by Simon and Schuster. And the prizes are attractive.

Before you decide whether to enter have a look at the competition website where there is an opportunity to ask questions about exactly what is required & learn from what others have asked. Also have a look at Carol’s blog post where she emphasises the importance of one of the rules which states that your work must not have been previously published – including on a blog.

Finally, to show that real people do win competitions like this, have a look at Patsy Collins’ reaction to winning a novel writing competition – and getting her book published as the prize! Well done, Patsy!

In short stories it isn’t always necessary to know all the details about a character, for example it may be enough to know that the heroine is a grandmother and not her exact age or her previous profession (if any). But when attempting to write something longer, facts like these become important so that the writer can concoct a suitable back story for the lady, so it may be useful to know in what decade she was a teenager, at what age she left full-time education and whether or not she became a working mother. The life which the grandmother lived before the novel opens will have a bearing on how she acts and reacts within the story – so both the author and the reader need to know what went before.

Some writers advocate filling in a questionnaire about each character, covering physical appearance, hobbies, education etc (a sample questionnaire can be found on Stewart Ferris’ website here). This is a useful way of keeping track of facts such as eye colour and height (easy things to forget as you get deeper into the plot). 

However, I find it very hard to just jot down a sentence or two about the big things such as a character’s personality, attitude to life and motivation.  In order to get know a protagonist I have to start writing scenes from his or her point of view. It’s only as I write that I realise what I don’t know about a character and therefore what I need to put into their back story to make them act in a certain way in the present. This means I don’t do much planning before I write because I have to write in order to create the characters.

Some writers cut pictures from magazines and use these as prompts for their characters. But this only covers their physical appearance – so I’m not sure it would help me.

Nicola Morgan advocates interviewing your main character (her list of suggested questions is here and they are pretty searching!) Most of these I couldn’t have answered when I initially decided on the people I needed in my story but now I’ve written a bit from each point of view I’m going to pretend I’m a chat show host and start asking questions.

What about you – how do you develop your characters?

It’s written in an easy to read friendly tone and does what it says on the tin - it explains the different techniques required for writing full length fiction compared to short stories.

When I attempted NaNoWriMo a couple of years ago I fell into the trap of thinking that to fill the pages of a novel it was necessary to pack it with action. I had something new happening all the time. Della explains that this is not the case, what is needed is more depth – i.e. more characterisation, detail of setting etc. She uses examples from her own novels and stories, including a synopsis (great to see a successful synopsis ‘in the flesh’!) and a chart showing how to keep track of what’s happening in each chapter (one of those things that you see and then say – that’s obvious so why didn’t I think of it? Sometimes we just need these things pointing out). 

Della also explains the concept of a theme within a novel. Something that I’ve always thought sounds very literary and highbrow but in fact it’s something that many writers do unconsciously. Theme boils down to the focus of your novel and, according to Della, if you can identify that theme then both plotting and editing become easier.

The only downside to this book is that it’s not available on Kindle and incidentally, it’s written in such a way that a novelist could use it as an aid to moving to shorter fiction.

Now all I have to do is put all this brilliant advice into practice…

The competition has an open theme. All ages are eligible and it closes on 27th June 2012. There is a maximum word count of 1,500.

 The prizes are £60, £30, £15 and there is also a £25 donation (likely to increase if a good response to this competition is received) available to either a UK charity or voluntary group.  Entrants can nominate their favourite charity or voluntary group with every entry. Names will be put into a hat and one drawn at the close of the competition. Full details about this charitable donation are here.

The entry fee is £3 but additional entries by the same person attract a discount.

The competition judge is Keith ‘Carrot Nappers’ Large.  His humorous fantasy ‘The Tisbech Terror’ won first prize in Freelance Market News’s 2010 short story competition, along with a piece of reverse creativity, adapting his stage play ‘Whine Fever’ into a short story to win the 2011 PCS/Words national competition. You can read his biography on the competition website.

The full details for the competition are here.

So why not have a go and increase that charitable donation fund!

Before I started using the Kindle I was a bit worried that it wouldn’t feel like a book and I wouldn’t be able to get engrossed in the story. But it was no problem, the page turning becomes automatic and the fact that it’s an electronic device doesn’t reduce the enjoyment. A colleague at work said he was so involved in what he was reading that he totally forgot it wasn’t a book and reached his hand over to turn the page manually.   

The only thing I find frustrating is the choice of font sizes. I was hoping to find one that would let me read without wearing my glasses but my ideal size seems to fall in the middle of two choices – so I still put the specs on.

So far I’ve worked my way electronically through A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton, How to Make £10 in 10 Minutes by Linda Lewis and I’ve just started Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (am I the only person never to have seen the film or read the book?).

Now, I’m wondering about downloading Write a Great Synopsis by Nicola Morgan. I think I’m going to need it to stand any chance of getting an entry ready for the Good Housekeeping Novel Writing Competition - it’s not going too well at the moment! Is anybody else struggling?

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reason we particularly like these pieces but it seems no-one else does! Recently I resurrected a couple of stories which had unsuccessfully done the rounds but which I thought had a strong idea behind them.

The first was a ‘twist in the tail’ about a fortune-teller and was based on an anecdote that a work colleague told me. It was rejected by both Take a Break Fiction Feast and The Weekly News. I managed to distill the essence of the story down into just 60 words and emailed it off  to Real People, which publishes a 60 word story each week and pays £25. And finally my fortune-teller tale found a home! It was published a couple of weeks ago and now I feel that I can stop fretting over that ‘favourite’ and move on.

Similarly, another story, set partly in the early 1980s and partly in the present day, had flopped in a couple of competitions and had been rejected by Woman’s Weekly. It then also got turned down by My Weekly – but this time with a few words about why it wasn’t quite right. I took notice of the comments, reworked the story and sent it off yet again – this time to People’s Friend. This week I had an email from one of the People’s Friend fiction team saying that they liked the story, but also listing a number of changes that would be necessary before it could be considered for the magazine.  So now I’m editing the story yet again and crossing my fingers that when I re-submit it, People’s Friend will say ‘Yes’ and finally give my story a home.

So if you’ve written something you really love but can’t seem to get it accepted anywhere – keep trying. Persistance can pay!

Brian David from the CheerReader website has asked me to give their quarterly short story competitions a mention – and they want stories that will make the reader laugh.

The theme for each competition is – anything, as long as it’s funny. 100 Euros is the prize on offer for the winner in each of the 4 competitions. The winner plus commended stories will be published on the website.

The maximum word count is 1500 and the entry fee is 5 Euros (payable via PayPal).  The closing dates are March 15th 2012, June 15th 2012, September 15 th 2012 and December 15th 2012. Winners will be announced 2 weeks after each closing date.

There are plenty of stories on the website to give you an idea of what goes down well with the organisers. Have a look here.

The full competition details are here.

Cover via Amazon

I was one of the many who received a Kindle for Christmas and one of the first books I downloaded was Linda Lewis’ new book How To Make £10 in Ten Minutes. Linda is a prolific Womag writer, competition judge, columnist etc.

Her book is short and to the point. It gives useful advice on how to find the material that the weekly women’s magazines (and to a lesser extent other publications) thrive on. For instance, lots of magazines pay for Tips that either save money or make life easier – but how do you find tips to submit? Linda explains.

I was tempted by the book because you can download the first chapter for free, which I did. After reading it, I decided it was worth paying 89p to read the rest. Now all I need is one successful submission following Linda’s advice and I’ll be quids in! 

By the way, did anyone else see the bit in the news that said around 20% of those who received a Kindle for Christmas haven’t used it? In contrast, only 9% of iPads have remained unused – probably because you don’t buy someone an iPad ‘on spec’. If I was spending all that money I’d want to be sure that it was something the recipient actually wanted!

Can you guess what the most unused present was? Smellies and toiletries.

Read the full story here.

Therefore we should all be able to create something for the Final Chapters Writing Competition, organised by Dying Matters  which works to raise awareness of dying, death and bereavement.

The competition is free to enter and is offering prizes of £200, £100 and £50 for 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively plus highly commended certificates. All entries will also be considered for publication in either print form or online.

The closing date is 31 March 2012 and the winners will be announced during Dying Matters Awareness Week, 14-20 May 2012.

Entries can be prose (up to 2,500 words) or poetry (up to 40 lines) and each person can submit up to 3 entries by email or post.

The Dying Matters website says – “The judges will be looking for original writing in which the author’s feelings and thoughts about the end of life have been crafted into a succinct piece of work that attracts the reader’s attention and retains their interest”. I wasn’t sure whether this meant that they were looking for an account of a true experience or whether fiction would be acceptable so I contacted the organisers. Joe Meredith replied and indicated that either fact or fiction would be suitable entries for the competition. 

Please read the full terms and conditions here before entering.

Image via Wikipedia

Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

The meaning is:

Buffalo buffalo (i.e. buffalo that live in Buffalo) buffalo (i.e a verb meaning to intimidate or fight) Buffalo buffalo (i.e. buffalo that live in Buffalo).

This is also explained here and a longer more complicated version is here.  One day this knowledge might make you the winner of a pub quiz!

Whilst we’re on the subject of short pieces of writing, here are a couple of flash fiction competitions:

• Early Works Press are offering £75 first prize plus two runners-up prizes of £10 for a 100-word story. Entry is £3.50 and the closing date is 31/8/2012. Full details here.
• Multi-Story want 600 words and offer prizes of £300, £100 and £50 for an entry fee of £5 (or £8 for 2 stories).  It’s an open theme and the closing date is 29th February 2012. Full details are here.