This will be my last post here for a while as our competition closes in two weeks and then it’s a busy reading period until the summer when we announce our longlist, shortlist and prize winners.
But today I’ve been thinking about not just why we write stories but some of the reasons we might feel what’s the point?

I’ve just come back from seeing The Human Body, by Lucy Kirkwood. I’ve loved her work previously, especially Chimerica which was utterly brilliant, but her latest ended up irritating me, the second act in particular. It’s always interesting to try and figure out why something jars or doesn’t land right, especially when you usually admire the writer, so I bought the script and read it and I will read it again. I’d thought at first it was because the slightly tragic but generic, sentimental love story took centre stage, away from the (to me more interesting) political theme (the founding of the NHS against a background of both apathy and antagonism, from doctors to housewives) and then, mulling on it later, I wondered if that was exactly her point and my frustration with the play was deliberately provoked. The focus on personal feelings/reactions/responsibilities drew attention away from a desperate need for reconstruction/equality/government and I was (rightly) annoyed by that. Continue reading →

We’re delighted to publish BSSA team member Jane Riekemann’s interview with award-winning author, screen writer, broadcaster and Booker Prize judge, Sara Collins, who won the Costa First Novel Award in 2019 with her best-selling novel  The Confessions of Frannie Langton. Sara’s brilliant short story, ‘Say You’ was a third-prize BSSA winner, way back in 2016 and two other of her superb stories have been shortlisted in our Awards; ‘Light Like You’, also in 2016 and ‘Lilith’ in 2015. The stories are published in our 2015 and 2016 anthologies which you can buy from Amazon. In this fascinating interview, among other things, Sara tells us about adapting her novel for the TV, her current writing projects and daily writing rituals and gives great advice for anyone thinking of entering BSSA 2024, which closes three weeks today, Monday, April 15th. Continue reading →

As short story writers, where do you find the best places to send your work? Social media platforms, the magazines and journals you read and competition listing sites of which there are many. Listing sites do seem to come and go and, when I was posting our award this year, I noticed that many we’ve used over the decade have folded. One that seems here to stay is Christopher Fielden’s website where you’ll find the BSSA listed under ‘Prestigious &/or Big Prize Competitions’
In addition to running the site, Chris is an award-winning and Amazon best-selling author, editor and blogger and runs his own short humorous story competition ‘To Hull and Back’ (more about that later). His short story collection, Book of the Bloodless Volume 1: Alternative Afterlives was published by Victorina Press and was a finalist in the ‘Fiction: Short Story’ category of the International Book Awards, sponsored by American Book Fest. It also won Author Shout’s Cover Wars. He also publishes thousands of writers’ stories in support of literary charities via his flash fiction writing challenges. Via the writing challenges, Chris compiled and edited a world record-breaking book. The 81 Words Flash Fiction Anthology  that contains 1,000 stories written by 1,000 authors. It won Best Anthology in the 2022 Saboteur Awards. He also manages to find time to run an email newsletter  that goes out once or twice a month. It’s currently free to sign up and gives regular details of writing competitions, guest posts by experienced writers / editors, details of new books that have been published by subscribers, and lots of other writing-related content.
I met Chris at an anthology launch in the days before Covid, when we held in-person events at Mr B’s Emporium in Bath and am pleased he was happy to share with us, in the following interview, his thoughts on short stories and those parts of the writing industry he knows so well. Continue reading →

I’ve been with groups of writers many a time in a social situation when someone laughs and says, what you just said would make a great story title. Sometimes people do write the story that goes with what they said in conversation. Often they don’t. But as well as finding titles in conversations with friends, it is fun to read titles in published short story collections for inspiration. Continue reading →

Once upon a time I told my dad I was going to be a writer and he bought me one of those Dummy Guides. It had a bright yellow cover and practically guaranteed I’d produce a bestseller, fast. After a few weeks Dad asked how I was getting on? Had I worked my way through the chapters yet?

Reader, I had not.

He shook his head sadly. Dad was an autodidact who’d taught himself to play the piano, speak three languages and produce a passable watercolour. Surely anyone willing to apply themselves, could learn the ‘rules’ of writing? It’s a question I think about quite a lot, especially as a teacher and mentor. Wouldn’t it be great, the theory goes, if there was a map to follow, a class to take, a video to watch, some instructions we could stick to that would get the story written!

Well, no, actually! Isn’t that the fear of AI? Where would the personality, individuality, oddity and beautiful imperfection be in a creative work written by rote? Following the rules can certainly polish a piece of writing, but can they make it sing? Continue reading →

I was going to call this Pic Fic but, on checking, found that’s already a registered title for an X -Files archive and this blog is definitely not that. I’m not sure if there’s an actual genre for stories inspired by paintings but certainly the visual arts have rippled across literary sands, occasionally making big waves as the works of a particular artist or school have popped up over the years.

Vermeer and Dutch paintings of the 17^th Century became a focus in the 90s through the novels of Tracy Chevalier and Deborah Moggach. Girl with a Pearl Earring  (the title of Chevalier’s book as well as Vermeer’s painting) mixes a smidgen of fact with a rich imagining of the identity of the enigmatic subject and her relationship with her master Vermeer. It was a commercial success globally and predictably a film followed. In Moggach’s Tulip Fever  the characters are fictional but the subject is real: tulip mania, which saw the price of tulip bulbs soar until the speculative bubble market crashed. This is the backdrop to the story but Moggach’s inspiration for her tale of love, beauty and the payback for greed was a painting by a very minor 17^th Century Dutch artist that she bought at auction and, in the narratives of both Chevalier and Moggach, the world of dark Dutch interiors is illuminated on so many levels.

Continue reading →

I walked for several hours today, in the surprisingly warm sunshine, because I couldn’t settle and I’d spent hours doing admin jobs and rearranging my notes. It’s been a worryingly recurrent feature of the last few months, and I’ve tried to confront it with my usual tricks (star charts, targets, treats, journaling, reading, essay writing, editing etc) but to no avail. Creatively I feel paralysed, the world overwhelming, my expectations of myself and what I should/could/ought to be writing derailing me before I begin.

I set off on my usual route but when I came to the first fork in the path, this way or that, I stopped and thought about what would make me feel better, rather than just move forward on auto pilot or along a predetermined route. None of these paths are new (sorry Robert Frost!), but today I looked for where there was more sunlight, more snowdrops. I chose woodland tracks over tarmac because I wanted to be amongst trees. I walked up a hill to get the view. As I walked I let each previous choice inform the next one and the next until, almost by accident, I left my gloom behind and felt invigorated. Continue reading →

In the eleven years we’ve been running the Bath Short Story Award, we’ve been treated to over 12,000 stories on a wide range of themes and genres, presented in a variety of styles. Our anthologies have showcased some 210 of those wonderful stories, many of which have induced tears of sadness, recognition and laughter. But in all the years I’ve been part of the BSSA reading team I can’t remember coming across an overtly political story, say, one just about Brexit, party political shenanigans, or the reality of a protest march.

Of course, stories that deal with topics such as war, refugees, pandemics, homelessness, crime and the climate, for example, will naturally be political in the broad sense and will probably be richer and more textured for it, but one specifically pinning its colours to a ‘party political’ or an issue-specific mast?

Perhaps, there’s a dearth of such stories? And then you come across ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th, 1983’ by the late Hilary Mantel. It was the title story in Mantel’s second collection, published in 2014; she has been more highly acclaimed for her long historical narratives but the collection, as a whole, bears her trademark style of framing moments in disquieting prose. In 2015 it was selected for the BBC National Short Story Award and generated a huge amount of publicity, with the Daily Mail calling it ‘warped’ and ‘a distasteful fantasy.’ The subject matter was certainly shocking as the highly divisive former Prime Minister had only been dead for a year when the story was first published. Continue reading →