When you’ve sent away your darlings

Having spent the last 24 hours firmly glued to my 15′ screen, wrestling with my petits yeux that have gone permanently bogg-ey, I’m experiencing one of the lesser publicised parts of the creative process: Finishing.

You should feel relief, but I tend to always just feel empty and somewhat depressed. It’s rare that I finish something and feel like it has lived up to expectations. Often the (unwritten) version, still safe in my grey matter, feels like the best version, the highest version – and I can’t help feeling that I still haven’t managed to grab hold of it…

The upside is, much of what feels like rubbish now, will, in a month’s time, look much better (or at least this is the hope) and strangely enough, I’ll probably come to hate what on first writing felt like genius on tap…

The Commonwealth Short Story Comp has however been an interesting experience.

Not only do competitions force you to finish things – oh the ingenuity of having a deadline – but in this case, word economy is paramount. The trick? A story in under 600 words.

As I found, there’s not enough time to tell a real story, yet just enough to get across sense of place, time, drama…

Honestly, it’s a pretty good exercise and I one I should probably do more often. I like the challenge of grasping for every word – good training for longer pieces where it’s tempting to fluff up your word count like big squashy cushions on a sofa. It’s not unlike script writing, in that everything feels pared down, peeled back – just the bare essentials of story laid out.

It undoubtedly reinforces the classic question anyone who writes should keep in mind: how does this (event/character etc) advance the story?

I guess there’s a reason they call this business the art of ‘killing your darlings’.

Well, I’m off to rest my eyes and brave the post office… Meanwhile, feel free to add details about upcoming competitions here…