Emma Darwin's Blog, page 34

Emma Darwin's Twelve Tools [not rules] of Writing

As you'll know by now, as soon as anyone tells me a "rule" of writing, I start thinking of times when any good writer would "break" it. Whether it's Elmore Leonard's Ten or George Orwell's Six Rules that are being quoted, the fact that I admire their writing and agree with much that they say doesn't make me more inclined to keep their rules as rules. Indeed, Elmore Leonard never meant his to be taken all that seriously, and Orwell acknowledges that they're not really rules in his own Rule Six: "Break any these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

And it remains the truest rule of all - although the least helpful - that you can do anything you like, as long as you make it work. But as I go on blogging and teaching and writing, I do find that the same old questions and issues keep coming up. I also find that it's far more useful and therefore fruitful to talk about process - how you set things up so that good writing will happen - than about product - what good writing should be like. So, in a light-hearted, pre-Christmas spirit, I offer you my Twelve Tools of Writing. You'll notice that they're almost all about process, not product. Here goes.

1) Never follow a rule until you understand why someone's made it, and then treat it as advice, not law.

2) Don't write what you know: write what you like, and make us believe you know it.

3) Train your writer's ear: learn to count syllables and think rhythms; read poetry aloud; take some speech-and-drama lessons; write poetry; read your own work aloud.

4) Train your listener's ear, your nose, your tongue, your finger-tips, your body, your eyes... to sense and then recall sounds, smells, textures, balance/weight/movement, colour and form, the angles of light and the patterns of shade.

5) Do enough free-writing to discover that switch in your mind which can turn off the censor at will, and know when to switch it. Remember that nothing you write is ever wasted, even if it all gets cut in revision.

6) Whenever you do some work on your story, know what you're doing and why, do it, and then stop. Don't fiddle, hop about or get diverted.

7) Understand showing and telling, and use them both for good.

8) Never use second-hand language except deliberately, making the most of its second-hand-ness.

9) Get to grips with psychic distance, narrators and point of view, and practice all the possibilites till they're part of your toolkit.

10) Understand adverbs and adjectives and why you're so often told to cut them... and then use their power for good.

11) Learn to punctuate, to spell and to use grammar and syntax first properly and then skillfully, because only then will you be able bend them to your creative will and still keep readers reading.

12) Never write anything purely to achieve an external goal: if it won't have any value for you as writing, then don't write it. Consider ideas that come from the market place in the same receptive but critical spirit as you do any other ideas: use them if they're right for the book. Never write anything that you'll regret having spent the time on.

By any other name

I would say, with all the smugness of someone making a hard-to-top bid in Pop-Psychology Whist, that I have a particularly complicated relationship with my name, except that... I don't know anyone who doesn't. At a workshop run by Diane Samuels, she started by asking each of us to say one of our names, and something about it. And I promise you, no-one had nothing to say, from the ones who hated and feared the grandmother whose name they bear, to the ones who changed their name when they emigrated from Australia because... And yet a surprising number of aspiring writers say that they want to publish under a pseudonym, and it's not always because they're writing a roman-a-clé about high-level corruption in their local council. Often it springs, as far as I can see, from not wanting their grandmother to read the GBH scene, or their husband not wanting his mates to think he's the bloke in the sex scenes. (Which was was the ostensible reason for the stories in In Bed With... being written under our "porn star" names: we would feel less inhibited. The real reason was to get the media to start a guessing game, and the media duly obliged with several weeks of the Name Game...)

Unless you really musn't be recognised, or you have a deep-laid plan to switch to your "real" writing after learning your trade in category fiction, say, I confess that I don't really understand the desire to hide behind a pseudonym. But it is true that in putting our name on a book, and getting that book on a bookshop table, we are in some way claiming space for what we've said: what we've written is worth listening to; we are worth listening to. And we're saying that it's the best we're capable of: we can do no more. That's a very big and loud claim, and writers are often inward, private people: maybe it's easier to make that great claim, if you pretend to be someone else.

A well-known writer of women's fiction - let's call her Phillida Ashmole - said recently that she still finds it odd to be referred to in reviews and interviews purely by her surname: "What Ashmole seems to intend is that..."It's the common practice of literary criticism, of course, and to some extent journalism, but women, especially, aren't used to that label for their identity. Phillida says that it makes her feel as if the review is talking about someone else entirely - that the book was written by someone else - and I know just what she means. Indeed, Phillida also has a married surname which she uses in non-writing contexts, so that's three identies that's she's running.

Publishers need to establish a writer's name as something recognisable, so maybe we shouldn't be surprised when that simple word-image seems separate from the complicated plait of our writing and other selves. A junior diplomat in Bonn in the late 1950s was going to have to publish under a pseudonym while he was still employed by HMG, and he chose one which had a highly recognisable shape: John LeCarré. I do know that David Cornwell is called David, not John, by everyone, but I'd love to know how much he feels that John is a different entity. Ruth Rendell says that she doesn't write in a different voice as Barbara Vine: the distinction is purely about the tin, to make sure that the two different kinds of books she writes can be found by the different readers who will enjoy them. Whereas Doris Lessing, once she admitted that she had written Diary of a Good Neighbour by Jane Somers, said that she did feel that there were things and ways she could write as Jane Somers, that didn't fit into Doris Lessing's work.

Undoubtedly some aspiring writers have such terror of being judged that it seems safer to disown the work. And I know that the name-as-brand is something which many writers react to with visceral distaste, because it seems to narrow the boundaries of their creative self. But the word "brand" of course, is much older than the last 300 years of consumer society. Imagine a branding-iron with your name on it (backwards, of course) and imagine it thumping onto a newly-printed book with a hiss of smoke... and there's your name. This book is yours, and it's yours as your child is yours: it's made of your creative DNA, wherever it goes and whoever it goes to. Why wouldn't you claim it?

The common scaffold

So my agent was sitting on a delayed bus into work, and I was walking along a long and snowy road in lieu of spending half an hour digging my car out, and we were on the phone discussing the latest version of my new novel. Basically she loves it, and thinks it's very nearly ready to fly: she awarded the ending three hankies and we've settled on a great title. She even spontaneously suggested something for the ending which I'd wanted to do all along but hadn't dared. Her only reservations were about some of the new material. I've totally re-written the first chapter and written an epilogue from scratch, so these are things which have had enough passes to be okay of themselves and to apparently do the job that needed doing. But when she pointed out the ways in which they're not really working, I felt, "Doh! Of course!"

Make no mistake, these aren't technical or high-level slips: they're common mistakes in storytelling that I see all the time in the work of aspiring writers. You'd think I would have pounced on them in my own, or even not committed them in the first place. But, since I was feeling cheerful by then, instead of beating myself up I started wondering why I hadn't seen them. And the clue, I think, is in "common mistakes"; these are things which are a very natural outcome of how most of us set about writing a story.

For example, at the macro level I see many novels where the real story doesn't start till Chapter 4: Chs 1-3 are all just trundling towards the starting grid. And then there's the cry that your research is showing; historical or geographical facts are deliciously seductive to the writer, and it's by making the detail believable that we get the reader to suspend their disbelief in the story. But we're storytelling, not writing a gazeteer or a history book, and anything that doesn't serve the story is weakening it.

And at the micro level I'm sure it's why I spend so much time saying, "Don't tell and then show". Don't tell us the picnic was a disaster then write the scene: one or the other ("tell" is an important part of any writer's toolkit) but not both. But this too, arises not because the writer is careless or talentless, but because of how stories come to us. Either explicitly or intuitively the writer realises that for the purposes of character-in-action and plot the picnic will be a disaster. So they write that fact down, then set about making it happen.

So don't beat yourself up. Ch1-3 are all backstory that you needed to work out: they're process writing, not a failure or mistake, and now they've achieved their purpose and can be cut. And it was only by putting all the researched material in, that you discovered which bits become part of the story-stew and which stay floating factily on the top. And think about it: maybe the writing down of that initial "tell" about the picnic helped as a note to yourself might, getting your creative brain to focus on the picnic's main purpose in the story, and not get bogged down in what's in the hamper.

Instead of regarding such things as mistakes, maybe we should see them as a dressmaker's tacking stitches; the wooden scaffolding over which the arches of the bridge are formed; the paper collar round the soufflé dish that you take off once the gelatine has set. They're part of the fundamental nature and process of creating that thing. But since they are functional they can be hard to spot, and it might be canny to do a pass through the novel purely looking for them. But even as you do, don't scold yourself for putting them there: without them, the story might never have got built at all.

Are you a course junkie?

Over on Help! I Need a Publisher, Nicola Morgan has a characteristically sensible post about if and when it's sense to invest money in your writing. One thing, especially, that she says isn't said often enough: "I would spend far more time practising what I'd been taught than I'd spent on receiving the teaching". I've had my say about the pros and cons of writing courses in general here, but I'd suggest that what Nicola's getting at is something I touched on in that post: the possibility that you are, or could become, a writing course junkie.

I'm not talking about people who do writing courses because they love writing and want to get their work heard, but honestly admit that it takes a course to make them do any. I love photography but the day job sucks up my time not just for taking photographs but also for getting them seen. So every year or so I do a photography course, and love every minute of it, and I'm a better writer for the way that a camera makes me really look at things, and feel them... and that's as far as I go. No, I'm talking about people who are working to get published, and never seem to stop doing courses, classes and so on. There are how-to-write-book junkies too, of course and editorial report junkies, and what they all have in common, it seems to me, is that they're using the course/book/report not as a temporary, bright light shed on their own work to develop their instinct and technique, their craft and art, but as a substitute for the long haul on their own work. It's not as cart-before-horse as the wannabe writers who put all their energy into selling their work and none into writing it, but it can still get out of hand. If you keep doing writing courses, could it be that you're avoiding something? Something that a course offers you in a more palatable form than the struggle to find in yourself? Because doing a course

may be much easier than the amorphous business of trying to make your writing better on your own: however un-prescriptive it is, there's always a whiff of listed-goals-and-outcomes about a course
may structure your work on your writing - plot one week, character the next - instead of the beginning-muddle-and-end that you're drowning in at home
may make it easier to claim space for your writing from family or work and/or silence your own Inner Protestant, who tells you that it's all just self-indulgence
may shore up your own judgement in your writing, or even replace it all together with that of your tutor and fellows
may be a clearer, public marker of progress in your writing (more sophisticated courses, better fellow students), than trusting your own sense of how your writing measures up to other peoples
may boost your confidence by showing you that there are worse writers than you in the world, and equally there are tutors who think you're good
offer you what I've called conditional validation

Any of these may be a perfectly good reason for doing a course. And yes, there are things that only someone else reading your work can give you: the outside eye, the reaction of someone who doesn't know what you're trying to say. But a course can never do the writing for you. It takes time after the course and lots of writing for all these new things to become part of your writerly practice and instincts. And in any creative practice as individual as writing, in the end you do need to learn to rely on yourself: to have your own discipline, confidence, ways of working, judgement and sense of your work's value. What worries me is when I see writers who seek all these essential things from a course instead of looking for them in their own writing life and self, at home, every day, alone.

Keeping up with the Jameses

Someone reading my post In Praise of the Long Sentence recently took issue with one of my examples, taken from un(der)educated, 15-year-old Anna's narrative in The Mathematics of Love:

They were tiny of course like all the other negs I'd looked at, but different because I was looking at them in one curling strip and all still wet: clear lavender-coloured shadows and dark skies, trees and pillars and windows and faces caught click after click, coiling and springing down the film one after the other so that all the distance and time between them was pressed into plain, pale bands of almost nothing.

Would an uneducated fifteen year old really talk like this, they asked; would she be this articulate, and in a sentence this long? I had gone very carefully about the business of finding a voice for Anna which was convincing (loose grammar, no metaphors but only similes, unsophisticated ways of saying things) but could also be as vivid and evocative of both things and ideas, as I needed it to be. But this question got me thinking, because of course Anna doesn't talk like this: this is not how she would say the same thought aloud. So how can her narrative voice - as opposed to her dialogue voice - be like this, if this isn't something she would say?

It's clear enough that if a narrative is in third person, then there's some kind of implied, external narrator, and that narrator by definition has a voice - a particular way of saying things - which may or may not be the writer's natural way of saying things. How much and when that voice takes on the colour of one or more characters' voices is the whole game with free indirect style, and that flexibility is one of the great advantages of a narrative in third person. But I would argue that even in a narrative in first person, it can be very useful to think of character-narrator James, say, as a subtly different entity from the James who inhabits the same novel-world as Jilly and Jonathan. The obvious example would be where James, now older, re-tells what happened in the past: in a kind of free-indirect-first-person-style, to a greater or lesser degree (and probably variably) James bring his older ways of describing and perceiving things, to the business of evoking that younger James. But even when a narrative isn't explicitly structured like that, in telling his story James is acting almost like an external narrator, putting words to things which the James in the drama wouldn't say out loud, or not like that. Narrative is not the same as dialogue, in other words.

What we're doing with a narrative voice, it seems to me, is not unlike what a painter does, as opposed to a photographer. Failing Photoshop, a photographer can only reproduce what is actually before the camera, although they may set that up very carefully. That, it seems to me, is a bit like writing any naturalistic dialogue: the goal is to keep us in the forgetting-to-disbelieve world of the novel, in which we take these things as actually being spoken. On the other hand, a portrait painter starts from the features before her, but uses paint and technique to say something less straightforwardly reproductive, and more expressive; the painting might be less useful for meeting the right person off an aeroplane, but we don't take the swirls and bumps of paint or the non-naturalistic colours literally; their job is telling us other things (or getting us to sense them) about who this person is.

And yet we must also recognise, within that expressive paint, something essential about the face and looks. Similarly, we don't take the narrative voice as words actually spoken aloud, and it can therefore range wider than strict verisimilitude would permit, but it must also have something essential in common with the dialogue voice, or we won't be convinced that the character and the narrator are actually the same person. To keep your reader forgetting to disbelieve that this person is telling us what happened, you need to make sure that both speech and narrative spring from the same real-seeming consciousness.

Disagreeing with Kapka Kassabova (and thanks to Ian Rankin)

On Twitter, @beathhigh, otherwise known as Ian Rankin, has just tweeted a quote from the poet Kapka Kassabova on writing courses: All you can teach is the craft, not the art. Twenty minutes in, and it's been re-tweeted by two people I follow - an agent and a writer - and goodness knows how many others who I don't. So maybe I'm a lone voice in saying that although I like her poetry very much, I don't think she's entirely right. Or rather, I don't think it's as simple as that, though what I do think isn't that complicated: it only took me one more 140-character tweet: True. Though you can also teach ways of helping the art to happen if it's there and it's going to.

The quickest trip to the V&A will show you that there's no clear dividing line between craft and art, and yet we know which is which when we see it. And it seems to me that creative work becomes art when the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts: when an artefact has an effect on the viewer/listener/reader which goes beyond simply appreciating a job well and thoughtfully done.

But what puts the work over that dividing line that we can't see? I do think it's something about the individuality of the artist, expressing something that no one else can quite express, and in no other voice: both medium and message are to some extent unique to that individual. Yes, as Raymond Tallis put it recently on Radio 3, most humans are shaped by experience and trauma, and have a drive to express their shape. But their expression doesn't usually emerge as real art, whereas, says Tallis,

there's something about artists, who turn their individual wound into something which connects with the universal wound, which is the wound of being born as a creature who's going to die, as a creature who possesses life, a life, full of incomplete meanings.

Rose Tremain said in reply, "It's having the medium in which you can make something of those experiences, which is the essential step", and it's obvious that a course can help you with your medium. It can't make your sow's-ear talent for words into a silken literary purse, (though you might well end up with a very nice pigskin one) but it can teach you to handle paint, perspective, pirouettes or point-of-view. And a course can help you with an essential part of the process of making art: mining your own individuality to find meanings, whether by teaching free-writing, or providing a safe space for strange things to emerge into.

What no course can teach, if you don't have it in you, is an individuality which speaks what others need to have said. This, arguably, is a large part of any real talent, as I was exploring in The Full House and the Real Thing. What makes a work art, and greater and greater art, is that somehow the artist can root their work in their own wounds and half-completed meanings, but is also master enough of the medium to move beyond themself, to bring us comfort for our own wounds and complete the meanings for us.

All that jazz

These days, when I go to a writerly-authorly sort of do it's rare that I don't see someone I know, or meet someone who turns out to have friends in common. The book trade is a very small village, and book launches, parties and gatherings of The Society of Authors, NAWE, RNA and the like are our shop, pub, and cottage hospital. (Our school bus stop is Twitter, of course). By comparison, official networking events seem depressingly cold-blooded: the speed-dating of the human world.

But even that kind of event can bear fruit, though if you went looking for a bag of basic apples, you may find only a single, beautiful kumkwat. The Alumni Arts Network Event wasn't the most exciting evening of my life, but did I met Mary O'Neill, who directs the Centre for Early Music Performance and Research at Birmingham University. Along with specialist academics and performers, she runs workshops in early music for non-specialist musicians. We're talking about music that was written before the concert hall, the composer as fons et origo of art, the worshipful silence, the conductor in white-tie-and-tales. We're talking about music that might be danced or sung or both, that might be played one night by a pipe and tabor, the next by a choir of boys. It involves quite a lot of improvising, of making do and making-up-as-you-go-along, and that's not just necessity, it's part of the experience of both performer and audience: this music will never the same two days running.

And what Mary said was that although their idiom and instruments couldn't be more different from the originals, and although some of them can't read music so the first run-through is very rough indeed, the jazz musicians take to it like ducks to water. Whereas some players from the big London orchestras find it extraordinarily difficult. Not in the technical sense: these musicians are famous round the world for how they can sight-read a vast score and record it in the twinkling of a baton. And what they're playing is not that distant in idiom from their more usual fare: Monteverdi, say, and the staple Baroque composers. But these musicians find semi-improvising not just alien, but actively scary: they don't know what they're "supposed" to be doing; there isn't a "'right", to aim for and practise for; no "best possible" result. If you're brought up to succeed at exams and auditions, and live by melting your personality into a hundred others, this is extraordinarily stressful.

You know where I'm going with this, don't you. I've blogged before about the kind of writer (and writing teacher) who clings to the liferaft of "the rules", and gets worried  (though it may manifest as defensiveness or even aggression) when you start explaining why it's not as simple as that. It's the kind of writer who has got past the non-writer's "get it right first time" mentality that Barbara Baig pinpoints - has learnt to flip the mental switch which allows first drafts to emerge un-censored - but who still has a huge amount invested in "getting it right" in the end, on the assumption that there's a "right" to be reached.

But have you noticed how in learned jazz programmes they quote the date and place of the actual recording? And have you noticed how reading old work of your own, however un-autobiographical it is, is like reading old diaries? It was produced by you, then, in that room, in that week/month/year. If you had started or finished it at another time, in another life, it would be a different book, It might even have been a song or a dance or all that jazz.

Opening the doors

One of the odder corners of my beloved Radio 3 is the slot for really avant garde contemporary music, Hear and Now. But I love a contrast - I'm a hot chocolate sauce on cold ice cream kind of a gal - so I was lying in the bath last night, reading Georgette Heyer and listening to a programme from Cut and Splice, a festival of electronic music. The piece was as much sound art as music, really, an extraordinary plaiting and weaving of white noise and sound, the fading-in-and-out of the old Medium and Short Wave radio and so on, at once apparently random and beautifully structured. It was entirely electronic but somehow seemed acoustic, breathing memories of all sorts of natural things like whale song and rainstorms. And for a while after it had finished, every sound I heard, from the sploosh of bathwater to the flump of the duvet and the click of the light switch seemed extraordinarily clear, present and, above all, itself: the splooshiest sploosh, the flumpiest flump, the clickiest click ever. It reminded me a little of Aldous Huxley's description of his mescaline trip in The Doors of Perception.

We think of fiction as telling a story which never actually happened but might have; as making narrative sense of a random world; as making us laugh or cry or think. The empathy which novels demand seems to me a fundamental human pleasure as well as necessity: we call those who don't feel it psychopaths. And of course there are the non-fiction pleasures of documentary and understanding that you get from fiction, whether it's some history you never knew, or an experience of a life or a personality which is remote from your own. 

In Alan Bennett's delightful The Uncommon Reader, the Queen becomes a bookworm, and discovers that "books tenderise you." And have you ever come out of a concert or an art exhibition, or read some poetry, or closed the novel and found that you're... well, the only word I've come up with is "skinned". Everything is more so: you hear rhythms in ordinary speech and songs in the train squawking past your shoulder; lights arrange themselves into dances and the gleams of the wet pavement suddenly show you the moon; and your very body, as you walk, seems to say out loud who you are and what you're feeling. Everything's the same as when you went in, except that it's completely different. I'd say it's like being in love, except that love gives you tunnel vision, whereas that skinned state is a wide-angle lens with a depth of field from your eyelids to infinity.

One of the nicest things to hear, as a writer, is that your work will live with someone for a long time. And I've suggested before that you should think about what familiar pleasures you're offering your reader. But have you ever thought that the value of your work to someone might not be what they take away with them at the end, but that they leave it behind, but then live more intensely among everything else? It's an odd thought, because of course it ignores everything you put in and hoped readers would take out. And I doubt very much if there's anything you can do to make it happen for readers, except write the very best, most emotionally truthful, most exquisitely observed book you can. But maybe we should all remember sometimes that art doesn't just give you stuff, whether it's a belly laugh or a glimpse of death, it also takes something away: your armour, your carapace, the closed doors of your eyes, your ears, your very skin.

The Hoops You Must Jump Through: an insider's view of writing competitions, part 2

This is Part Two of a guest post by short story writer and winner of the Scott Prize, Susannah Rickards. In Part One she explored the role of the First Filter Reader, who will be the one deciding whether your work should be seen by the named judge, and here in Part Two she discusses just what it is that separates the 94% of stories which don't make it onto the longlist, from the 2% which do. And just to make it even more fun, one reader can win a signed copy of Hot Kitchen Snow. Leave a comment by the end of Sunday 14th November on this post, or on Part One, and I'll pick one out of the virtual hat.

So, over to Susannah:

HOOP TWO: What the 2% have, and how to make sure yours is in that pile.

So, your competition entry is probably sandwiched between a bank statement and a lost return slip for football training fees, somewhere in the first filter reader's living room. How do you make it stand out?

A strong title and first sentence are good places to start. I'd never drop a story because it had a dull or pretentious title, but will pull one from the pile because its title appeals, to start the reading session. So, a good title might mean your reader comes to your work fresh. What's a good title? I'm not among those who think one-worders are cop-outs. I'm likely to pull out a story called Oranges or Catcher because those words are potent when they stand alone, but would be even more likely to pull out stories called Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit or Catcher in the Rye (had they not already been coined) because they take the potent noun and activate it. Stock titles, such as Knock Em Dead or A Real Trooper are less likely to appeal immediately because the language isn't new. They don't demonstrate the author is capable of manipulating language in an original way. A trite title may be a brilliant parody or counterpoint the material bulk of the story, and that would appeal once I'm immersed, but in a competition, why make a bland first impression?

Is it churlish to judge a piece of work on its first line?  Not entirely. Why not make that opening a measure of your best skills? Strong caveat here:  a great opening line doesn't SHOUT, 'LOOK AT ME!!!' to the reader. An understated but confident opener will be better received than a throat-grabber.  A great opening line demonstrates in miniature what the whole story must convey – a distinctive and engaging tone of voice.

Because the common qualities of winning fiction, regardless of style and genre, are:
1.    That the writer loves and knows the English language better by far than non-writers do.
2.    That the writer has taken the trouble to find out how fiction works, and is overtly enthusiastic about its possibilities.

These two elements cover all areas. They allow for a traditional well-made tale or the fractured, plotless experimental piece, provided the author is excelling within that frame. And yes, enthusiasm really does make a difference. The lacklustre majority of stories could be raised up if only their writers had enough enthusiasm for their art to take out the platitudes, lazy phrasing, hackneyed plotlines and stock characters and refuel them with the originality that is born of true enthusiasm for the possibilities within a form.

The thing is, while only 2% of entries are very good indeed, only 2% are risible drivel. It's the remaining 96%  that has us tearing our hair out. Not the 2% handwritten-in-green-biro and Random Capitals declaring that The End is Nige (sic) but the tidy tale, after tale, after tale, of women putting their lives back together after divorce; the warm and wholesome escapades of post-war families on church outings. These stories can be witty and well-constructed but nothing lifts them out of the ordinary and I wonder what makes their authors think these pieces will shine among the masses. I suspect they are written by people who don't read that much and don't analyse the little they do read, critically, hungrily, to see how an author has brought that catch to their throat, that ripple along their spine. They don't put that work in and so possess insufficient knowledge to apply to their own writing and lift it.

The stories that rise are by authors who know what they're doing better than most, because they've put the hours in. They've read widely and can see how their work fits within the canon and within current trends. I don't mean it's immodest but that it's informed.

Next up: Empathy. The authors who come through have an emotional maturity which is shockingly lacking in that nicely turned 96%. I am often bewildered by the naivety of tone in the majority of pieces. Characters are bad'uns or dears with no complexity or contradiction. Themes of self harm, drugs and suicide are popped in to add edge to placid writing in a manner akin to tossing hot chilli sauce into rice pudding to pep it up. You don't.

So, the stories that rise easily to the shortlist are those with an overt artfulness with language. They guide the exhausted FFR towards a quick decision. They are the easy-to-be-around colleague, with their striking storylines, settings and characters. After 34 openings of two women reminiscing in a kitchen, one in which a child has its head against a cow's flank will make a reader sit up. Which is why, perhaps, the stories that come through may seem at times a little flash, crammed with well-turned but superfluous metaphors or bizarre scenarios. But they still stand out from the 96%. They demonstrate vitality and promise.

A final word on behalf of the quiet story. These ones get missed at times, perhaps. I know I've put stories on the reject pile on many occasions because they're the thirteenth in a row about cancer, or because someone dies at the end, and I'm so fed up of authors trotting out a death to round something off because they can't be bothered to tackle the subtle, trickier task of exploring life. But these stories do their magic. I'll wake at three in the morning and think: Story 984 – that language wasn't bland, it was unobtrusive. Read it again! Or a line or a gesture persists in the memory and resurfaces as I'm buttering packed lunch sarnies. Sometimes I look back over the pile and a story will scowl up at me. Something, some animation which these quiet but strong stories possess, usually demands a second reading.

So, in answer to my friend's original question – Is there a style of writing that succeeds in awards? Does it differ from other good writing? I'd say yes. Perhaps it is a touch more what-it-is than it need be – more ornate or bonkers, edgy or driven. But this immediate energy feeds the jaded first filter reader.  It is writing that rewards the reader immediately. It reassures immediately that its author cares enough about voice, story and the contrary, complex, vigorous world (whether by beginner's luck and intuition, or years of well-placed graft) that at very least they had the courtesy to engage both our hearts and our brains.

The Hoops You Must Jump Through: an insider's view of writing competitions, part 1

Susannah Rickards won the Scott Prize with her debut collection of short fiction, Hot Kitchen Snow and it's just out from Salt. She's also the teaching a workshop on entering writing competitions at the Claygate & Esher Short Fiction Festival, which is running 22-24 November as part of National Short Story Week. For many writers competitions are their first taste of trying to get their work noticed, but most of us have little idea of how they work and therefore little idea of how we might improve our chances of getting onto the longlist. So when I heard that Susannah has many years' experience of reading for competitions, I asked her to do a guest blog on what they look like from the inside.

And just to make it even more fun, one reader can win a signed copy of Hot Kitchen Snow. Leave a comment on this post, or in Part Two which will be going up in a couple of days, and I'll pick one out of the virtual hat. So, over to Susannah:

HOOP ONE – The First Filter Reader

A talented, unpublished writer I know was recently told to enter her work for awards as her prose was 'the sort that does well in competitions.' She asked if such prose existed, and if so, what was distinctively competition-friendly about it? How did it differ from other good writing?

My instinct was to reply that there isn't a single style that wins a judge's heart: I've judged thousands of stories and hundreds of novels for local and national fiction competitions, and have shortlisted work I loved and work I loathed but respected or admired. But I didn't say that. Because however different in tone the top stories are, they do have certain stylistic traits in common that raise them to that crucial top  2%.  (With a surprising consistency over the years, only about 2% of entries stand out.) This 2-part post is about what we're looking for, why, and also why great stories can get overlooked but rarely do.

First  - it helps to understand the process.  You may submit your work to a competition because an author you have a keen affinity with its judge this year. It's a shrewd move in some ways but that author may never read your work. They aren't paid to wade through the hundreds, sometimes thousands of entries that pour in. There are lackeys for that. I was one for years and still do it sometimes to keep aware of writing trends. It's the most insightful, rewarding and badly paid job I've ever had. The low paid, power-wielding First Filter Reader, not the judge, is the person to whom your story must appeal, so who takes this role? Why? And how do you make them kiss your script with relief and scrawl over it: At last – a shortlister – halle-hooplah-lujah!

FFRs aren't the enemy, they're your colleagues. Like any colleague, we appreciate writers who make our work easier. I'm not talking about double-spacing typescripts and numbering pages – readers of Emma's blog aren't fools - I know you know all that. To make a FFR happy, have a bit of insight into what we do and what we crave, and provide it. FFRs are typically paid between nothing and £2 for reading a story, between nothing and £10 for critiquing one. Usually towards the lower end of that pay scale. (I'm currently reading for a local award that works out at about 30p a story. Clearly we're not in this for the money. )

Don't fondly imagine your story will be read during office hours by a full-time awards assistant who has access to a well-lit office with a broad desk on which to spread out submissions. We work from home, when we've come home from work. Boxes of books or typescripts are biked to us by couriers, hastily signed for and stuffed on top of an already overflowing desk, on the way to our main occupations as Publishing Assistant, Literary Agent's Assistant, Mother, Schoolboy or Sea-fisherman. Because some first filter readers are just readers. Bridport's are. They are the staff from the Arts Centre, their friends and relations, whose first degree may be in Agriculture or they may still be studying for their A levels.

Before you toss a pen across the room in scorn at the sheer amateurish random selection of this process, consider this: FFRs are that elusive grail – keen readers. We plough through hundreds of stories for next to nothing because we love to read, because our craving to discover a new, rare voice is keener than the nose of a truffle pig. We've read dozens of authors every day, published and unpublished. Sheer volume trains the eye to note good syntax from the first sentence. It's practice, not personal whim, that leads us to know if a voice stands out from the crowd. I admit without apology that I've read submissions in the bath, in bed, on the tube, on my kitchen step at five in the morning with three cups of coffee lined up on the floor as stamina fuel. A good story will turn the bath and coffee cold, make a reader miss her stop. In short, it does exactly what you seek when you pick up a book. It transports the FFR and makes us forget we're reading. The fact that we're shattered or our car broke down, our main-job boss had a go or our kids are screaming all work in your favour in a skewy way: we're reading as real readers do – without £££ in our eyes or marketing teams on our backs. We're reading to escape. If you can persuade us to suspend disbelief, your writing is working.

In Part Two, I'll be looking at what puts a story into that 2%.

Susannah Rickards grew up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She read English at Oxford, trained for the theatre in Paris and then spent ten years in classical and improvisational theatre, touring the world with baskets of corsets and swords in ever-dodgier vehicles. Her fiction and poetry have been published, anthologised, broadcast on radio and online, and have brought her the Commonwealth Broadcasting Short Story Prize, the 2008 Conan Doyle New Fiction Award, and a Hawthornden Writing Fellowship, as well as numerous Highly Commendeds and shortlistings.