A Glorious Mess

I’ve joined a new writing group. My fourth writing group for the month is The Short Storyists. It’s a new venture for the Peter Cowan Writers Centre (PCWC).

I nearly didn’t join at all, given that I confused the times and turned up for the other new group: Fictional Manuscript Development. I didn’t stay to listen to that one because memoir isn’t considered fictional, and that’s my preferred style.

This new group has an interesting format. The writers work in sets of four. In Month One, at the end of the first week, Writers 1 & 2 send a short story to Writers 3 & 4, the group moderators and the other writer in their pair. Then everyone critiques the two stories (except the pair of writers who only critique that of their other half), and they’re all sent back to Writers 1 & 2 by the end of Week 3. In Week 4 we get together at PCWC and discuss everything. Then, a week later, Writers 3 & 4 send a story out, and Writers 1 & 2, the moderators and the other half of Writers 3 and 4 get to critique those. What it means is that you only submit a story once every two months. That same month, you also critique one story; the other month, you critique two. Great. It all made sense and sounded achievable.

Someone had to go first. Me being me, I volunteered. I knew that meant I would only have a week to come up with a story to send. That was okay, too … until the moderators defined what they meant by a short story.

There’s a lot of leeway in the definition of short. For 50 Give or Take, it’s fifty words. For the Peter Cowan Writers Centre annual short story competition, it’s 600 words. In my book Brush Tales, most of the stories are less than 1500 words long. You can imagine my horror when the moderators declared they wanted us to aim for stories about 4000 words long.

Four thousand words. In a week. Before Easter. I don’t have an issue with writing lots of words. I’m more concerned with those words not making sense or not following the lines of ‘story’ well enough for others to read and enjoy. I am already imagining the feedback, gently delivered in the middle of a positivity sandwich, from the others who all have more experience in story writing than I do. I’m anticipating words along the lines of ‘This part doesn’t make sense.’ ‘Where’s the conflict?’ ‘You haven’t developed your characters very well.’ ‘I don’t believe your dialogue’. Writing is fun, but my Imposter Syndrome has definitely already been triggered!

It’s now Monday, the story is due Saturday, and I haven’t written anything. Apparently, genuine writers are meant to have a stock of stories they’ve started and not taken anywhere. That is true of me. I have a folder full of one-liners and orphaned paragraphs. I have a number of stories that didn’t make the cut for Brush Tales, plus bits and pieces I’ve started and then fallen out of love with. But none of those attempts are anywhere near 4000 words long. I’ve looked at them, and nothing has drawn my attention to expand.

That gives me two options. I could go Eenie Meenie Minie Mo and start working on extending one of my existing stories, or I could ask everyone reading this for a theme. So, has anyone got any interesting ideas? Feel free to chuck ’em in the comments. Silly, funny, topical, off the wall. I just need words to consider, which will hopefully turn into ideas for a ‘what if’ and eventually become a story. By Saturday. No pressure!

I’m open to everything because all I’m trying to do is come up with a place to start. Once the spark of inspiration is ignited, I can do the rest. I hope.

Go for it!

BTW, the image is from a vintage copy of The Concise English Dictionary published in 1956 and found in an op shop in country WA while scratching for ideas for my Major Creative Work in 2022. It gave me a lot of inspiration then. I’m hoping for the same now!