Gwyneth Box

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I have often wondered about judges' reports that start by stating how good the standard of entries to a competition was and how difficult it was to choose the actual winners: are they being honest, or just hoping to encourage and console those who didn't make the grade? But this year, I can honestly say that I was delighted by the general high standard of the entries to the SWLF creative non-fiction (CNF) competition and genuinely found myself faced with a difficult task in making my final choices. There were so many well-written and moving entries that I had to reject pieces that were probably technically as good as others, but simply weren’t “my kind of writing”. That, of course, means that even some of those that didn’t make the long list might do better in a competition with a different judge.

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The first round of eliminations was relatively simple. There were some pieces that simply didn't fit my understanding of what counts as CNF. There wasn’t very much excuse for this as I delved quite deeply into this subject in last year’s competition report and the report was available on the Festival website. This emphasises the desirability of researching the judge wherever possible, if you are entering a competition: if information is out there, either expressed in previous reports, or simply inferred from their own writing, it could give you a head start!

It can also be worth finding out about the judge’s age, their experience, their publicly admitted likes and dislikes. For example, a couple of entries talked about music from my youth and this naturally conjured personal associations for me and helped to keep them afloat in the “possibles” list, even though they were eventually outswum by others. That doesn’t mean that I rejected everything that didn’t immediately have a personal resonance: although we do all have favourites, reading should be about meeting new ideas and themes and expanding our horizons, not just reinforcing our existing ideas. Of course, the key here is that the writing has to be relatable, even for a reader with no hat in the ring: a well written piece on the care and keeping of tarantula spiders should be able to overcome the objections of the most hardened arachnophobe.

 

My personal belief is that CNF doesn’t necessarily have to have a beginning, middle and end, and I have a particular liking for "non-events" – the tiny unhappenings that rely on good writing to shine a spotlight or bring them into focus, the simple banal details of everyday life that are well observed and brought to life by the telling.

For that kind of writing, the content isn’t going to be ground-breaking or earth-shaking, so it's no wonder that I think language matters. The specific language of a craft or an activity, the private language of a relationship, the writer's own idiolect and speech patterns… these are the things that make a story unique and appealing. After all, almost everyone had a best friend at school or a pet, or could tell a story about going for a walk or about a chance conversation with a stranger, or an anecdote of a family scene or something that happened to them on holiday. To mis-quote Frank Carson, “It’s the way you tell them” that will make them successful.

Some pieces used just the right vocabulary; nothing complicated, nothing self-conscious, but it was clear that the words came naturally to the writer, that they knew what they were doing: they had selected specific words from a wider vocabulary – they hadn't just chosen the only one they knew. You wouldn't normally notice this as you are reading – unless you're reading as a judge – but it makes the reading so much smoother.

Although I don't think there has to be a traditional three-act story arc to CNF, I do believe that the "shape" of the writing matters: using repeated phrases, sometimes with variation, is a powerful tool to hold the piece together and give it structure.

One frequent problem was the pieces that were overly complex for the space available. Eight hundred words isn't very much and most entries pushed the word count to the absolute limit. Reading some of these, I felt that they had been cut short at 800 words, as if they had been extracted from a longer piece. While it is possible to take a longer piece and cut it down to adapt it to a competition’s requirements, the finished piece still needs to have integrity and balance: if the end result is to be less than 800 words, perhaps you can only use 600 words of the original and then write 200 new words that restore coherence and make the finished piece read as a complete text.

Sometimes, though, you just have too much to say to make a piece conform to the restrictions. You wouldn't enter a poem into a short story competition, so why enter an article into a competition that is only asking for 800 words if you actually need 3,000 words to do the piece justice?

The fact that the rules allow up to 800 words doesn't mean you must use up all the allowance. This is not a competition that demands a specific word count. Some of the strongest pieces said just what was needed in far fewer words.

Some entries took too long getting to the point, or spent too long on the build up to make an impact with the actual message. There were poignant pieces, and pieces that had messages and morals. These were more effective when they shone a light on a subject but left me to make up my own mind and didn't preach or hammer home the point. Less can definitely be more, and it's as well to allow the reader some freedom of interpretation. Before submitting a piece, leave it for a while and then go back and check whether you've started too soon, wasting words on excessive background or an unnecessary lead-in, or whether you can cut the final sentence or paragraph and leave the reader to make the final inference. There is a fine balance to be drawn between leaving your reader unsatisfied and stuffing them full of explanations.

 

Some of the personal stories were obviously very important to the writers, but failed to reach out across the unshared experience and touch me personally. There were other pieces that informed, but didn’t really add insight or entertainment value: they were more what I would class as non-fiction reference and seemed to have forgotten the need for creativity.

 

Titles matter. They need to relate to the content in some way, to intrigue the reader, or perhaps add a key that will allow them to unlock a further meaning. They aren’t part of the word count, and can be incredibly powerful as a way to set the reader on the right path – or even mislead them and then force them to rethink and revise their expectations.

 

Proofreading is absolutely essential. You can get away with some mistakes when you're writing blog posts or emails, and even when you're writing articles things are not likely to be absolutely 100% perfect – hopefully if you submit for publication, there will be an editing phase where minor errors are spotted and corrected. But when you're entering a competition and it's only 800 words, if your grammar isn't perfect (unless this is clearly part of the voice of the piece) you’re going to be up against another entry that has been fully corrected. At the end of the day, competitions are about prioritising the best. Your entry doesn’t have to be just good, it has to be better than the others.

 

There were too many pieces where it was possible to say this piece is fine, but that was where it stopped. There was nothing more than: yeah, there is nothing to object to here. In very small competitions this may be enough, but once there are a good number of other contenders, your work needs to be more than “nothing to object to” if it's going to win.

 

Watch the use of tenses. If you're writing about the past, it's perfectly acceptable to use the present – the narrative or historical present – but this needs to be consistent. The voice, too, needs to be consistent: if you’re writing about a childhood memory, the writing needs to sound either like the child you were, or the adult you are, not half and half without any method when you swap between voices. In both cases, tense and voice, it is in fact possible to change halfway through, (though difficult in such a short piece as we’re talking about here) but this needs to be a conscious decision: you need to know why you’re doing so and it will take skillful handling to make it successful.

 

As a judge, I have to find a balance between what appeals as far as the content, the meaning and the story of the piece is concerned, and how the writing is actually executed – the technicalities and mechanics of the writing. On a personal level, it matters to me that the grammar is at least mostly right – or right for the voice. I notice the vocabulary. I notice the way something is written – the structure and flow of the writing. There may be pieces that stand out despite the execution, just because the stories are interesting. Unfortunately, though, this is a writing competition and, whereas these would stand up perfectly well in a competition for monologues or performance, where the text was to be performed, they don't stand up in a competition for written work.

 

The same subjects cropped up again and again. There were a lot of mountains. There were babies. There were friends and family. There were strangers. There was death. There was music. And there were Rayburns (variously spelled). The events dealt with were big and small, personal and political. It was, again, a pleasure to read all the entries, to meet your families and travel with you for a while. Thank you to all the entrants for the opportunity to step inside your personal worlds.

 

 

 

Winner & commendeds

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The final choice was difficult, but I have come down to three very personal stories of family. It was not intentional that the winner and two commended pieces should together frame human life from birth, through family relationships, to impending death, but perhaps it isn’t surprising. Creative non-fiction is, after all, a lens through which we look at moments that illuminate the human condition and these are experiences that everyone shares, however different the actual details and perspective.

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Commendeds

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How I found my parents - Christine Hogarth 

I have no personal experience of adoption or abortion or any such issues, and yet I found this piece reached across from an unshared experience to touch me with its poignancy.

The narrative present was well used and the language was simple, direct and clear for the  “innocent and ignorant times” in question.

 

The full 800 words were used, but there was no feeling of wastefulness or unnecessary digression. The initial set up took time, but this was needed to balance the development of the full story. Then the adoptive parents Ken and Jean were introduced and their characters established in a couple of strong and succinct sentences. This was quite enough – at that point they needed no complex explanatory anecdotes, just a couple of broad brushstrokes that left room for the actual story.

 

Much of the skill of writing is knowing how much to write and how much to leave to the imagination. And with a limited word count, it’s important to understand just how much scope the canvas will allow and which false starts and side paths there is room to explore.

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All the things - Letty Butler 

This is a piece about end-of-life dignity, the importance of which is recognised by both the father and the surgeon. It’s about words that we “hear but can’t process” and then about using words to reach out and connect, to reassure ourselves as much as others and “to try and fill an unspeakable void.”

 

It’s very short – just 437 words. This may seem odd for a piece called “All the things”, especially with a narrator who says, “I begin to list everything I remember” and then “When I run out of memories, I make them up.”

 

A less-skilled writer would have told us more. But we all have our own list of “things” and we are told just enough of the past to be able to complete the story with our own ideas to reflect our own experience.

 

The abruptness of the ending was slightly unexpected and brought me up short. But it was very effective and it was absolutely right for what was being said.

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Winner:

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Bagsy-blobsy, no back answers - Jan Kaneen

The title was one that stood out immediately: although I’d never come across the phrase “bagsy-blobsy”, I remembered childhood squabbles as we’d bagsy the front seat on the bus or the right to choose a TV programme. The vocabulary used wasn’t from my part of the world, but it managed to trigger fond memories: jackstraws would have been pick-a-sticks for my family; plimsolls were daps; we carried our nets to fish for minnows in the brook in the park, not tiddlers in the river. But the atmosphere created was familiar and I recognised the dock leaves – and how marvellously observed were the “raspberry ripple” nettle stings they were used to treat!

 

The language throughout is careful and consistent and creates a true and credible voice. There is love at the heart of this piece – understated as it would no doubt have been by the child narrator – and acceptance, beautifully summed up in statements like, “He’s only a stepbrother, but he’s alright is Martin - never throws the first punch.”

 

The overall effect is simply appealing – and I do mean “simply”: there is nothing dire going on, nothing critical, nothing fatal, just the normal rivalry and establishment of sibling hierarchy. It's a perfectly observed moment of childhood that takes just as long as it needs to establish a setting, to develop and to conclude.