The RTÉ Short Story Competition 2024 in honour of Francis MacManus is back and is now open for entries.
Below, one of this year's returning judges, acclaimed novelist Claire Kilroy, explores what she likes in a good short story - read more of her advice for budding scribes here.
They say write what you know. If I wrote what I know, I would write very little indeed. It seems to me now you should write what you feel. A wise friend once told me that there is no such thing as a wasted emotion. This is especially true if you have an artistic outlet. "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," Wordsworth wrote. "It takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." Anger, pain, love, confusion: use them as fuel for the page. And while the Irish invented autofiction (Ulysses) you don't have write your own life. Characters, plots, settings – powerful feelings bring them to life. It's a strange business, the human imagination, a strange and occasionally wonderful business.
During the 2023 judging process, we were unanimous about just one story, Mr Hoo. It was written with compassion. It came from the heart. Mr Hoo was not the author's life story, we discovered when the names of the authors were revealed – we judge the stories anonymously. It was the story of a naive boy who had been led down the wrong path. The boy's mother loved him. I think that was the bit that got us all: the boy's mother telling him, after he had been found guilty in court, that he was a good boy. He was a good boy. The author, John O'Donnell, had written what he felt.
Anger, pain, love, confusion: use them as fuel for the page.
The judges read without criteria or expectations. The stories that came in were entirely different and we responded to them in entirely different ways. We all had certain things we particularly liked. I am drawn to the chaotic qualites of life being captured in prose. To do this well, the prose itself must be the opposite of chaotic: precise. I tell my writing students to think of a paragraph as a carriage drawn by a team of horses. All the horses have to pull in the same direction. Go through each sentence not just line by line, but word by word, to ensure each word is the right word, the strongest. The dialogue must ring true, particularly since the RTE Short Story Award is a radio competition. The winning stories will be read out on air, so read your story out loud to yourself. If you find yourself tripping up on a sentence, or if the dialogue seems clunky, your ear has located a problem. I always tell students to pay attention to their verbs. Verbs are the unsung heroes of the sentence. They are often overlooked but a well-deployed verb helps a reader to visualise an action.
The one thing I need to happen with a short story is to end up in a different place to the one in which I started, to experience a perspective shift. It doesn't have to be a huge movement but I want to go somewhere, or to be brought. Insight, I suppose you might call it. Joyce termed it the epiphany. Writing an epiphany, of course, is no simple feat, and there are no instructions on how to accomplish this, but that's the glorious game that is writing, and it's the particular discipline of the short story – that it doesn't just stop. It arrives.
Writers have until Friday 10th May 2024 to submit their short story to the RTÉ Short Story Competition - for rules, information on how to enter, and to read and listen to past winning stories, go here.
