SHORT STORY WRITING KEY POINTS
Many writers have success with their short stories for much of the time. However, almost everyone hits a fallow patch and sometimes it’s useful to re-visit the key principles for writing in this increasingly popular genre.
1. First of all, keep the plot simple. You will not have room to expand into sub-plots or detailed description. You are writing about a singular but important event in the main character’s life and you need to keep tightly focused.
2. You need only two or three characters. Any more, and you’ll succeed only in confusing and disappointing your readers as they struggle to keep up with the antics of your 2D people!
3. Describe setting in the briefest of terms. If you want to create the atmosphere of a market or another busy place, refer briefly to the noises or the jostling of the crowd from your character’s point of view.
4. Use dialogue to enhance the quality of your characterisation and to drive the story along. You will make your characters both real and immediate, engaging and capable of gaining the reader’s interest quickly - vital in the constraints of a limited word count.
5. And talking of word counts, make sure you stay within the limits set by the competition or magazine concerned. Competition judges are likely to reject, on principle, entries in excess of the required length and editors will want something that fits the space in their magazine rather than having to edit to the required length.
6. Keep to a narrow time frame - an afternoon, a day, a few hours rather than months or years. If you need to provide background information, limit yourself to a couple of sentences.
7. Put the finished story aside for a day or two and come back prepared to edit ruthlessly. Strike out any overly descriptive paragraphs, aim for the most economical prose and the most succinct dialogue - ensure that no word is superfluous.
8. Finally, check spelling and punctuation. Make sure your copy is clean and well-presented - no coffee stains, dog-ears, fancy fonts or neon-coloured paper! Let your writing jump from the pile for the right reasons - its clarity and quality of presentation.
COMMISSIONING BRIEFS FOR RADIO 4 DRAMA
Many writers would like to have their work broadcast by the BBC and, if you want to have a go, the good news is that ‘Auntie’ provides detailed specifications for the kind of material she needs. As follows:
AFTERNOON PLAY; 45 minutes every weekday afternoon at 14.15
The Afternoon Play is about storytelling. It may be called the Afternoon Play but it is a slot with a huge scope and license in both subject matter and form. First and foremost we want to tell the listener a good story. The glory of the slot is its enormous range - anything and everything goes in this slot - contemporary and period drama, comedy, biography (but see below), issues driven plays, drama documentary, family plays, crime and thriller, poetry, romance fantasy, etc. It can be a play, a dramatisation (of short stories, letters, memoirs or non fiction - last year we dramatised the WG Hoskins geography text book ‘The Making of the English Landscape’) a dramatised feature, a narrative poem, a sequence of short plays. But: do you have a good story? Obviously we have to work within the constraints of entertaining a large audience in the afternoon, but there is no drama slot within broadcasting with as much editorial latitude as The Afternoon Play. Find new ways to tell stories and we will play it out here; be imaginative. In the last round we commissioned a play from a flow chart.
SERIES
We are looking for Drama Series, i.e. plays with a self contained storyline with characters who follow through from episode to episode. We are looking for something fresh and distinctive that will appeal to the Radio 4 audience - we are not interested in hospitals or medicine (‘Doctors’ on BBC ONE daily at 1400 does that) detectives etc will have to be very unusual (we already have McLevy, Baldi, Dixon, Poirot, etc. Character is as important as situation/setting.
We are also looking for portmanteau collections of plays. Find an umbrella or a format or a theme (eg ‘Ways to Leave Your Lover’) and group three, four or five plays. The Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare Retold were both very clever ways for BBC ONE to reinvent the Single Play - the key to their success was retelling familiar but great stories in a completely fresh way. We will also consider groups of dramatisations to celebrate a particular writer.
We are looking to build on the success of ‘To Serve Them All My Days’ with one serialisation stripped across the week. There is very limited scope here and if you have ideas you will need to discuss it with the Commissioning Editor. We will also commission the occasional two part dramatisation and original play.
BIOGRAPHY
Of course we will still do biographical plays, but with the new ‘Last Word ‘(the obituary programme) and with ‘Great Lives’ moving to the afternoon there will be a little less of an appetite for them. Simply dramatising someone's life is a non starter - the rule of thumb is will the play work if you substitute the name of the famous person for a name like Smith? If the answer is no then it probably isn't a good play and we don't want it. Your subject also needs to be someone the audience care about.
TONE
Think about the audience for this slot. There is only so much gloom they can take. Listen to ‘Amy's Spaghetti’ - a comic take on grief. This is not a social work slot: of course we want plays about contemporary social and domestic issues, but they need to be handled imaginatively and often with a light touch. ‘Shameless’ takes people at the very bottom of the heap and makes them fun and life affirming. Plays should be about something - this is not a green light to fill the slot with plays about issues, but even the most imaginative flight of fancy needs to connect with life as the audience lives it. Listen to the delightful reversioning of Daphnis and Chloe, a fairy tale with recognisable people in recognisable situations. It does not take place in a sealed aesthetic bubble.
We are always looking for good comedy drama.
Drama documentaries play well in this slot, but how the drama and the actuality are going to work together is crucial. Would the story be better treated as a documentary feature?
TALENT
New, different and diverse voices are the lifeblood of the Afternoon Play. New writing and writers are central to the Afternoon Play. A writer's second commission is as important to us as the first.
SATURDAY PLAY; Saturday 14.30 (60 minutes)
We are looking for compelling narrative driven stories. Plot is crucial. They should not be extended Afternoon Plays. The Saturday Play is the home of genre fiction. We are looking for: crime and detective stories, ghost stories, great trials, love stories, mysteries and thrillers.
We are looking to schedule them in short seasons, so if your story doesn't fit into any of the above genres it may well not get bought. We want the Radio 4 equivalents of ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ ‘The Sixth Sense,’ ‘Oceans Eleven’, ‘Syriana’, ‘Munich’ ‘The Bourne Identity’, ‘Gosford Park’, ‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’, ‘Sexy Beast’, ‘Good Night and Good Luck’, ‘When Harry Met Sally’, ‘Sleepless in Seattle’, etc etc. - i.e. popular high class entertainment, the kind of show you would buy a ticket for if it was in the cinema.
WOMAN’S HOUR DRAMA; 15 minutes every weekday 10.45/19.45
We are looking for drama that reflects the values of Woman's Hour (intelligent, witty, curious) which sees the world from a woman's perspective. Take note - this is the hardest one to get right!
Simplicity is the key. Telling a self contained story with a serial element in a 15 minute episode is probably not the place to try out new writers. Writing a self contained play within 15 minutes is a tough call.
The slot requires editorial boldness - a strong idea, a simple sharp format led by characters whose story we want to follow over several episodes. Getting the audience to fall in love with a character is as important as getting them gripped by the story.
What we are looking for:
FRIDAY PLAY; Friday evenings at 21.00 (60 minutes)
The Friday Play is changing. We still want to encourage the very best of new and established writers to the longer original play, we are still looking for original challenging drama to create a 'must listen' radio event. We want to pump up the volume.
We want:
Serials/Series that get the nation talking - 2- 6 parts or bigger. We want to develop state of the nation, state of the planet, state of life event with impact - our version of ‘Holding On’, ‘Traffik’, ‘Our Friends from the North’, ‘State of Play’ etc. Intelligent new thrillers/groundbreaking detectives (single/2 parters). Single plays under 3 banners:
Radio 4 wants to encourage dramas with a sense of ambition, original serials and/or series with a diversity of characters that reflect the contemporary world - plays that entertain, emotionally engage and make the listener look afresh at the way we live now.
The following criteria should be borne in mind: