Thanks to my awesome day job as a school librarian, I was lucky enough to get to spend today judging entries for Radio 2's 500 Word Story competition.
I really enjoyed getting involved with this competition this year; there were so many original, well written entries and I was excited by the quality of the work. Writing a complete story in just 500 words is difficult to do, but is also a lot of fun. I think that after reading through my entries, my top tips for anyone taking part in this sort of competition in the future would be:
1) Focus on originality - I read quite a few entries with similar plot lines
2) Make sure your work has a complete plot structure.
3) Just because you've only got 500 words, don't forget to put some effort into characterisation.
If all of the entries were as good as the ones I was sent, I'm excited to see the finalists for this comp - they are going to be brilliant!
As someone who likes to enter my writing into competition myself, I feel like I've learnt a lot from getting the opportunity to do some judging. Hopefully this will help me to improve my writing in the future.
Reading back through Air (my first job of the day) I definitely came up with some ideas which would make some good 500 word stories (and much longer ones if I could find the time).
I have now finished editing my first print copy of Air and have lots of adaptations to start adding in on my laptop. I'm extremely excited as Air is getting very close to a point where I can share it with some beta readers for feedback; and I can't wait to find out what they think!
However, following the beautiful weather we've had in the South East today, I think my chances of getting some snow for the front cover photography are growing increasingly slim...
