We are delighted to announce the results of round three of the 2024-5 BeaconFlash competition to the theme of ‘Silver Light’. The three stories listed below (in alphabetical order) go through to the final judging when the competition closes at the end of May 2025, announced at next July’s BeaconLit festival.
If your story is not listed below you are welcome to send it elsewhere. If it is, please refrain from doing so until after the final results next year. NB. The overall top three will be posted in full on this website.
So, the three stories chosen for October 2024 are....
Morgen’s comments:
A mix of charming, amusing and thought-provoking stories this month. I know I often say this but it’s almost always true that in a different batch, so many of the stories could have gone through. There was rich description, skilled word choice and unexpected plots. Such talent! Some were closer to the theme than others and this often means the difference between the top three and narrowly missing out so bear this in mind before submitting.
A couple of the stories were 498 words, two of 497, another 499, which is fine as the limit is 500, but it runs the risk of the word count increasing should there be any words that have been hyphenated when they shouldn’t have been. Have three of those and it pushes the story over the limit. I can say this as I’m a fiction editor but it’s easy to chop words. Start with your dialogue. If you have the character doing something and speaking in the same paragraph you can lose the ‘said’. Just have them do the action then speak, or vice versa. More tips below.
We are delighted to announce the results of round two of the 2024-5 BeaconFlash competition to the theme of ‘Another Season’. The three stories listed below (in alphabetical order) go through to the final judging when the competition closes at the end of May 2025, announced at next July’s BeaconLit festival.
If your story is not listed below you are welcome to send it elsewhere. If it is, please refrain from doing so until after the final results are announced. NB. The overall top three will be posted in full on this website.
So, the three stories chosen for September 2024 are…
· A Snapshot of Life
· The Grand Solution
· Standing on a Distant Shore
Morgen’s comments:
Some stories were closer to the theme than others. It’s always worth making the most of the theme whenever there is one. I recommend writing down several ideas then going with the most obscure one, providing it’s something you’d like to write. The chances are there will be several stories with the same basic idea, as we had this month. Yours could stand out as something ‘fresh’.
Writing competitions are obviously about the writing but when there are several ‘winners’ to choose from, you want yours to ‘shine’. One did leap out as a clear ‘winner’, another particularly strong with three equally striking so it was a tricky task (several reads) to pick my favourite of the three. And that’s often what it comes down to; a judge’s favourite.
If your story isn’t listed above, it’s likely that it only just missed out so don’t lose heart. It could be a winner in another batch elsewhere.
When using adverbs in description or dialogue tags, it’s usually better to use a more active verb, e.g. ‘he strode’ rather than ‘he walked purposefully’ or ‘he snapped’ instead of ‘he said angrily’. The same goes for when the characters are doing something in the general description, e.g. ‘he plodded’ instead of ‘he walked slowly’. Apart from chopping a word – always useful when you have a limited word count, it makes for a more interesting read.
Although grammatically correct, I recommend not putting commas between adjectives, and certainly not immediately before the noun / object. It slows the pace… really slows it where there are several. I feel commas work best when the reader is supposed to breathe (or the writer wants to make the reader pause for a particular reason). They wouldn’t need to when describing an object and anything that slows what should be a fast-paced page-turning read is best avoided.
When we have someone’s/something’s age, we don’t usually need the ‘years old’ or ‘years of age’ because the number – within the right context – is sufficient. There would also only be a hyphen if preceding a noun (or implied), e.g. a fourteen-year-old girl / a fourteen-year-old. Had there been a non-exact name using ‘something’ (or similar), the ‘something’ represents an unknown number so it would all still be hyphenated as the likes of ‘twenty-two-year-old nurse’ would have been.
We only think to ourselves so we don’t need the ‘to himself’, herself, myself…
Don’t forget to use as many of the five senses as possible. By default we have sound (dialogue) and sight (narration) but what about taste, touch and smell. It makes a story all the more vivid if we can have one or more of those.
Where an action (verb) has ‘starts to’ / ‘started to’ or ‘begins to’ / ‘began to’ before it, most of the time they’re not needed because unless the action is interrupted, the verb alone works better / is stronger. An example would be ‘the phone began to ring’. If it stops without being answered then that’s fine (although it still rang!) but if not then just have ‘the phone rang’.
Technically, ‘now’ is present tense so it would normally be removed or changed to a past-tense alternative. Dialogue is present tense so they’re fine in speech, and you can get away with it, up to a point, in first-person narration, and it’s fine if used as a comparison, e.g. They were green but were now yellow.
We are delighted to announce the results of round one of the 2024/25 BeaconFlash competition to the theme of ‘Dog Days’.
The three stories listed below (in alphabetical order) go through to the final judging when the competition closes at the end of May 2025 and announced at next July’s BeaconLit festival.
If your story is not listed below you are welcome to send it elsewhere. If it is, please refrain from doing so until after the final results. NB. The overall top three will be posted in full on this website.
So, the three stories chosen for August 2024 are…
· Did Someone Just Say 'Walkies'?
· Regular as Clockwork
· Summer Holiday Fever
Morgen’s Comments:
A really fun batch this month. In some stories, the dog was the main feature (a treat as a dog owner) but in others the story was inspired by the sultry summer weather https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_days. Most had a healthy mix of dialogue vs narration; I always recommend at least 50% dialogue as it brings the characters alive rather than rely on the narrator ‘telling’ us everything.
I recommend writing numbers under 100 in full so they blend with the rest of the text. That said, I think all numbers unless titles (BMW Series 5) etc. are best written in full.
When speaking to someone and using a name, nickname or term of endearment (dear, love, pet*), generalisation (guys, ladies etc.), you’d need a comma before the name, i.e. ‘Do you know John?’ is asking if the person knows someone called John. ‘Do you know, John?’ means that the character is speaking to someone called John but asking them if they know something. A subtle difference but you want to avoid confusing the reader so they jump out of the story. If what’s said is very short, e.g. ‘Hi John’, then the comma’s not so important. * When it’s not a name it would usually be a small first letter.
Where you have a character doing something and speaking, I think it’s useful to have the narration first so it’s clearer who’s doing the speaking – even if it’s obvious by what’s said – as early as possible. As well as often negating the need for ‘said’ (or equivalent), it also breaks up a pattern of speech/narration.
It’s good to have as many of the five senses as possible. By default we have sound (dialogue) and sight (narration) but what about taste, touch and smell. It makes a story all the more vivid if we can have one or more of those.
As well as the five senses, try to choose onomatopoeic words such as bang, crash, flash, wallop etc. We had a ‘pop’ in one story.
I recommend chopping ‘ing’s where you can, especially where they are verbs and at the start of sentences. Having ‘ing’ verbs at the start of sentences avoids having too many pronouns, e.g. He did this, She did that, which can become a list and therefore a little monotonous but ‘ing’s can jar equally.
I often come across ‘ing’s following ‘said’. A way to avoid that is to split the sentence but where there’s narration, especially the character doing something, the ‘said’ could go, e.g. ‘“That’s not fair.” Taylor pushed the note across the table.’ Or better still: Taylor pushed the note across the table. “That’s not fair.” rather than: “That’s not fair,” Taylor said, pushing forward the note.
First paragraphs of chapters/sections should be flush to the left with subsequent paragraphs indented, usually two or three spaces (via the top ruler rather than tabbed across or physical spaces).
· Did Someone Just Say 'Walkies'?
· Regular as Clockwork
· Summer Holiday Fever
Supporting Beacon Villages Community Library
Copyright © 2024 Beacon Lit - All Rights Reserved.