The Roy Chapman Ltd BeaconFlash 2024/25

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....

• The Homecoming
• The Waiting Room
• White Feather, Yellow Feather

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.

• Where you have a direct question, the question mark should appear at the end of the speech (or thought in this instance) rather than after the dialogue tag so: “Will you be there tomorrow?” Tom asked.

• It’s a tough ask but the stories that usually make me go ‘wow’ at the end are the ones that are usually placed. I always recommend asking someone you trust to read your story. If you can get them to sit opposite you then you can see their reaction. If they go ‘wow’ then you know you’ve got a cracker.

• I recommend not having any characters with the same initial letter (especially in the same scene) wherever you can as readers remember characters’ names from the initial letter so I always recommend having them as distinctive as possible. Having the same letter, same second letter and the same or similar lengths (e.g. Mark / Matt) can be confusing and again, anything that can pull the reader away from the story, even for a second, is to be avoided.

• Stopping something or someone ‘in his / her tracks’ is a big cliché (as would be ‘stopping dead’).

• We speak in contractions (e.g. I’m rather than I am, isn’t rather than is not etc.), and it’s fine / preferred to use them in dialogue* and first-person narration as it comes across as more natural. It’s used less in third-person narration / description but it depends on the era – contractions tend to work better in contemporary novels. *How characters talk does vary between strangers (formal) and friends/family (informal).

• Although grammatically correct, I recommend you don’t put commas between adjectives, especially where there is one or more comma elsewhere in the sentence. It slows the pace… really slows it where there are several and anything that slows what should be a fast-paced turning read is best avoided.

• If a section feels a bit flat, it could be that you have too many sentences / paragraphs starting with a pronoun, e.g. ‘Barry did this…’ or ‘He did that…’, or that you have too much narration (Andy was angry) vs. dialogue or the character ‘doing’, e.g. “Get out!” Andy slammed his fist onto the desk. Dialogue = character. Narration = plot. It’s tricky to avoid the ‘I’ (or ‘we’) when writing in first person but it does stand out more than a mix of names.

• Another way of chopping words is if you ‘tell’ us how a character feels but also have what they say – that ‘shows’ us. Even if you don’t need to cut the word count it’s better to have the ‘show’.

• 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.

• There are exceptions (re-sit is one) but most words starting with ‘re’ / re-, unless followed by an ‘e’, aren’t hyphenated. ‘re-edit’ and ‘re-evaluate’, for example, would be. Word doesn’t seem to like ‘rejoin’ but https://www.lexico.com/definition/rejoin confirms no hyphen.

• If you only have two characters in a story I recommend having different genders so the he/she are clearer, especially should you choose names where they could be either. Anything that might pull a reader out of a story is best avoided.

• 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.

• In British English, the hyphen (-) is usually only used for connecting words, i.e. a well-known man. The ‘en’ dash (–) is usually used for everything else (interruptions with no spaces, asides with a space either side of the dash etc) whereas the longer ‘em’ dash (—) is usually only reserved for US English. https://getitwriteonline.com/articles/en-dashes-em-dashes explains the differences there. If a character is pausing/hesitating, or there’s a break in proceedings by narration, then you’d use the … ellipses (one ‘character’, not three individual full stops).

• When writing past tense narration, this/last/next night/week/weekend/month/year etc. is present tense should ‘the previous/following night/year’ etc. or ‘the night/year before’. Likewise, yesterday is the day before / a day earlier, tonight isn’t tonight but that evening / night, tomorrow isn’t tomorrow but the next day / the day after, today is that day. Ditto ‘two years ago’ wouldn’t actually be two years ago but two years earlier. Dialogue is present tense so they’re fine in speech but not when writing a past tense story.

• Where the dialogue tag (he said) follows on from what is said there should be a comma before the speech marks / inverted commas then small ‘h’ for ‘he said’ or ‘s’ for ‘she said’ or equivalent. There still wouldn’t be capitals, unless for a name, after a question or exclamation mark. And it’s fine to use exclamation marks when someone’s yelling / shouting (then you’d often not need the ‘he / she yelled / shouted’), but just one!

• One of the stories had multiple points of view. If you start with one main character then switch to another, or a gap in time, there has to be a clear break so the reader is prepared for a change.

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).