A List-less story
Once again I have been guilty of not looking carefully at a competition brief. I rushed off making plans for the ‘List’ flash fiction story in Writers Journal and found I was only allowed ten items. No matter, all these aborted attempts produce story lines for future use. The ‘Hidden’ one for Writer’s Magazine was a lost cause until I listened to that I’m just a Country Boy, Don Williams song and I wondered what the girl he loved might be missing, especially if the situation was set in Victorian times when the girl was fenced in with social rules. The draft in short story form looks good but, after reading a Katie Fford and an Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread, which was a finalist in Booker Prize competition, I wonder if it is really a novel. My normal reading being Bernard Cornwell, C.S. Forester, or P.G. Wodehouse, which all have ACTION and PLOT. Like Mark Twain, I feel Ann Tyler writes wine, I try to write water, everybody drinks water.