Nonfiction

Navigating the Path: Crafting and Publishing Writing about Death

~ Coren Farley

I’d not considered myself as a worthy candidate for publishing until this module, would people besides my university lecturers really want to read my work? With that in mind here’s my reflection of my experience of writing for publication. Specifically a short story, but this wasn’t just any story—this one’s gritty, raw, and packed with emotion. Join me as I share the highs, lows, and everything in between of bringing this piece to life, specifically for Blood and Bourbon.

Embracing the Challenge:

I decided after spending time thinking about this assignment and being conflicted to begin with that I needed to come to a decision about what format I would like my submission to take. I love writing poetry but I wasn’t sure I wanted to stick to my comfort zone and I’d attempted writing longer narratives before but had found it challenging to keep a reader consistently engaged. Friedman’s (Friedman, 2018) emphasis’ on short stories being simpler to write than books gave me the idea to craft a short story, this would all me to step out of my comfort zone of poetry and to practise my narrative skills without having to worry about such a slow burn.

Upon discovering an article listing places for submissions I read through and found that Blood and Bourbon were asking for various different submissions under the theme of death by August the 31st., I sensed an opportunity to push myself beyond my creative boundaries. Their appetite for hard-hitting, gritty work immediately caught my attention. It was a challenge I couldn’t resist—a chance to delve deep into the darkest corners of my imagination and experiences and produce something truly raw and unfiltered. This was a chance to create something entirely new for me, a short story that explored the complex feelings and emotions around death.

Initial Discomfort:

I’ll be honest—the notion of tackling the theme of death initially made me squirm. It’s not the most uplifting topic, after all and as a sensitive person I knew that it could even be triggering at times but as I mulled it over, I realised that discomfort often signals an opportunity for growth. I could take this opportunity to really think about my journey with understanding death so, I made the conscious decision to lean into the discomfort and see where it would lead. Hoping to create work that would be both emotionally charged and reflect personal growth.

Crafting and Editing:

With the theme of death firmly in mind, I set out to craft a story that would resonate on a deep level. Drawing upon personal experiences and weaving in exaggerated truths, I constructed a tale that explored the messy, complicated emotions that accompany loss

Within my first drafts I did find the writing especially hard, I leant more into a third person style which I found, after sharing my piece with a few close friends, did not read as well as I had hoped. The characters were two dimensional and the emotions seemed forced. I considered Baverstock (Baverstock 2006) and Heard’s (Heard, 2018) advice, I needed to consider my audience and keep my characters complex.

After much consideration I decided to ruthlessly edit (Craig 2015) my work and change it to first person leaning towards a balance between fiction and non-fiction, It was tough to make such a big change but I felt the piece would work better if it read like an exaggerated autobiographical recount of my experiences with death. I also found it a lot easier to really make use of  my emotions surrounding significant loss and how I had thought and felt to play into the way the piece read.

However, there was a challenge looming ahead: my initial draft was perfect for the 3000 word count for my assignment but Blood and Bourbon called for a piece that was at a maximum of 2500 words. I had to cut a large 250 word chunk from the beginning and end of the story to make it the correct size for submission, I do think this hindered the depth of the story slightly but not enough that it wouldn’t be suitable to submit.

Submitting the Final Draft:

After weeks of revisions and late-night writing sessions, I arrived at a final draft that I was proud to submit. Raw, gritty, and undeniably real, it encapsulated the essence of what I aimed to convey. I made the unfortunate discovery that Blood and Bourbons submission point on the article I had found was in fact an old submission and they were not seeking stories of death anymore. Determined to still submit my work I found another publisher Months to Years seeking creative nonfiction of 2500 words, I considered if my work would fall into this category and I believed it did, a majority of the experience I had written about was true, I had altered some parts but not enough that it could be considered entirely fictional. I reviewed the fine print of the submission guidelines to make sure my work would be suitable and with that I sent off my piece.

In the end

Although I haven’t heard yet whether my submission will be published I’ve found new confidence in my abilities and what I’m capable of. The journey of creating this piece provided a huge insight into the publishing world and opened my eyes to how many opportunities are waiting for us if we just take them. Don’t be afraid to lean into the discomfort. Embrace the challenge, push your boundaries, and let your words shine!

References:

Heard, W. 2018. Writing Passport: Characters. Scribbler.

Friedman, J. 2018. The Business of Being a Writer. The University of Chicago Press.

Baverstock, A. 2006. Is There a Book in You? A & C Publishers Limited.

Craig. J, 2015. ‘How to win a Creative Writing Competition – Top Tips’, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2015/nov/16/how-to-win-a-creative-writing-competition-joe-craig-tips

Submissions websites:

http://6 Great Places For Themed Submissions – International Writers’ Collective

https://blood-and-bourbon.com/

http://monthstoyears.org/

My words and where do they belong

~ Dhanusha Ranapurwala

A black typewriter set on a white background with a view from it's top and a paper inserted in the typerwriter.

 

On paper and on screens. …Duh!

To leave this blog at this point would be hilarious but the grades wouldn’t be so here is my attempt to break it down.

What type of genre does my writing fall under?

I was raised with Indian mythology, which was often served to me with food, in return Indian mythology ended up serving as a major source of inspiration for most of my short stories and poetry. Typically, the story’s female protagonist provides the perspective for these pieces.

 

According to Ritu Menon, in a Robert Fraser interview, the traditional understanding of feminist writing in the West differs slightly from what feminist writing is. It is the location of the majority of creative pieces’ genres. (Fraser, October 2007)

‘It’s been around for the last twenty years or so. By ‘feminist’ I mean something distinctively so — with a feminist gender perspective, not just a focus on gender studies or women’s studies, which is often the case with mainstream publishing.’[1]

(Menon R. 2007, pg. 11)

 

To find my audience I ended up doing some research:

Types of Publishing Houses and Which one is the best for me?

Perr Henningsgaard {Hennningsgaard, 2020} proposes three models for surveying the many types of publishing firms and determining which mix of houses will allow your writing to flourish. Based on the explanations of each type of publishing firm, I concluded that the ‘Traditional type of publishing house’ was the best fit for my writing and for me to reach t

 

he intended audience. This requires the least amount of financial input from the author, and there are already several well-known authors who have published in the same genre as my writing, but in the form of a novel, which is exactly what I aim to achieve. Authors like Amish with his Shiva Trilogy, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Palace of Illusions, Forest of Enchantments, and the Last Queen.

The best place for me to begin with the form of an engagement is to submit my work to some competitions and anthologies, either in a physical book or in digital form. For example, The Flight of the Dragonflies accepts submissions for their bi-monthly e-journal, but only for poet

 

ry, flash, and short fiction, and Short Fiction Journal accepts short fiction. Aside from these and many other competition sources.

My writing with challenges and solutions:

Since a lot of my work is emotionally charged, I had to learn to show rather than explain. My creative piece was far less interesting than I had anticipated because of this problem. Even while the plot and the story piqued the interest of my readers, it wasn’t sufficient. That’s when my professor saved the day! They lent me a book called How to Write: How to Write and What to Write if You Don’t Have Any Ideas, which helped

 

me with my telling and showing problems (Tondeur, 2017). This provides a step-by-step writing tutorial whether you are just starting, stuck at a certain point, or just need an outline since everything seems overwhelming. It was helpful to me in dealing with the latter.

The characters I created for my work also presented a challenge. In addition,, a lot of writers wind up making their characters two-dimensional due to an abundance of ideas or a lack of ideas for character development. Writing Passport: Characters was the piece that saved my bacon in this situation (Heard, 2018). One of the clearest ideas for developing your characters that I have ever seen was included in this essay.

“It’s important to remember that no one is all good or all bad. When planning a character, we have to keep them complex.”[2]

(Heard, 2018)

 

To Assess the Assessment:

Speaking of highly emotive content, I grew up seeing both Bollywood and Hollywood productions; the latter had a significant impact on me. By influence, I mean that I began to look for the kind of closeness that they displayed, whether it was between a teenage boy and girl or a mother and her daughter. Its one flaw was that it was implausible to ever exist at that level, not to mention that I lived in a place where depictions of closeness and love like that were never found on the gloomiest street or around the corner. In Ziyad Marar’s book, Intimacy:

Ordinary people (at least in Western cultures) do seem to hold a

 

common prototype of what creates intimacy, and we can recognize common themes in researchers’ definitions that are not unlike laypersons’ understandings. Yet, we do not by any means have a common definition.[3]                                                                                   (Mashek & Aron 2004: 417)[i]

As I got older, my idea of intimacy shifted, and I began to see intimacy in the tiniest, most ordinary things. My publishing module’s final work serves as an example of the same. the items I associate with my hometown. Something that will always bring me back to my hometown is the unique connection I have with even the slightest things. The uniqueness and the emotions I have associated with the objects, rather than the objects themselves, are what make my creative piece relatable, even though the objects I have chosen to use aren’t particularly common or even found in every household. Despite this, the piece is still powerful and emotionally moving.

 

‘… close-up scrutiny (with perhaps a voyeuristic edge), connection, privacy, depth of knowledge, the smallest scale of daily life, heightened emotion, something personal or customized (rather than standardized), friendship and ambivalence, as well as, of course, eroticism and sexuality.’ [4]

 

 

(Marar, 2014, pg.24)

 

And to leave on the note of…

Three published novels that are either related to my writing style or sometimes serve as sources of inspiration are On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, 40 Rules of Love, and Five Feet Apart. These are the books I turn to when I’m lacking creative inspiration, even though they don’t resemble the article I submitted for my assessment.  Creating a poetic rendition of a commonplace idea is where it most benefits me, as I have mentioned in my work. As a reader, these works have succeeded in evoking strong emotions in me regarding everything that is connected to the characters, even when the authors have written about the most unrelatable topics.

 

[1] FRASER, R. October 2007. ‘Half the World is Not so Narrow’: Feminist Publishing in India. Wasafiri, 22, 7.

[2] HEARD, W. 2018. Writing Passport: Characters, Scribbler.

[3] MASHEK, D. J., ARON, ARTHUR 20004. Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy.

[4] MARAR, Z. 2014. Intimacy, Routledge.

Bibliography:

FRASER, R. October 2007. ‘Half the World is Not so Narrow’: Feminist Publishing in India. Wasafiri, 22, 7.

HEARD, W. 2018. Writing Passport: Characters, Scribbler.

HENNNINGSGAARD, P. 2020. Types of Publishing Houses. In: ALISON BAVERSTOCK, R. B., MADELENA GONZALEZ (ed.) Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books. London, UK: Routledge.

MARAR, Z. 2014. Intimacy, Routledge.

MASHEK, D. J., ARON, ARTHUR 20004. Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy.

PHILLIPS, A. 2020. The Modern Literary Agent. Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books. st Edition ed.: Routledge.

TONDEUR, L. 2017. How to Write: How to write and what to write if you don’t have any ideas, Self-published.

DIVAKARUNI, CHITRA BANERJEE. 2008. Palace of Illusions (Pan Macmillan: India).

DIVAKARUNI, CHITRA BANERJEE. 2019. Forest of Enchantments (Pan Macmillan: India).

TRIPATHI, AMISH. 2013. The Immortals of Meluha (HarperCollins India).

Lippincott, Rachael. 2018. Five Feet Apart (Simon and Schuster).

Shafak, Elif. 2010. 40 Rules of Love (Penguin Press).

VUONG, OCEAN. 2019. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press).

 

 

The Process of Publishing “The Story of Seraphina:”

a hand holding a pen over paper at a desk lit in bright daylight. there is a laptop and mug also on the desk indicating a home setting
~ Tyler Mitchell

Publishing a short story, especially for an academic module assignment, can be an exciting yet challenging process. When I began on this journey with my story “The Story of Seraphina,” I had no idea of the intricate steps involved in getting a piece ready for publication. Through careful planning, countless revisions, and a deep dive into understanding the publishing world. Here, I share my reflections on this experience, hoping to offer some insight for fellow writers and students.

First things first, I had to wrap my head around what the assignment wanted from me. The module required us to write and publish a short story. Our module leader suggested finding publications that matched our story’s style and themes. So, I made sure “The Story of Seraphina,” with its themes of self-discovery and empowerment, would fit right in.

“The Story of Seraphina” is about a young girl named Seraphina fighting for her freedom in a world that tries to silence and hold her. Seraphina has a supernatural ability, able to create a burning gas from her hands, and is being held captive in a school which functions more like a prison for people who have these gifts. Drawing from my own experiences and those of women around me, I wanted to create a story that felt real and meaningful. My early drafts were all about Seraphina’s inner struggles and how she navigated the small world around her.

Once I had something solid, I joined a group workshop. Sharing my story with peers and getting their feedback was eye-opening. Some pointed out parts where the plot dragged, others spotted inconsistencies in the characters’ behaviour. It was tough to hear, but it made the story a lot stronger in the end. I ended up cutting an entire side character named Leora!

Next, I had to figure out where to send my story. Jane Friedman, in her book “The Business of Being a Writer,” talks about how publishing a short story can be simpler than pitching a whole book (Friedman, J. 2018). This made sense to me, so I started researching magazines and websites that might like “The Story of Seraphina.” I made a list of potential places, like Clarkesworld and Uncanny Magazine. I checked their submission guidelines carefully to make sure my story fit their vibe.

Understanding who might read my story was key to figuring out where to submit it for further publishing. Alison Baverstock talks about figuring out who might want to read your work (Baverstock, A. 2006), and I took that to heart. I looked at past issues of the journals I was interested in to see what kind of stories they liked. This helped me tweak my story to fit their style.

To up my chances of getting published, I entered a few writing competitions. Winning or even getting shortlisted can really boost your confidence as a writer. Dianne Doubtfire says it’s important to research competitions just like you would markets (Doubtfire, D. 1993)., and she’s right. I intend on entering contests like the BBC National Short Story aware, making sure to follow all their rules to a T.

Even though I was aiming for traditional publication, I kept self-publishing in mind as a backup plan. Jane Friedman talks about how online platforms have made self-publishing more accessible, and that got me thinking. Platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing seemed like good options if traditional routes didn’t pan out.

This part was tough. Joe Craig says you have to be ruthless when editing your work (Craig, J. 2015), and he’s not wrong. I took a break from my story for a while to gain some distance, then came back to it with fresh eyes. It was hard, but I knew every cut and tweak was making my story better.

Looking back on this whole process, from brainstorming to publication, I’ve learned so much about writing and the publishing world. It hasn’t been easy, but every step has been worth it. My advice to other writers and students is to embrace the journey fully. Understand your audience, seek feedback, and don’t be afraid to revise. Whether you go traditional or self-publishing, stay true to your story and keep practicing your craft.

In the end, publishing “The Story of Seraphina” was as much about the journey as the story itself. It taught me that with hard work and perseverance, getting published is possible. So, to all the writers out there, keep writing, keep rewriting, and never give up on the stories you want to tell and share with the world.

 

References:

Friedman, J. (2018). The Business of Being a Writer. The University of Chicago Press.

Baverstock, A. (2006). Is There a Book In You. A & C Black Publishers Limited.

Doubtfire, D. (1993). Teach Yourself: Creative Writing. Hodder Education.

Craig, J. (2015) ‘How to Win a Creative Writing Competition – Top Tips.’ The Guardian.

 

Beyond Brick & Mortar: the opportunity to publish in today’s world by Ife Disu

A photo by Aliis Sinisalu from Unsplash. The photo shows a slightly angled top down view of a dark brown desk, on which sit a white coffee mug with brown rectangles, to its left is a brown and orange notebook upon which rests a pen, a pair of glasses and an e-reader with text on the screen.
~ Ife Disu

Beneath the romanticised allure that getting your work published by the “Big 5” publishing houses that dominate the industry, it can be easy to misjudge our own abundant opportunities to publish fictional, non-fictional, or poetic works through other means. Relinquishing our preconceived barriers to these alternate avenues and broadening the scope of the potential for our work to be shared can help us reach our personal and professional goals for publishing in new, inspiring ways.

This is something I can attest to as I developed my creative piece, “Violets from Astroturf”.

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WRAPP – The Writing, Reading And Publishing Podcast

A desk with a notebook, laptop and coffee on it, ready to work on.
~ Roxanne Clark

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Publishing Short Story Collections

Link ~ ~ Rob Vanston
Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

‘Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction’[1]

J. G. Ballard

You’ve just finished writing your short story, what next?

Do you send it out to endless magazines and competitions, or do you get brave and try and get your first anthology published first? What do you do? After all your favourite authors like Stephen King, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter all have collections of their own. Shouldn’t yours be up there right next to theirs? For me, I can see myself submitting ‘The Bone Flowers’ to a niche magazine such as Shoreline of Infinity or perhaps Uncanny, both specialise in science fiction and fantasy, with a touch of horror. But be aware, some publications may ask you to edit it to make it suitable to publish. In fact, I had to make several changes to ‘The Bone Flowers’ just so it would make this blog including removing several characters to concentrate on Dave and Daisy’s narrative, taking out a violent sub plot, and adding more realistic emotions; all of which were legitimate changes that improved the storytelling. Author Tobias Wolff is known for constantly revising his short stories as he says ‘These are not holy texts. This isn’t the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is work that as long as it’s available to me to make better, I will.’[2]

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