Suraya Dewing's blog

My editor is my best friend and she is remarkable.

This is because when she is editing my work she is not bothered about how I might feel when she fixes my mistakes or points them out. These mistakes can be continuity problems, grammatical slip ups or any number of things I miss when I am in full creative flight.

So, in fact, she is my very best friend when she is not trying to be.

When my editor dispassionately points out my errors, she makes me look good to my readers. And that is what good friends do. They watch out for each other. She has my back!

One of the mistakes some writers make is to slip into telling the reader everything that’s going on in sweeping generalisations. A reader won't see what a writer is visualising until the writer describes the scene, character or action. Until then it is a blank.

All any reader can ever see is what the writer allows him or her to see and the only way the reader can do this is if the writer takes the time to describe it.

The Story Mint has just published its first Anthology of collaboratively written short stories. There are twelve stories written by 32 authors from eight countries. It is an amazing achievement and it is a world first.

We learnt a great deal from this experiment. However, it was so successful we intend to repeat it.

We have just released Everyone Has a Story, which is a set of short stories created from The Story Mint’s earliest serials. There are 12 stories, written by 32 authors from 8 countries and, as Kalli Deschamps says in her review, “The serials are well written with a beginning, middle and ending; complete as though written by one author.”

As writers we mix our experiences, associations and stories in a unique way. No-one else will tell a story like each of us does even if it is on the same topic.

While we were at the Melbourne Writers Festival I attended a session chaired by a successful Melbourne independent bookseller. He had two publishers, Henry Rosenbloom, founder of Scribe Publishers and still in business after 40 years, and Louise Ryan, Penguin Publishers on the panel. As can be expected they were asked what publishers look for in a manuscript. Both had the same answer. That answer made me sit bolt upright.

Why do writing experts always advise us to use the writing principle of show don’t tell?

I find that when I am reading a writer who uses show don’t tell I am absorbed and fully engaged with the story. Those stories are the ones I cannot put down.

The reason for this is the language is cinematic and active sentences prevail. There is more detail and description. I am not simply told something happened I am shown what happened and I am part of the action as a reader. Love that feeling.

A major building block in a good story is tension. Tension can be as simple as surprise at the way the writer has shaped a sentence, conjured an image or set up a series of events that create within the reader a curiosity that will not be satisfied until we find the answer to our initial question, why, what or how.

Tension is the key to engaging readers and to keep them turning the pages of your short story, novel or piece of non-fiction.  There is no reason to keep turning the pages if nothing is happening.

                                Lighting fires

Fires burned in the hearts of students from Room 26 of Matipo School this week and it was exciting to witness. We were giving the stylecheck a trial run in the class to see if it could make writing more fun for students.

Their teacher arranged the 25 students into teams of two or three and asked them to write what they liked about Matipo School.

Alex Keegan says in his article writing winning stories that writing for competitions is a way to increase your output, and this is true. This is one positive outcome of not winning. Winning is a bonus!

And who of us doesn’t want to win? Yes, we all do!