29 August 2008 Melbourne Writers Festival

Kit Fletcher

I learnt a couple of things while writing the story for this competition and I’d like to share them with you, in the hope that perhaps some of you might find them useful.
One is about finding the story
And the other is about drawing the reader in.

So, finding the story.
Now I’m a veteran of this competition in that I’ve had a crack at it twice before. Both times under assumed names, fortunately. And both times my stories didn’t place.

Nevertheless, I thought I’d have another go. The prizes were good. So I began by using my same old technique of trying to write a story on any aspect of the inner city of Sydney which popped into my head.
I started writing:
An historic story.
A romance.
A work story.
A tourist story.
An amusing train story.
A talent contest story.
A story from the point of view of someone living rough.
A compulsive, obsessive story.
A student story.
A graffiti artist story.
A soldering a car around a tree story.

And they were all rubbish.

So, in despair, I set myself an exercise.
Pick 3 things, 3 small aspects of inner city life.
Write a page on each. Then combine them into a story.
I think I chose the Sydney Harbour Bridge, catching a train and my friend’s house. I have a friend who has an house in Redfern in the inner city of Sydney.

Well, this had a degree of success but the three small things turned out to be quite big things and competed with one another and I had a word count to think of.
What it did show me though was that the thing I was actually most interested in writing about was my friend’s house in Redfern.
And I started to think that perhaps that’s what the judges meant by inner city life.

The next thing I did was a bit odd.
Often when I sit down to write, after I’ve written my journal, I take a word randomly chosen from the dictionary and write a page on that, to limber up.

So, this time I decided to write a page on mushrooms, a page on paper bags and a page on my friend’s house in Redfern and combine them.

Then I just wrote. About anything I could think of which was a combination of the three. Not really a story, just thoughts.
And as I wrote, the mushrooms and the paper bags worked as filters for the house story until I’d discovered a whole lot of things about the house which I hadn’t known before. What it was like growing up in the house, eating mushrooms and using paper bags, how a real estate agent discribed the house while eating at an all-mushroom restaurant, the house as metaphor for a paper bag salesman’s life.
And eventually, as I wrote, the mushrooms and the paper bags were themselves filtered out and I was just writing about the house. But richly.

Then I went back through the pages and made a big list of all the bits I liked.
I ordered the list into something resembling a story and started to write and as I did:
I thought about, the second part of this talk, drawing the reader in.
Now a lot of people enter the NSW Writers’ Centre Inner City Life Competition every year and the judges have to wade through a ton of entries.
What was going to make my story memorable?
Because I wanted to win. There were book vouchers at stake.

• Well, to start with, I chose to write in the first person. Beginning the story in a familiar, Hemingway-esque kind of way, getting alongside the reader from the outset. I used a lot dialogue for the some reason. Cut-down dialogue. Which is the way we speak so familiar but is also advantageous when working to a tight word limit.

• Secondly, I decided to put a twist in the tail, to make the reader think.

• Thirdly, I tried to make the story real to the reader by systematically going through and making sure I’d mentioned a sense-related thing about every two sentences.
“fingers combing the potted rosemary.”
“sausages on a BBQ.”
“a laugh like a dawn magpie.”
“the balcony, slippery with jacaranda flowers.”
After that, I went back and made the writing uneven so it didn’t sound false.
For example - “This landing is so quaint,” she coos. “Leads to the back rooms, a toilet (not a bathroom, that’s on the next level) and up these stairs ... the master bedroom.”
I mean, what’s that? That’s a mess.
It’s wasteful and risky writing. But it’s necessessary.
Even when you’re working to a word limit of 5oo.

Yes, a page and a bit. I didn’t want to mention that earlier in case I was laughed off the stage for my audacity at getting up here. But I’m at the end of the talk now so ...

I’ll conclude by saying that I found it a great exercise to try to fit a story into 500 words.
It certainly has made my writing more succinct.
If not my speeches.