Author: Tom

A Scotsman who lives in England. An ex-Serviceman (23 years), ex-Retail (25 years). From 2007 - Creative Writer and Artist.

Rhyme and Reason

On By TomIn Competitions, General, Insight, Poetry1 Comment

I may be close to my 620th poem in three years but I don’t consider myself a poet.  I would prefer to be thought of as a writer who dabbles in verse.

Whilst this year was in it’s infancy I had three short stories, a monologue and a poem entered in competitions.  I made a vague promise to myself that I would cut back to no more than two poems per week.  Storytelling I decided, was to take precedence. 

It’s not yet the end of February and I’ve already written 26 poems this year.  Before I’m judged too harshly please consider the content of my verse.  Since January alone there has been; medieval conflict (a series of 7), vengeance of a marooned sailor, assassins, New York, romance and a couple of collaborations about passion. 

The thing I do enjoy about poetry is that I can relate a story idea rapidly and the thought process used in rhyming actually forces me to work harder with the plot.  Why is that a good thing?  For the main part because it is a simple framework to expand later into a short story.  My latest theory is to try to open with action, as I would with a conventional piece of prose.

Photographic Memory – origins

On By TomIn Competitions, General2 Comments

My tale about a UN soldier being stranded in an African township after his patrol vehicle is blown up.   This short story started it’s life as a project for the weekly writing class I attend as one of the Inkerman Writers.  My inspiration came from watching various news footage and seeing the acceptance on the faces of some of the older generation.  Our leader, John Dean proposed that we have our story develop   over a seven to ten week period.  All writers would then read out their completed work in the last three weeks of term .                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

The week after initiating our stories he gave us the task of introducing a character that didn’t originally belong to see how it would affect the dynamics of the tale.  As reported in a recent blog post, I introduced a character and killed him off rapidly, but he played his part. 

Recently, as is my habit I’ve been working on more than one story but this one was crying out to be completed.  I spent six hours on it during my day off last week.  From initial draft of 2500 words, I’ve printed and edited it about seven times over the last four days.  I did manage to leave it aside for one whole day.  It arrived at the point where I was satisfied with it just two hours ago, complete with target count of 2000 words.  I’ve entered it into the Global Writers Short Story Competition for February.

For anyone interested, it’s also posted here in the left hand column under Short Stories.