SOMEONE LIKES MY STORIES

It's always good to be read and I think that's why I enter the competitions I do… to be read, even if only by a few more readers. And getting into anthologies guarantees a handful more, but only a handful. If you really want to be read, then a literary magazine is the next step up, for the readership is a wee bit bigger there. Publication of one's own collection would be next...

Anyway, it's nice to be read, and it's nice to get feedback on what one has written - another reason why one might enter a competition and why I still enter a few hear and there over the passage of a year. Getting a podium spot in a competition is good for the ego (briefly at least) and may tell you that something in your story is working. A shortlisting or a longlisting does the same, though it's not quite the same tonic for the ego.

I have one private reader in particular - and you do have to be careful with 'friends' who are readers, but this is a reader I have never met and who occasionally gives me feedback. That's always useful - she gives me critical pointers, too, and she also tells me to get on with it if I'm dilly-dallying. Anyway, she has just sent me some comments which are rather nice and I want to share one of them here:

She said:  

"I believe a steady diet of your stories would make anyone kinder, less apt to judge and gentler…"

I like that because it is true to what I think I am, as a teacher, as a writer and as a person. It's true to what I think we should all be. So thank you to my particular private reader, for getting what I am trying to do with my writing.

I think it was David Lean, the British film director, who said he did not have any great message to impart in his work - he just had good stories to tell. I think he was being a bit disingenuous, but I still like that he said this - it's what gave me permission to write and still does. However, I do have something to say, a message of sorts, and it is about being non-judgmental and gentler and kinder. Seems a big enough and important enough message to me.