The Fine Line’s inaugural short story competition is now closed.
Whatever your taste, style or inspiration, submit your tale and you could win £200 ($320/€230) and publication in The Fine Line Short Story Collection. A percentage of all entry fees goes to charity so you’ll be doing good while getting your work out there.

Email your story with contact details and the name of the charity, from those below, to which you would like the donation to be made to editorial.consultancy@gmail.com.

Click here to add your competition entry to your cart, and proceed to checkout.

The Rules

The competition is open to anyone. Only employees of The Fine Line or The Fine Line Editorial Consultancy may not enter.

Maximum word count for each entry is 5000 words. There is no minimum word count.

Entries must be entirely the work of the entrant and must never have been published, self-published, published on any website or public online forum, broadcast nor winning or placed in any other competition.

The entry fee is £5 ($8/€6) per story. Payment is made online via credit/debit card or PayPal. Entries will not be read until payment has been received.

£1 of every entry fee will be donated to charity. Entrants should specify the charity to which they wish the donation to be made in the email accompanying their entry: Irving House, Cricket for Change, or Home-Start Worldwide.

Entries should be sent as email attachments to editorial.consultancy@gmail.com.

Entrants may submit as many stories as they wish.

Worldwide copyright of each entry remains with the author, but The Fine Line will have the unrestricted right to publish the winning and runner-up stories, in the short story anthology and any relevant promotional material.

First prize is £200 plus publication in The Fine Line short story anthology. Twelve runners-up will also be published in the anthology.

The judges’ decision is final and no individual correspondence can be entered into.

The deadline for entries is the 15th of June, 2011.

Winners will be notified by the 30^th of June, 2011.

The Charities

Irving House is where special animals are cared for by special people. Not a shelter or adoption facility, Irving House is designed for allowing animals who otherwise would face life in a cage or worse, to live out the remainder of their lives in safety, comfort, and love while providing whatever medical attention they may require. Our rescues come to us from the streets or from death row or from simple surrenders. They might be blind or sick or old, but dog or cat or even rabbit, the one thing they all have in common is the neglect and abuse they endured before arriving at our door. We get them well, we gain their trust, we give them love, comfort and care and a safe haven to call home. At Irving House, we welcome the ones that others turn away and create second chances where there was once no chance at all. To find out more, go to Irving House

Set up 30 years ago, Cricket for Change uses cricket as a vehicle to help children and young people living in underprivileged and difficult circumstances. Hit The Top is the world’s largest cricket project for young people with disabilities; the Street Chance and Street Team Projects work with communities to provide cricket facilities; the C4C Apprenticeship trains young people to be cricket coaches; and the Refugee Cricket Project helps child refugees, affected by war and natural disaster, to learn English and cricket, and provides them with any necessary advocacy. The charity works overseas with partners such as UNICEF and the ICC, providing help and cricket facilities for children in over 15 countries. To read on, go to Cricket for Change

Home-Start Worldwide is based on a very simple and practical idea: we train local volunteers, usually parents themselves, to support local parents who need help. Most services already know what they will offer: medical care, a loan of money, information or training, for example. Volunteers have to be ready for anything. Their first job when home visiting a family is to listen. The second priority is to help the family make links with the local community so that they will gradually feel more confident in their environment. One week a volunteer might be helping with the shopping, making sure the children are involved, and another week cutting out pictures with the children while their mother gets some much needed sleep. The volunteer’s job is largely dictated by the family themselves, although volunteers will suggest activities if they think they will help. Formed in 1999, there are now Home-Start schemes in 22 countries. For more information, go to Home-Start Worldwide

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Writing at its best seduces.  This is your aim: to take the reader into the world of your making and convince them to stay.  The urge to write begins with enticement and so should the urge to read.  You got into writing for all manner of reasons: love, ego, boredom, money, fame.  What you need to keep you in it is passion.  Writing should become a compulsion to you.  Nothing less will make that world.  You want to write?  Then make it something you can’t be without.  “Language is wine upon the lips,” said Virginia Woolf.  So it should be with you.

Think back to when you first learnt to read.  Sound out the vowels and consonants.  Remember how those letters you laboured over looked to you on the page.  It’s not just a cerebral thing, forming words.  There are curves and lines that took time to learn – at first your hand was scrappy and the pencil awkward, slowly you learnt to form the letters.  Most likely, the first thing you learnt to write was your own name.  Then they were more than just rote-learned symbols and laborious alphabet recitations.  Suddenly you had some ownership over those letters – lines and curves on a page that signified you.  You built those letters up into words and you had language.  To succeed as a writer, you have to love what language can create.  The reader won’t stir to the efforts of a half-hearted lover.  You have to take words and make of them something new.  You have to take what you see, smell, hear, taste and touch and make it real.  What is it that you want the reader to experience?  How are you going to get them there?  With words.  It started as straggly scrawl – lines on a page – but once you make letters into words and words into language, it becomes something new entirely.  It is a tool to communicate the depth, breadth, and height of every loathsome, sexy, joyous, mundane, peculiar human experience.  And any new ones you care to invent.  Get a handle on that tool and you can do anything.

The relationship between a writer and reader is one of reciprocal need: you need the gratification implicit in the reader’s desire for your words and they need your words to envelop their mind.  Your writing can give them a fifteen-minute distraction on the train home or it can divert them from all that their life contains, making them question everything they ever accepted and believed.  It depends on what you want to achieve.  Why people read is as varied as why people write so a few moments’ distraction is as valuable as an experience from which they will emerge indefinitely (perhaps indefinably) altered.  Everyone has become lost in a book at some time in their lives.  It’s for the ever-surprising plot, the tangle of language from which it is difficult to extricate ourselves, or the slightly narcissistic search for self or sense of self-recognition, as though no one knows us like the writer.  We read to learn, to disappear, to switch off, to hope that we will know our lovers a little better by reading their favourites.  Consider why you read.  What is it you want from a book?  Is it to be distracted or diverted, entertained or irrevocably changed, to experience familiarity or lives so far removed from your own the characters could well exist on another planet?  Take what it is you want from reading and transplant it onto your writing.  Write what you want to read, whether it’s genre-bound or the book you wish was out there.

Why, how and what you write is something you’ll have to work out.  What writing means to you – its place in your life – is also there to be decided.  How you come to writing will determine how it comes to you.  Indifferent prose will be the reward of the indifferent writer.  If that is your approach, you might write a Blake Carrington but you won’t write a Heathcliff.  You won’t know the intoxication of Woolf’s wine or Emily Bronte’s capitulation to the craft to which she was held darkly in thrall.  “The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master – something that at times strangely wills and works for itself,” wrote Charlotte Bronte, introducing her sister’s book.  “Be the work grim or glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption.  As for you – the nominal artist – your share in it has been to work passively under dictates you neither delivered nor could question – that would not be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your caprice.”

Writing need not be your oxygen.  It need not be a near-death experience for you or those around you.  It isn’t necessary to feel, as Virginia Woolf did, that the only thing keeping her alive was writing, rendering her suicidal at the end of every book so she was forced to start another til finally she succumbed to the waters of the river Ouse.  Anaïs Nin wrote of herself, “I am truly mute without writing”.  Reading romance, you can fall in love with a character without, as Mary Wollstonecraft feared all women would, abandoning all educational aspirations and settling for marriage to a winsome cad.  Elizabeth Smart lost everything to her muse, George Barker, ravenous for both the man and his work.  Scott Fitzgerald robbed Zelda of far more than her wealth in a bid to stop her writing, but still she wrote.  I could go on: the road of great writing is littered with those who’ve suffered for their craft through poverty, broken marriages, nervous breakdowns, suicides, obsessions, violence, and perversity.  That is the way creativity worked for them.  But don’t ape the antics of writers you admire and think it will make you great.  Find your own way to seduce.  Lure the reader into your world and always remember that purpose.  Writing doesn’t need affectation – it needs passion.

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