Thursday, January 21, 2016

Short story talk...

I've been asked to waffle on about short stories quite a lot recently, I thought I'd share it all with you - first, here are a blue-tinged me and Kirsty Logan at Fictions Of Every Kind in Leeds in November, talking about short stories and writing:



Next, I was honored to be interviewed over at The Short Story, here's a snippet:

How has the editing process informed your own work?
 
What an interesting question! First, I have to say that it’s far easier to spot things in someone else’s work than it is in your own. What I do when I offer suggestions on someone else’s story is to remember to come at it from within what the writer wants to do, not how I would write that story.

And this week the wonderful folk at the Bristol Short Story Prize, for whom I am a judge this year, asked me a few more questions:
What influence do you think doing a PhD has had on your writing?

As a short story writer – and now also a poet – while I loved what I was doing, no-one was really waiting for me to do anything, by which I mean, I imposed my own deadlines, motivated myself. I didn’t have an agent chivvying me, for example. So the main reason for me to undertake a PhD in Creative Writing was to have a framework, to get gently yet firmly chivvied!  
You may discover that I disagree with myself in these interviews - any thoughts on your own writing processes, what competitions mean to you? Please do share in the comments!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You say in one of the interviews that 'I had banished all my inhibitions when it comes to fiction-writing' - could you expand on that some more?

Tania Hershman said...

Hello, The Hill! Thanks for stopping by. Well, in a nutshell, it took years to finally be able to write without inhibitions. I think it was a combination of writing a LOT over 10 years, especially flash fiction, and becoming less precious and attached to each piece, and understanding how I work best, which is that I often do something else while I am writing (play online scrabble, tweet) which seems to distract my Inner Editor! Do you have anything like this that you'd like to share?