Pivot!

I managed to write around 7000 words of my novel. Which would have been great, had I not come across a plotting worksheet which emphasised that what I was writing was, in fact, rubbish. Not just first draft rubbish, but that the central concept was rather bleh. It simply wasn’t very interesting.

I was, am, writing a short story on a speculative theme at the same time. And it’s this story I’ve decided to take forward instead. It hurt to have to throw away a week’s work but better that than 60,000 words like it could have been.

Now, there’s two special bursary’s being offered by writing programmes here in the UK. Both close by early February. One requires the first 3000 words, the other the first 1500 words from 10,000 completed. So not onerous, especially if you’re writing the novel anyways.

The chance is to get on either a six month or twelve month writing programme. Like a shortened MA in Creative Writing in that you end up with a full length manuscript. Which is more than you’d complete on a MA which is usually 15,000 albeit highly edited. Given a MA (or MLitt at Glasgow), costs £8-15,000 and there doesn’t tend to be much, if any funding available apart from a loan for fees, the opportunity to learn intensively for free is amazing.

Of course, I’m expecting this to be extremely competitive. One of the offers has runner up prizes of premium membership to their learning platform worth £200 which I also wouldn’t turn down as they have self-learning courses on novel writing which would also be extremely useful.

So I leave you having written approximately 2000 words of this new story. I just have to keep pushing through to early February to get those 10,000 words completed so I can apply for both. Deadlines are 9th and 15th of February.

I’ll come back when I’ve completed my 10,000 and I’ve returned to editing the first 3000 words that are required for the applications.

How about you? What writing projects are you working on or competitions are you entering?