Tag: Short Story Competition

How I Wrote ‘High-Intensity Interval Training’

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(Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash)

Writers are often asked where they get their ideas from. Mostly that’s a difficult question to answer, but this story had a very definite moment of inspiration. It was conceived while doing a Joe Wicks workout in lockdown, which I think is the first time I’ve ever got anything truly satisfying out of exercise. Writing really is 90 per cent perspiration.

I love stories in which the structure complements, comments on and expands the theme and plot. With the HIIT workouts, I quickly realised that the different exercises could provide a workable structure. The ‘Warm Up’ and ‘Cool Down’ provided an obvious beginning and ending, and it was a short step from there to the idea that this could be about the course of a relationship.

Then it was a case of selecting the exercises that could be used as stepping stones in that relationship arc. Some lent themselves very quickly: I saw how I could use ‘Mountain Climbers’ and ‘Plank’ and ‘Butt Kicks’, but I knew I needed something more. That’s where the ‘Russian Twist’ came in.

My dad has never been keen to discuss his childhood and indeed appears to have forgotten almost every detail of his past. I’d picked up bits of information here and there. In particular, I believed that his grandparents were Russian Jews, who came over to England to escape the early twentieth-century pogroms in Russia. I asked him once if he knew anything about this and he said no, though he called his grandmother ‘Bushka’. It may be a stretch to definitively link this to the Russian word babushka, meaning ‘grandmother’, and I may never find out the truth, but it planted a seed that eventually provided a key theme in the story and made it about something deeper than merely keeping fit.

I knew the story worked, but was hesitant to send it out. It takes me so long to write a story that it often feels out of date by the time it’s finished. I didn’t know if anybody would want to read a story about lockdown workouts so long after the lockdowns were over. I was therefore stunned and delighted when the story won the Hammond House International Literary Prize.

You can read the story here (click on the down arrow on the right-hand side of that page to expand the text).

How I Wrote ‘Uffington’

I’ve loved the Uffington White Horse on the Oxfordshire/Berkshire border since I first visited as teenager. One of the many figures carved out of the chalk hillsides across southern England, it’s the only one that has been dated to prehistoric times. Nobody knows for certain who made it or what it represents, though some say it’s a depiction of Epona, the Celtic goddess of fertility.

Over the years I’ve tried to write about this place many times, but nothing quite gelled. Then I read that in previous centuries there was an annual ‘scouring’ of the horse – a clean-up operation to keep the figure free of weeds. This scouring would be accompanied by much debauchery. The work is still done annually by volunteers for the National Trust, with new chalk hammered into the ground to freshen up the whiteness, but without the debauchery.

It was this notion of ‘scouring’ that really caught my imagination. Could this be applied to a character, perhaps in the sense of metaphorically sloughing off skin to reveal a new identity underneath?

So, the story would be called ‘The Scouring’ and have that element in it, plus lots more – betrayal, affairs, strange apparitions, debauchery . . . I did draft after draft over a couple of years and by the time I’d finished, I thought it was the best thing I’d ever written.

But then several beta readers showed me that what I’d done was really not working at all.

Hard to take, of course, but once I’d licked my wounds I realised they were right. A line I once wrote in one of my many unpublished novels came back to me: ‘There are only three things wrong with this piece of writing: the beginning, the middle and the end.’

I went back to the drawing board, changed the title and the characters, and the whole premise. And the beginning, the middle and the end. The only thing that remained was the figure of the white horse itself.  

More drafts, and finally there was ‘Uffington’, which to my astonishment has won the HISSAC Short Story Competition. You can read it here: http://www.hissac.co.uk/uploads/Shorts2021.pdf