Who’s joining me in my writing challenge?
This award-winning novelist is about to write his first novel for NaNoWriMo.
‘Novelist’ is a whopping exaggeration, but the one and only time I wrote a piece of fiction and officially submitted it, I won a competition.
That was 34 years ago – $100.
It was a short story I wrote in high school and though I can’t find it, I am certain it was terrible. I have many of the follow-up stories with the same character, a kid named Johnny, that I never submitted but when I read them now…they are hysterically atrocious. One was titled ‘Johnny Goes to Hell’ and featured him being tortured by Satan in a gimp costume. Good thing I didn’t submit that for the competition.
Thankfully, I’m not about to resurrect Johnny from the depths of hell. I’m going to stick to what I know…which isn’t much, but hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere.
My/Our Challenge: Micro, Flash, Short, Novel
The Daily Telegraph once ran a 50-word short story competition, they might have referred to them as micro-stories, or perhaps I came up with that. The idea was adapted for a well-known English Teaching course book (bonus points for any readers who can remember which one, and I have a couple in mind that I’m certain will guess it right away).
50 words exactly – no more, no less – is challenging for anyone, let alone language learners, especially those who speak languages lacking articles (a, an, the) and prepositions (at, in, of, by, etc). I think it’s a splendid activity; my students over the years, less so.
I’m going to show off just a wee bit here, but I was once helping a semi-famous Ukrainian singer with his song lyrics in English, tidying up the grammar and pronunciation and whenever I tried to insert an article for accuracy purposes, he would argue with me and say that it would affect the melody and other musical technical mumbo jumbo, but I insisted on getting it right.
Here's me trying to reason with Ivan Dorn. He’s not buying it.
Only recently did I hear the term flash fiction, and I have no idea how long it’s been around. I suppose these micro-stories qualify as such? Or does it require a time limit, like say, 15 minutes to write as much as you can? I used to do an activity like this during my final year of high school English class, called rapid writes. It’s daunting at first – 15 minutes to write as much as you can or want on a topic or addressing a question – but works wonders for critical thinking and it’s something I’ve used a lot over the years with my students. They grumble at first, but even the most obstinate of them realise the value.
One of my favourite parts of language teaching is creating my own texts for classes, most of which feature some utterly bizarre, warped and inappropriate humour, not to mention one or two things that would probably get me cancelled. I’m proud to say that many of my more professional and less controversial texts were used worldwide in the official class materials for my former employer, one of the more prestigious language teaching institutions in the world (although they are also a bunch of jerks; I shall divulge much more on this one day and spill the beans).
(Luckily for the world, I am currently compiling a collection of my favourite texts from over the years and will be releasing them for free on Amazon sometime in December – stay tuned.)
Halloween is a fun time for writing activities, mainly because of the juicy and evocative vocabulary. Here’s an example of flash fiction that I might or might not be proud of. I’d forgotten to create a model text for the class to use and I created this one right on the spot in front of them on the interactive whiteboard, I swear in no more than 30 seconds. The new vocabulary is in bold:
I woke up one morning to the smell of rotting flesh. There was pus oozing out of my skin. I heard a scream. It sounded like a woman was being tortured. There was a tapping at my door, and the floor was creaking. I looked at my stomach: my guts were coming out. There was a wooden stake in my back: I had been stabbed! I heard a witch cackling. What was happening? Had I been impaled? Was I…a…vampire?!
Please don’t judge me – I can do better! I was trying to cram in as much vocabulary and as wide a range of verb tenses as possible.
Who’s up for NaNoWriMo?
As in, the National Novel Writing Month. Anyone care to join me in the fun?
Thousands of people take part and the rules are simple: 50,000 words by the end of November. That’s an average of 1,667 words a day. Easy peasy.
This year has featured quite the controversy – many people are boycotting because, believe it or not, they allow you to use AI tools.
I’m not planning on submitting anything official and honestly, I don’t know all that much about it other than the word count requirement. And from what I understand, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a novel, but I’ve decided to practise what I preach and get out of my comfort zone and give myself a challenge.
No matter how bad my novel is, I plan on trying to make something out of it. I have a very rough idea, and I think it’ll be fun.
Some of those not officially taking part in NaNoWriMo are doing their own challenges and if you’d like to take part, you can write as little or as much as you want. Language learners, I’ll happily share my thoughts and give feedback. How about a 10,000-word short story? How’s that for a language learning challenge? A few micro-stories or 100-word pieces of flash fiction? Anything!
For goodness’ sakes, no using ChatGPT. Do I need to say this? I’ve never understood why my students started using it so prolifically upon its release in autumn 2022. They were LEARNING a LANGUAGE for crying out loud, what’s the feckin’ point? (I’ve just returned from Dublin)
Even more baffling? The ones using it for exam preparation courses! They’re meant to be practising their writing skills to take a timed writing exam under strict conditions where it is 100% impossible to cheat, so why are they cheating?
Trust teachers – we always know when you are doing this – we’re not dummies. If you can barely string a sentence together (“I very like…go swimming…when I…be on the…holiday”) you are not suddenly going to magically produce a flawless but clunkily written essay on topics like crime, education, public policy, and early 18th century Hungarian cabinet making. I’ve always told my students that if they are going to cheat, then at least change some of the articles and prepositions to make it believable.
(I feel like it’s important to say this: I am aware that there a few of my former students from exam preparation classes who subscribe and read my posts, and unless some of these guilty parties have changed their email addresses, I am almost certain that none of them/you were cheating; anyway, someone who cheats on things like this isn’t likely to be spending their time developing their reading skills when there are easier ways to master English with ChatGPT. Yes, that was sarcasm!)
Who’s up for collaboration?
If you’re not a language learner, I’m not interested in your novels – sorry, haha, lol, #imajerk. But I am very interested in collaboration, whether that’s guest posts, ideas if you have any, podcasting – this goes for everyone. Don’t be shy, get in touch, DM me, send a carrier pigeon with a note, use smoke signals to grab my attention, hire one of those planes with a banner and have it fly across Vienna with a message.
I’m also happy to write guest posts.
Who’s up for English lessons?
I jokingly have ‘semi-retired EFL teacher’ in my profile, simply because it’s been a while since I’ve worked. I haven’t ruled out returning to the teaching ranks, but for now, I’m in no great rush to and I love writing full-time. Sadly, it doesn’t make ends meet just yet and my creditors have been telling me that it might be time to swim with the fishes, which is awfully kind of them. I owe them all this money and yet they want to treat me to a seaside holiday.
If you are a language learner – and there’s a good chance that I was your teacher at one point – and interested in conversational lessons or speaking exam practice (IELTS, for example) get in touch and we can arrange something.
It’s a bit odd that I’m announcing this here when there are already people who have asked me for lessons, and I’ve said no. There’s a reason for that – I’ve never lied to anyone when I said I didn’t have time because of my teaching and writing commitments and what my contract stipulated. I’ve never lied to anyone when I said I’ve never done private 1-1 lessons in my two decades of teaching because they kind of terrify me. I’m not about to start lying now.
I’m flattered whenever people ask for private lessons, but this is the way I want to go about – if you read my drivel and put up with my nonsense and make it to the end of these posts, then you are the type of person I’d love to teach. It’s as simple as that. The reality is, too many students I’ve known over the years haven’t done anything on their own to improve their skills, whether it’s reading or listening and if you can’t be bothered to do that, we’re unlikely to get along when I tell you that you NEED to do some extra work if you really want to boost your vocabulary or make the most of lessons.
For now, I’d love to hear in the comments from anyone planning to partake in the NaNoWriMo or an offshoot of it.
You can even post some micro-stories or flash fictions below and I may compile a few and make a post out of them.
Let the writing fun begin!
Get my book here: A Classroom in Kyiv
One of the things I tried this summer was flash fiction! I thought it would be easier than writing a lengthy, unflashy piece. I didn’t know there was a time limit on it, just a word limit. It was fun, but just as difficult as any other writing in the end. I also heard about the November challenge thing. I’d be up for it if I was still thinking of doing a book. May be next year …
I don't write anywhere near enough for someone whose job is writing 😬 so maybe I will join the writing challenge (and then inevitably give up ten days in)