The first competition had 30,000 entries; the second more than 74,000. How many will be attracted to this year’s 500 Words challenge, launched by Chris Evans on his Radio 2 morning show on Monday? It’s open to any young person — under the age of 13 — to come up with a winning short story.
To create a fiction that works as a vivid, compelling narrative in just 500 words, and no more, is no easy task. Shorter means crisper, sharper, edgier and more focused; no dead wood. That’s hard enough for a seasoned grown-up. The young writer must quickly learn how to stick to the point, to conjure up a scene or say what they want to say, in just over a page of single-spaced A4.
On Monday, at the launch, Evans directed prospective winners to the competition’s webpage, where this year’s judges give their tips on how to begin. Just think, what if? says the award-winning children’s writer Jacqueline Wilson. ‘Think of something ordinary and then couple it with something extraordinary…Don’t copy other people’s ideas. It’s always best to be original.’ But none of the panel of experts gives the best tip of all: read what you’ve written out loud to yourself. Check the rhythm of the words. Cut what doesn’t sound right.
In spite of being a Radio 2 competition, no story was read out on air as an inspiration. There was no mention at the launch of the power of listening to stories on radio. Probably, I suspect, because children don’t expect to find stories that were written for them, and only them, on radio. They’re so hard to find now on the BBC’s schedules. There’s the four o’clock slot on Radio 4 Extra, and the odd dramatised adaptation on Radio 4, but these tend to be stories that adults can enjoy as well.
Yet hearing stories, rather than reading them, is how we first discover the power of the imagination, of being taken out of ourselves, and away into another, quite different world. In the past 90 years, radio has been keeping our ears attuned to the necessary skill of listening, but for how much longer? Without enough stories being broadcast, tempting and encouraging children to begin listening, how will they pick up the radio habit?
At the end of the very same day Seamus Heaney was on Radio 3, giving us a master-class on how listening to well-chosen words that have been well placed in poetic sequence can help us deal with winter’s necessary melancholy. In his essay for this week’s series of five Anglo-Saxon Portraits (produced by Mohini Patel), Heaney talked about the power and influence of the professional court poets who in the supposed Dark Ages created the poems that celebrate Beowulf, the Wanderer and the Far Traveller. These aural poets were, he says, ‘word hoarders’, whose skill in ‘entwining words’ ensured the fame and destiny of the lordly rulers who employed them.
In less than 15 minutes, Heaney took us back to the draughty, smoke-filled halls where once the poets held sway, entertaining the company with stories of triumph over evil monsters and travels to far-distant places, in verse that ‘communicates before it’s understood and which remains with you in the imagination after it is understood’. Even in translation, Heaney persuaded us, these poems have ‘a strangeness and communication that is more than lexical’. We hear more than we can at first process in our heads, picking up the ‘heart’s truth’ that lies behind the mere sound of the words.
On the night before, the Radio 3 feature (produced by Fiona McLean) also gave us Anglo-Saxon poetry as Alexandra Harris looked at our island obsession not so much with weather but with being cold. In A Brief History of Cold we heard from Beowulf, Keats, Robert Boyle, A.S. Byatt and Simon Armitage as Harris demonstrated how the cold has ‘spread its frosty way through our lives and language’. Cold is anti-life, it’s brooding, menacing, she argued, but it’s also enticing. We talk of ‘being cool’, sophisticated, as well as giving someone the cold shoulder, or making their blood run cold. Yet we’re now the most heated generation ever, our central heating turning us into feeble imitations of the hardy souls who once were so enthralled by the Anglo-Saxon
adventurers.
With perfect timing for these snowy, wintry days, Harris gave us Keats’s hare, limping through the frozen grass, his silent flock ‘in woolly fold’ (Sunday was actually St Agnes’s Eve, she reminded us) and Dr Johnson’s advice that in bad weather it’s ‘best not to moan about it’. W.H. Auden liked the winter, because it made him ‘cold, hungry and very happy’. But we also discovered that poor old Francis Bacon took his passion for snow and scientific inquiry too far: he died in March 1626, from exposure, after trying to refrigerate a chicken by stuffing it with snow.
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