Poet? Flash fiction? Short story? Looking to join a collection or create your own?
The art of creating a collection is based on the editorial overview. Any collection must have a focus and ideas should be developed through alternative voices, stories and plotlines. Whether you have a whole collection or some connected works and an idea about how they might be developed, we would be happy to review your proposals.
Make sure that you are clear about where you see your writing. Who is your target audience? What is the genre? Collections may reasonably cross multiple genres where there is a focused theme.Consider how your collection will be read. This is even more pertinent than for extended texts such as novels as you may consider your work to be performance and auditory, as well as private and visual.
This idea about genres links to how you will sell your collection. Is it designed to be sold to enable others to perform or celebrate an event? Perhaps you are writing for commuters? Or an audience who traditionally find it difficult to stay focused for an entire novel.
Our collections have been put together in a variety of ways. These include anthologies compiled by an editor who has a coherent idea and wishes to see this executed by multiple voices; by the result of competition and discovering a logical thread between entries of a high enough standard; by the purposeful bringing together of specific writers whose works complement each other.
If you are starting out why not submit an entry to one of our competitions. We partner IdeasTap, a charity set up as a network that supports creative people through opportunities, funding, arts jobs and career development. They can be found at www.ideastap.com where our writing briefs can also be reviewed.
If you are a group of writers who wish to submit a possible brief to us we are vey happy to consider combined works. The experience of collaborative writing is one way to develop and hone your writing skills and to explore in simpler structures how to create a story that grabs the reader. This is an excellent way to test your skills and your hunger for publication and what it really entails. This works equally well for writers who wish to put together sole author anthologies.