Scottish Writers > Alan Spence Author Profile

Hi, my name is Alan Spence and I'm a short story writer and I've been writing short stories for about thirty years in fact. There are different kinds of short stories you can write; there are those which can have a twist in the tale, a surprise ending where it's all driven by the plot and you're trying to figure-out what's going to happen next. There's another kind of story that I've always been really interested in, that depends on unfolding a kind of magic that you maybe find in everyday life. Something quite surprising. It doesn't have to be a huge event that takes place in the story. It can be about something quite simple. But you go right into the lives of your characters and find something out about them, and it often ends with a moment of real feeling, either something very sad or very beautiful, or it can be something funny. It's a moment when you find something out about your characters, or they find something out about themselves.

I think no matter what kind of story you're writing, you want to make the world of your story real. It can be the world that you know, the world that you live in, that you've grown-up in, or it can be a complete fantasy world. The important thing is that the details are believable, that you use your senses, and describe how things feel and taste and smell, so that the reader gets drawn into your world and believes in it.

And likewise, the characters in your story have to talk to each other in a way that's believable and realistic. And the way that you get that into your writing is just by using your ears and just listen to the way that people actually do speak in everyday life round about you. It's always interesting and fascinating and sometimes amazingly funny, just the things that people actually do say to each other.

So keep your eyes and ears open and try to get some of the energy of that in to your writing.

Alan Spence

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