Emily Paull

In a few weeks, a book with my name on it will be available for pre-order. It has a cover now (not that I am allowed to show anyone yet) and it's been copyedited and rewritten and it's ready for the world to read. But it's not the book that I thought would be my first. I've always thought of myself as a novelist. I wrote my first 'novel' in high school, a 30 000 word novella called 'Quoting Shakespeare' which was about what I realise now was a toxic friendship between a girl with a strong personality, and my main character, a girl who would do anything to be liked. I did not know what I was doing, but I enjoyed doing it. I printed pages off as I went and displayed them in a folder, harking back to the days when I used to run my own 'publishing house' in my bedroom as a child and design covers for all my short stories. A few years later, I wrote a 50 000 word 'novel' called 'Invisible Girl' which I suppose was urban fantas...

AKA all the wonderful short story collections that have inspired me on this journey. Little White Slips by Karen Hitchcock A Lovely and Terrible Thing by Chris Womersley The Weight of a Human Heart by Ryan O'Neill Heat and Light by Ellen van Neerven Zebra and Other Stories by Debra Adelaide You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian The True Colour of the Sea by Robert Drewe The Bodysurfers by Robert Drewe Australia Day by Melanie Cheng Pulse Points by Jennifer Down The Love of a Bad Man by Laura Elizabeth Woollett Bird Country by Claire Aman Like a House on Fire by Cate Kennedy Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy Portable Curiosities by Julie Koh Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri The Thing Around your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Promise by Tony Birch Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood Mothers Grimm by Danielle Wood Feet to the Stars by Susan Midalia ...

Like Douglas Adams, I also love deadlines. Deadlines keep me accountable, and keep me from prioritising binge-watching the entire new series of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina  instead of working on my book. Because that's the thing about writing-- sometimes, it's the only thing you want to be doing, and other times, you will literally think of any excuse to get out of it. Up until now, a lot of the deadlines that I have been working with have been self-imposed.  Things like doing Nanowrimo, or entering competitions have provided the external deadlines, but no one has been waiting for me to enter those things. I chose to.  Now, I have a manuscript to deliver to a publisher, and while that's a big exciting step, it's also a lot of pressure. I want to make sure that the book I hand over in a few weeks time is the best book it could possibly be, and that means making some hard decisions. In this post, I thought I would outline for you a few of the things I d...

In my last post, I talked about where some of the ideas for the stories in my collection came from. It's never an easy thing to pin down. Even after finishing the post, I kept thinking about things I could add. A lot of my stories are autobiographical but only up to a point. Some of them have links to things that really happened. Some are completely made up. In fact, I think it's more accurate to say that a lot of my stories start off  as autobiographical.  So how do I take the germ of an idea and turn it into a story? My relationship to the process of writing a short story hasn't really changed much over the ten years since I started Writing Short Stories for real. Once I get an idea that really interests me, I need to get to the keyboard or my journal and get it all down, preferably in one hit. Sometimes the idea itself might have been obsessing me for a time, but if the spark of the idea is not enough to sustain a writing session all the way through to the e...

It's the question writers dread: where do you get your ideas? This has been on my mind a bit this month, first as I had been reading John Boyne's new novel A Ladder to the Sky  in which a sociopathic young writers steals ideas for his novels in a myriad of ways, all varying in their degree of moral bankruptcy, and then second as I struggled to write any new short stories for my forthcoming book. There was a period of time, perhaps even two years ago although I really hope it wasn't that long, when stories used to be single sitting affairs. I'd have ideas buzzing around me like a swarm of wasps, irritating me, getting under my skin, and then off I'd go to my laptop or my notebook and the idea would just come rushing out. Lately, I've longed for that to happen to me again. It got me thinking about where the ideas for those particular stories had come from.  For my story The Sea Also Waits , I was inspired by the real life disappearance of a Russian fre...

Short story collections. You either hate them, or you love them. I hope that you, the person reading this post, is in the camp of those who love them, as come October this year, I'll have a collection of my very own out in bookshops. (It feels weird to say that, because I haven't even finished putting it all together, but more details will come as I know them and I am planning on blogging through the whole process.) In the lead up to the really hard work of getting it ready, I've been thinking a lot about short story collections I love, and short story collections that I really want to read.  I thought today I would post a list for you of amazing collections to check out if you're wanting to get into the genre, or if you're just looking for something new to read. These are in no particular order: Short Story Collections I Have Read and Loved * Like a House on Fire and Dark Roots, both by Cate Kennedy * Trick of the Light by Laura Elvery * Pulse Points by...