The Michael Round Prize 2025 is now closed. Thanks to everyone who took part.
The competition, which was free to enter, is for pieces of fiction up to 1,200 words long, and is dedicated to the memory of our late and much-missed Chairman. The competition attracted more than 270 entries from 37 different countries. Thanks to our hard working panel, the judging process is already well in hand and we will announce the results at our November meeting.
At our regular meeting on 13 October, Stella led a session on writing memoir, life stories and autobiography. Memoirs have become an increasingly popular form of creative writing in recent years (even putting aside all the stories which are really lightly veiled autobiographical fragments). After all, if we accept the old advice to ‘write about what you know’, what could be a more appropriate subject than your own life?
Update: The notes and reading list from the meeting are here:
Peter gave a presentation on the benefits, disadvantages and risks of entering competitions (and he does actually recommend it). You can see the presentation, with commentary, below.
Jane Austen stands high in the ranks of English writers. If we have to think of one example of painting, we are likely to pick the Mona Lisa: if we have to name one piece of classical music, it might be Beethoven’s fifth symphony. The play, I suppose, is Hamlet, but surely the novel must be Pride and Prejudice. However, it isn’t always appreciated that Austen was in some important ways an innovator. She was a pioneer and prime user of the technique of Free Indirect Style (the name varies a bit) in which the thoughts and feelings of a character are expressed through the voice of the narrator. She does it with such skill we don’t even notice, but some of her finest moments are delivered this way.
In a cozy burrow beneath an old oak tree, Peter Rabbit sat at a miniature wooden table, nibbling the end of a carrot thoughtfully. Around him were stacks of parchment, and ink pots made from hollowed-out acorns.
Outside, birds chirped and the wind rustled the garden leaves, but inside, Peter was lost in a world of his own creation — a tale of adventure, turnip heists, and cunning escapes from farmer foes. He called it “The Tale of the Bramblewood Bandits.”
Now and then, his cousin Benjamin Bunny would peek in, offering suggestions (“Add a hedgehog with a prickly temper!”), while Jemima Puddle-Duck stopped by to provide editorial advice (“You must revise the bit about tails — it’s all fluff!”). Peter was determined. He was going to enter the Michael Round Prize!
Another list of writing competitions, with deadlines in August.
Jo Bodley led a lively flash fiction writing session on a warm summer evening. Jo, whose pieces have achieved success in competitions, gave an introduction to writing flash including some interesting hints on what makes good pieces.
Then we did an exercise, chosing the short limit of 100 words. Prompts included ‘Far and Wide’ (catchy title, that), ‘Then you were gone’, ‘Then the roof fell in’ and ‘My coffee cup’. We each produced and read two short stories – or in Mike’s case several, including some he had prepared earlier. Ethel read an excellent one from an absent friend.
Stella plans to include some of the results in the newsletter she is going to produce.
Yes, really. ChatGPT has an AI that will critique a passage of your writing and offer suggestions and tips. It’s called Creative Writing Coach and you can find it here. As an experiment I gave it the piece I wrote during our session at The George (you can read them here: mine is the one called Weeping in the Dark).
This is what the gpt came up with, almost instantly.
Quick Rating: 8.5 / 10
⸻
✅ What’s Working Well:
**1. Atmosphere & Tone
You’re creating a quietly eerie mood that feels grounded and literary. The mysterious crying, the isolation, and the subtle psychological unease are evocative and artfully understated.
**2. Voice & Style
Your prose style is intelligent and reflective. Phrases like “electric fear,” “for form’s sake,” and “like someone letting go, piece by crumbling piece” show maturity in narrative voice. It reads like the opening of a psychological ghost story by someone like Shirley Jackson or Sarah Waters.
**3. Imagery & Setting
The setting is striking—the contrast between calling it a “cabin” and then revealing it to be more like a “factory worker’s cottage” creates a vivid, unexpected image. You’re world-building through quiet, telling detail.
⸻
🛠 Suggestions for Improvement:
1. Tense Consistency & Pacing:
• Sentence: “She closed the door and she was alone. It must have been well after midnight when Ann heard someone crying in the next room.”
This creates a slight temporal jolt—did she close the door and then later hear the crying, or is it all happening at once?
Suggestion:
Consider clarifying the timeline:
“She had closed the door and was alone. It must have been well after midnight when Ann first heard the crying…”
2. Slight Overlap in Descriptions:
• You mention the sound “startled her and for just a moment filled her with electric fear,” which then “passed instantly.” Later, you say “this time it was not at all frightening.”
The repetition is okay for emphasis, but it might be worth slightly rewording to avoid tonal redundancy.
Suggestion:
Soften the earlier fear just a touch so the later contrast lands more strongly:
“It jolted her—not terror exactly, but a sudden, involuntary alertness that passed in seconds…”
3. The Line About “Unborn and Unregretted”
• This phrase is haunting and poetic, but slightly jarring in the paragraph’s emotional arc. It dips into a darker, almost mythic register without much lead-in.
Suggestion: Either set it up a little more clearly as Ann’s associative thinking or simplify:
“Cats at night howl like babies, after all—like all the infants that never came into the world…”
Alternatively, lean fully into it and clarify it’s Ann’s thoughts, not the narrator’s intrusion.
⸻
💡 Optional Enrichment Ideas:
• Internal contradiction: Ann hesitates to believe what she’s hearing, but something compels her. A line hinting at a past experience—“She had learned not to trust her imagination—but this felt different”—could layer in subtle backstory and deepen tension.
• Sound motif: Consider extending the theme of sound—was the forest “too quiet” earlier? Were there any creaks in the cabin that now feel ominously silent?
⸻
🧠 Final Thought:
This piece is polished, literary, and filled with subtle psychological detail. It has the tone of an unsettling short story or the beginning of a gothic novella. You’re working in the quiet, uncanny tradition with a confident hand.
Would you like help developing what happens next? You could take this into horror, magical realism, or even psychological drama depending on your intent.
That seems surprisingly good to me, though I do think the bot has missed the point a couple of times. If you decide to try it out, remember it doesn’t actually understand anything. Its advice may be terrible and either flattering, mistaken, or even offensive.
There will be more of this, though. Writing competitions will start using this kind of thing for the first sift, and literary agents will turn it on the slush pile – mark my words.
Croydon Writers 