PUBLISH’D AFRIKA Short Story Competition – April

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PUBLISH’D AFRIKA Short Story Competition
64 stories submitted
64 195 words written
167 pages length of submissions
Which ones made it into the competition?

The April leg of the PUBLISH’D AFRIKA Short Story Competition boosts a total of 44 stories that have been submitted, which totals 64 195 words. This translates to 167 A4 pages. Of course, some will receive the chop for, amongst other reasons, grammatical errors, poor grasp of the English language, spelling mistakes, and the biggest elephant in the room – dialogue tags.
Most of the stories in this month’s leg of the competition were disqualified because the writers just cannot write dialogue and aren’t clued up on the use of dialogue tags. Most of the writers would close the dialogue with a full-stop, and still add a dialogue tag – capitalised. Example: “Sorry Mom, but I am not going.” He said.
Some would put quotation marks ahead of a comma: “Sorry Mom, but I am not going”, he said.
Some would leave a space between the quotation marks and the first word of the dialogue, or even write the first word in lower case: “ sorry Mom, but I am not going,” he said.
Some quotations marks were left open-ended: “Sorry Mom, but I am not going” he said.
Probably the biggest sin in writing dialogue was lining the dialogue of two or more characters in the same line: “Sorry Mom, but I am not going.” “What do you mean you are not going?” “I mean I don’t want to go, Mom, and you can’t make me.” “You shouldn’t speak to Mom like that, Tom!” my sister intervened.
Also noted were writers who wrote an entire piece of dialogue – as much as ten lines – and only put a dialogue tag at the end. At times, it will only be a ‘he said’ or ‘she said’, which creates an even bigger confusion on who had actually spoken the words: “He said he is not going to go. It’s okay though, he can stay. He should not blame us though when something happens while we are all away. There is too much crime in this neighbourhood and criminals are always staking these houses out. They will notice us leaving and they will know he is home alone. They will storm the house and harm him,” said Rebecca.
It’s all good and dandy if it is only two characters talking and by some action description, you made it clear which character is speaking. But if it is more than two characters, the narration should identify the person speaking after the first line of dialogue, like this: “He said he is not going to go,” Rebecca said. “It’s okay though, he can stay. He should not blame us though when something happens while we are all away. There is too much crime in this neighbourhood and criminals are always staking these houses out. They will notice us leaving and they will know he is home alone. They will storm the house and harm him.”
And then there were homophones (words that sound the same but spelled differently and do not have the same meaning). “It is not the car he new.” Clearly, here, the writer meant to write ‘knew’.
“The red hat complimented her blouse.” Here, the writer was looking for ‘complemented’.

These could have been honest mistakes and even typos, but when you come across the same error several times in the story, it becomes clear that the writer still needs to put a bit of work in his or her writing.
Some of the stories had minor errors, which we asked the writers to fix after giving them the assessments. Some stories just couldn’t be rescued. Some were just plain essays and thesis.
Which stories made it through, you ask? You just have to keep an eye on the page on the 20th of April, midnight.