Samuel Prince, London Independent Story Prize 2024 2nd Competition Short Story Finalist 'Chance is a Restless Traveller'

London Independent Story Prize 2024 2nd Competition Short Story Finalist 'Chance is a Restless Traveller' by Samuel Prince

Can you please tell us about you and your daily life?

I live and work in South Norfolk. Most of my writing is poetry, but as with this competition, I have the occasional dalliance with longer-form prose.

When and how did you get into writing?

Although I dabbled in my teens and as a student, it wasn’t until I moved to London after University, began working full-time and resumed reading fiction and poetry for pleasure that I got into motion.

A friend told me about City Lit in Holborn, and I joined an evening poetry writing course led by the poet Karen Annesen who gave me the encouragement I needed. I was then part of various workshops and writing groups for several years, meeting and mixing with some incredible writers (and people) who galvanised, tutored and taught me a lot.

I’ve mainly published poems in magazines, anthologies and won some prizes and places in competition awards. My debut collection of poetry Ulterior Atmospheres, was published by Live Canon in 2020.

How often do you write? Do you have a writing routine? And what inspires you to write?

Historically, my writing has occurred in skirmishes. Poems, for instance, always seem best born in the betweenness of life, in its interludes and gaps.

However, I’m much more disciplined and focused now than I was in my 20s and into my 30s when I could be quite punctilious, unnecessarily particular about pens, paper, environment, mood music. I lost a lot of staring contests with the blank page.

Nowadays, I’m better able to write fluidly wherever I am, whatever the moment. I make notes, draft and redraft everything longhand. I prefer early mornings, but don’t have the luxury of being choosy due to other commitments. I’m harried and hurried by the sense of (my) time running out, so I have to make it count.

How does it feel to have your work recognized?

It’s unfailingly tremendous, whether magazine acceptance, small press publication, competition recognition or being asked to read at an event etc.

Of course, I want my work to connect, for it to be savoured; in the same way many brilliant writers surface to me via discovery in independent magazines, journals or anthologies.

What's the best and most challenging thing about writing a Story?

My favourite part is the flourishing of an impulse or instinct for a poem or story. Nothing comes easy. It has to be earned, merited through the graft of planning, note-making, drafting and editing, but when it starts to transpire, that’s a charm.

The challenge with writing fiction is the constant (internal) question: ‘Shouldn’t this really be a poem?’ I have to convince myself ideas or character points for stories deserve the dedication, the pledge, that they’re not a masquerade for a more concise expression and form.

How did you develop the idea for your LISP-selected story? Is there a story behind your story? And, how long have you been working on it?

‘Chance is a Restless Traveller’ was first drafted in 2019 when I was supposed to be working on finishing a couple of poetry manuscripts I had in development. However, I just couldn’t get it going with the poems and switched to writing prose to compensate. I was reading and marveling at Gary Budden’s short fiction collection Hollow Shores as well as the anthology This Dreaming Isle, edited by Dan Coxon, and wrote some stories probably indebted to those influences.

‘Chance is…’ is set in the mid-2000s and was oriented around the character of Reece – a young professional woman with a camera around her neck in the rush-hour surge. I wanted to explore themes of metropolitan alienation, contagion of crowds, tremors of terror and corporate unease. Whether these are salient in the story is another matter, but her character was fostered by those forces.

Can you please give us a few tips about writing a story?

Sweat the titles ­– consider the reader scanning a contents page or sifting competition entries. Titling is such a subtle art; it’s a lifetime’s work, impossible to master, but worth the investment.

Otherwise, whether poetry or prose, character is always the impetus – and that can be place, location or mise en scène as well as the individual. Let that guide you. What is or are the stories this character, this group, this landscape or habitat wants to tell, insists to reveal – less the story you want to write?

What's the best thing and the most challenging thing about competitions?

The best thing is undoubtedly how they’re a great equaliser – especially if judged anonymously. Everyone enters on the same ready-line with the same prospects.

The worst thing? I’m not sure there is one. Rejection? But rejection or being passed over is such a mammoth, central and regular feature of amateur writing – certainly in my own experience – that it has to be almost as cherished as the successes. Almost.

Lastly, do you recommend that writers submit to LISP?

Absolutely. Submit everywhere with maximum conviction, low expectation.