Sunday 19 April 2015

Allas - Guidelines

Thank you to Simon Whaley (author of The Positively Productive Writer - and lots more) for hunting down the Allas guidelines and translating them (with help from Google) into English. I did think of just picking out the key points, but decided they're much more fun as they are.

6.1 Fiction

Fiction is a strong reason to buy single copies and subscribe to Everyone. Fiction in Everyone's entertainment, feel-good reading, but pointers. It seats excitement, emotion and humor, bright hopeful end, surprise effects and unexpected solutions. We want to offer the reader before both long and short reading, with an emphasis on short. We publish: serial (novel), short stories, detective novels and five-minute short story (= short story).
We want to promote ourselves by offering good, new, Swedish reading of established authors. We do this in the form of specially written short stories in the paper, especially in the high season, ie Christmas, Easter and during the summer, when our readers are free. Our ambition is to offer new, specially written long reading.

6.2 The short story

The short story is about relationships between man and woman. The stories are contemporary and the female protagonist should not be too young. 30-45 is a good age. The reader should feel good after reading a short story in Everyone. This is entertainment and the plot must not be black and hopeless. There must be an opening, a candle, a turnaround, development and future. It should as well be okay ...
It is important to have a genuine, happy personal and original tone of the text.
There must be emotion in the story, which can be emotional but also humorous.
We say no to: Intrigue to the effect that the woman stands and falls with her husband, where the woman's great fear is that the man will leave her.
We decline: Novels dealing with violence and abuse, assault, incest.
We say no to: Predictable, templated love stories.
The length should be between 8000 and 9000 characters, spaces included. A good story is longer, it is often short if needed. Can not do this, and the story is really good, we will publish it anyway.

6.3 5-minute story

5-minute story is of course shorter than the short story. Here is the higher ceilings. It can be about all kinds of relationships, friends, children, parents, siblings, coworkers, and others.
Our short story can be emotional and / or funny.
Sometimes, the surprise at the end, sometimes it approaches kåseriets shape.
The length may not exceed 6000 characters

6.4 Criminal short story

Criminal short story is exciting, but we avoid violence, gluttony in blood, beatings and other abuse.
Can not punkta up exactly what is ok and what is not. One should trust their gut feeling when reading the material.
The length is the same as the novel lens, about 8000-9000 characters long

6.5 The serial / novel

The serial must contain a love story between woman and man, but feel free to also be exciting (thriller). There are many demands on a story that will function as a serial. Our novel is simply a chapter of its own:
The story must be manageable.
It may not play out over too long a time (no long family histories spanning decades and centuries)
It is preferable to have a straight chronology, and a fairly simple plot.
It may not be too many people involved (preferably not more than seven).
It must not have too many sidings and delberättelser (preferably none at all).
The length should be between 12 000 and 14 000 characters, including spaces.

6.6 The language

We win puts us on a clear, simple and easy to read language with good balance between dialogue and narrative. The text should have depth, give experience, identification and arouse emotions - empathy, excitement, warmth, etc.

6.7 Headings

Headlines and vignettes will arouse curiosity, expectation and love of reading. They must rhyme with the text, tone and mood. They can give a feeling or revealing an exciting part of the action.

6.8 introductions and synopsis

After heading, the preamble's turn to lead further into the story. It will attract and capture the reader before, making her curious and excited that she "needs to know" what happens. The preamble to the feel and style tune with the rest of the text.
Brief, which is an important part of the serial, is on a compressed, yet legible way to provide information on the sequence of events so far, a "just in time" basis, so that the browser before without problems can continue to read and follow the action even if you missed something or more sections.



17 comments:

Keith Havers said...

Many thanks to Simon for doing all the hard work and thanks, Patsy, for posting the gidelines here. I estimate that 6000 characters is about 1000 words.

Maria said...

Well, I need to go away and think about the Criminal short story guidelines. Blood gluttony I assume means no vampires...Very good of Simon and Mr Google to take time out to translate this for us.

Dolores Doolittle said...

very useful thank you, and a similar style to mine when I`m translating from French - I like it!

Helen Yendall said...

My favourite line has to be,"we avoid violence, gluttony in blood, beatings and other abuse." As a linguist myself, ahem (not Swedish but German degree), seeing the complete hash that Google translater had made of this, makes me feel a little bit smug and that there is a point to language degrees and learning languages at school, after all. A machine can't do it!

Kate Blackadder said...

Yes, divide the number of characters by six. Loved the translation! Thanks for the info, Patsy and Simon.

Geraldine Ryan said...

That made me laugh so much!

Anonymous said...

Many thanks, Patsy and Simon. What a laugh! Well done Patsy on your Writing Magazine win your Woman's Weekly story, Simon, too. Both good reads.

Good wishes KH

Simon Whaley said...

I have to admit, when I first read what Google Translate.suggested, I thought , "6,000 characters!?! Blimey, I prefer writing stories with no kore than three or four!"

I hope people find some use from them, and thanks for mentioning The Positively Productive Writer, Patsy.

Simon

Patsy said...

@ Keith - that calculation sounds about right to me.

@ Maria. No, they're probably not keen on vampires.

@ Dolores and Helen - shows that we can't rely on Google translate if we want to be taken seriously.

@ Kate - as long as we don't give everyone double-barrelled names.

@ Geraldine - I liked it that's why I left it as it is (I'm sure they do a far better job translating whatever we send them)

@ KH - thank you.

@ Simon, I did initially think it must be a typo. It does make sense for them to specify length that way - although I suspect translating it will mean a bit of a variation.

Rosemary Gemmell said...

Love the translation! Thanks for posting this, Patsy.

Patsy said...

You're welcome, Rosemary.

Sherri said...

I have tried scanning my Allas stories then Google-translating them, and they do come out a bit like that!

Very funny - and useful too!

Patsy said...

Usually I read my stories to see what, if anything, has been changed. With Allas, I just look at the pictures.

Julie P said...

I'm laughing so hard I can't breathe!

Fay Knowles said...

Thanks for posting this information, Patsy. And thanks to Simon for translating. What about settings? Do we leave out place names if the story is set in Britain, for instance?

Patsy said...

I change them to Swedish place names, Fay.

Caroline said...

This is probably the most obvious and daft question, but will they accept stories written in English?