Scran: Self-Published Series of Short Stories

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Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to be awarded a Vacation Scholarship by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and chosen to be a Research Intern by the Research Interns at Strathclyde programme to research 21st century Scottish literature and to write and self-publish my own series of Scottish short stories. I worked on my creative writing research project this summer (and wrote a mid-internship blog about it) and now it is finally complete! My self-published short story collection is called Scran (a Scots word for food).

Here is a short blurb about Scran: a series of Scottish short stories –

Following Kayleigh through an encounter with a stranger in a Glasgow pub, Freya’s surprisingly amusing trip home to attend a family funeral, and Rebecca’s traumatic experience of her first ever hangover, ‘Scran’ is a series of stories exploring what it means to be an unsure 20 something living in Scotland in 2016.

‘These stories both amuse and move and announce Sophie McNaughton as a bright new voice in Scottish fiction…’ – David Kinloch

Scran includes three linked short stories, a glossary of Scottish terms used throughout the collection, a few Scots poetry extracts, a playlist so you can ‘listen’ along to the stories, a concluding critical reflection, a bibliography of the texts and resources I studied, and a foreword by Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing David Kinloch who supervised my project.

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You can buy your own A5

paperback copy of Scran here!

If you buy Scran, take a selfie with your copy or let me know what you think and use the hashtag #scranshortstories.

What do you think of this project? Let me know in the comment section below.

Intern Diary: News writing at The National

In April, I did my first ever work experience writing for Scotcampus for two weeks in their Glasgow office. This internship was great because the editors at Scotcampus really gave me the creative freedom to come up with my own ideas and write in my own style. I honed my writing skills, I learned a lot (including a few techy tricks and some surprising grammar revelations) and developed my ability in writing good quality articles to meet a deadline. I have been writing for Scotcampus since around January this year so I was fairly clued up on the style of articles, set up of the website, desired content etc. and I had a head start going into the internship. But this month, I stepped into unfamiliar territory by doing work experience in news writing for The National, the Scottish national newspaper that supports an independent Scotland.

At the start of my degree, I wanted to stay as far away from journalism as possible. I, like most people, had a preconceived idea of what I thought journalists did and how they did it but when I started learning more about it at university, I realised my perception of the field couldn’t have been further from the truth. As time went on, I became a little disenchanted with the areas of my course I was expecting to enjoy the most and ended up throwing myself into journalism, writing articles regularly for anyone who would publish me. Writing feature articles and opinion pieces comes quite easily to me and I love writing them but the area of journalism I was least comfortable with was definitely news stories. There’s a certain formula to news writing that can appear straightforward but in fact it is quite technical and almost mathematic in its structure and I’ve always lacked a bit of confidence in that area.