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Author: Ingrid Jendrzejewski

Published on Leave a comment on Flash Fiction Shrewsbury – Pauline Fisk

[First published on http://mytonightfromshrewsbury.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/flash-fiction-shrewsbury.html 20/06/2013]

Last night in the Shrewsbury Coffeehouse, National Flash Fiction Day was celebrated with an Open Mic and pieces of short, short fiction – very short and often very sharp too.  This is a great writing – and reading – form for a busy world.  If you haven’t the time to read a book, you’ve still got time for a couple of pieces of flash.  That’s the idea at any rate.  You can read a piece of flash in the time it takes you to wait for your bus to come along.  A couple of pieces, if it’s late.  And if you haven’t got time to write that novel you always reckoned you’d got in you, then you’ve got the time to write a story in five hundred words.

'Flash fiction is fiction with its teeth bared and its claws extended...'  'It's a machine of compression, the hugest of things in the tiniest of spaces, flash freakin' fiction...'   'It can be prose poetry, a whole story, a slice of sharp light illuminating a life...'

Three quotes amongst many on what is flash fiction.  The name's believed to have been coined back in 1992 as the title to an anthology of very short stories, and it's a name that's stuck. Short, short stories have been written for a long time.  Kafka did it, so did Chekov, and Hemingway's 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn' has been quoted to death.

However, in recent years, with the growth of the internet, more people reading on e-readers and mobile phones, and the sheer pace of life, the very short story has taken on a whole new life. People don't have much time for reading - or for writing - and the short short story has really come into its own.

Today flash fiction as a phenomenon is being written, and read, all over the world. People have different ideas about how long flash should be. 1,000 words? 50? 10? Ten's pushing it, I reckon. The good people who met at the Shrewsbury Coffeehouse last night have settled for 500.

Last year, Shrewsbury had the honour of launching the first National Flash Fiction Day on May 15th, Flash Fiction Eve.   This year the town was several days in advance.  Last year just a handful of people turned up with stories, and much of the evening was taken up with writing - people collaborating together, in many cases as strangers, but through the medium of writing becoming friends.  ‘I haven’t written a story since I was in primary school,’ somebody said.  And she and many others were back this year, raring to write more. The Shrewsbury Coffeehouse was packed.

This year there was still writing on the tables covered with rolls of lining paper for just that purpose, but where only six people turned up with stories to read, this time the running order had seventeen.  At one point it looked hard to see how they’d all be fitted into one short evening, but by the end of the night when the Muse departed, everybody had read.

In just one evening, we heard about Gabriel Rosetti’s obsession with exotic animals [which he buried in his garden]; window-cleaners encountering ghosts from the past; a new annunciation for a new Virgin Queen; a couple of murder mysteries, one told from the point of view of the corpse; the experience of trench life in the First World War, the experience of being mum to a dysfunctional family, running away to join the Foreign Legion and much, much more. The stories were as diverse as the people who were there.

The names on the running order are Caroline Bucknall, Carol Caffrey, Carol Forrester, Adrian Perks, Matt James, Liz Lefroy, Barry Tench, Lisa Oliver, Katherine Dixon-Miller, Catherine Redfern, Annie Wilson, Ivan Jones, Mal Jones, Steven Lovejoy, Rosemary [you didn't leave a surname, but I loved your story], Faiza Islam [and her sister, who needs thanks for reading with a heavy head cold] and Pauline Fisk. All of these people made the evening special, and need special thanks.

Also during the evening, the Flash Fiction Shrewsbury website was launched. The town already has its own Flash Fiction Shrewsbury Facebook page, but now there’s a place for the people of Shrewsbury to post their stories.  In just the couple of days the website had been up, it had been read by over fifty people in the UK, twenty-six in the US, and one each in Russia, the Netherlands and Singapore.  ‘Here’s a chance for the people of Shrewsbury to put their writing on the map,’ said the MC of the night, who happened to be me.

At the end of the evening, 'Snow' by Julia Alvarez was read from the book 'Flash Fiction - 72 Very Short Stories', edited by James and Denise Thomas and Tom Hazuka.  Here was a true master of flash at work.  An inspiration to us all. 'Each snowflake was different,' the story ends up, 'like a person, irreplaceable and beautiful.' And that spoke for the whole evening.  All those people, all those different takes on life. Shrewsbury has so much talent to offer.

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Published on 4 Comments on ‘The Language of Angels’ by Jonathan Pinnock
“Bonjour M’sieur,” said the guy with the wings, “J’éspère que vôtre mort n’était pas trop douloureuse?”
“You what?” said Jim. The air smelled vaguely of croissants.
“Pardon? Je ne vous comprends pas, m’sieur. Je suis St Pierre. Vous êtes …?”
Jim racked his brains for a moment, trying to work out what was going on. Was the guy saying that he didn’t understand him? Well that made two of them. Then he remembered something important from his school days.
“Pouvez-vous repéter la question?”
The guy with the wings looked at him for a moment, then burst out laughing.
“Répéter, m’sieur. Répéter!”
Then Jim realised. Repéter meant to re-fart, didn’t it? He vaguely recalled his old French teacher forever banging on about that. He had a feeling that he wasn’t making a very good impression.
“Pouvez-vous répéter …?” he began. It probably wasn’t going to help, but at least it would give him more time to think.
“Comment vous appelez-vous?” said the angel.
“Ah! Je m’appelle Jim,” said Jim, with a note of triumph.
             “Ah. Jim! C’est un nom anglais, n’est-ce pas?”
“Er … oui?” said Jim, struggling to keep up.
“Ah. Dans le ciel, on parle Français. Vous ne parlez pas bien Français, je pense?”
Huh? Something about speaking French here? Was that why they’d insisted on teaching it at school? He would have paid more attention if he’d known.
“SORRY,” he said, in a very slow, loud voice. “I … DON’T … REALLY … UNDERSTAND … YOU. CAN … I … HAVE … A … BIT … MORE … TIME … TO … THINK?”
The angel gave him a blank look. Then he shrugged and pulled a lever next to him. The floor under Jim opened up, and he fell down a long shaft, which twisted around several times before coming to a halt in a large warm room. A face peered down at him.
“You all right, mate?”
“I think so,” said Jim. “Do you speak English here?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank God for that,” said Jim.

“Nearly right,” said the guy with the horns.

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Published on 1 Comment on Telling Untold Stories – Jonathan Pinnock
Stories exist to be told. A story that goes untold is a story bereft of the reason for its existence. An untold story is a sad story. Even an untold happy story is a sad story. And an untold sad story is a very sad story indeed.
The sad truth however is that, up until relatively recently, there were a whole swathe of stories that were either not told at all or pulled out of shape and told in a way that made them a different story altogether.
The thing is, stories have a natural length. Some stories do fit into a nice Radio 4-friendly two thousand words, but there are many more that don’t fit into any nice comfortable slot. Gossamer-thin stories that don’t stretch longer than fifty words without snapping. Experimental stories that would fry the reader’s brain if the experiment continued beyond a couple of hundred or so. Stories that rely on sheer compression of narrative to make their impact.
The good news, however, is that in the last few years, more and more homes for these stories have appeared, along with a name: flash fiction. Sure, there have always been very short stories bubbling around, but never to the same extent as there are now. And the really wonderful thing – from both the reader’s and writer’s point of view – is that because it’s a relatively new concept, these are all new stories. Fresh stories. Untold stories.
And that, I guess, is what I love about flash fiction: its capacity for originality. You’ll read stuff in flashes that you’ve never encountered before in a conventional short story. You’ll read stuff presented in ways that you’ve never come across before. And sometimes you’ll read truly weird stuff that just couldn’t have worked in a conventional story.

I love writing flash fiction for exactly the same reason: it offers the opportunity to try stuff that hasn’t been tried before, to experiment with unusual styles and unexpected subject matter. Most importantly, it gives those untold stories a chance finally to get themselves an audience.

Published on Leave a comment on ‘Fingerthief’ by David Hartley
The bastard may know what those fingers were responsible for, he may feel like chief prosecutor of my soul, he may even feel slighted by the ineffectual judicial system that acquitted me, he clearly knows how to spirit himself in and out of locked doors, how to make surgical amputations without tools, how to make real life feel like nightmare until it is too late, and I’d bet my life he’s watching me now somehow – but I’ll be damned if I’ll give him the satisfaction of seeing me dial 999 with my nose.

['Fingerthief' is just one of the stories in David's collection, Threshold.]

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Published on 5 Comments on Say No to Flash Fiction – David Hartley
I don’t like the term flash fiction. Which seems a bit of an odd thing for me to say since I class myself as a flash fiction writer, I’ve had a book of flash fictions published, I’m part of a writing collective called Flashtag, and this is the official blog for National Flash Fiction Day 2013. But go with me on this; I don’t like the term – I do like the things themselves. Very much indeed.

Flash fictions are the art of brevity, and brevity is such an attractive thing in a gluttonous world of broadband teleportation, purple-sprouting dragon fruits, and eye-pad iPads. They fit well; on screens, in lives, into the fragmented rituals of our daily timeframes. And I believe they are a healthy medium too. They teach us control. And patience. And that leaving things out is almost always better than putting things in. Ahem.

They show us that stories don’t have to be long and consuming to be long in the mind and wholly consuming. Characters don’t need names. Or descriptions. Or back stories, or baggage, or a claim to the iron throne through something your half-sister’s cousin’s marriage partner’s spy said to a baby dragon seven thousand years ago. All you might need to say is ‘the ventriloquist’ and already the reader has a picture in their heads – and so do you, the writer, and now all you need to do is play that picture like a postmodern symphony of flavour until everything is mixed up and frightening and unsettling and then – BANG – hit them with the creepy dummy that they’ve almost forgotten existed, and stalk out of the room triumphant.

My problem with the term flash fiction is the word ‘flash’. It implies the brevity – ok that’s fine – but it also implies a certain unimportance, and that’s not fair. As more and more people discover flash fiction – readers and writers – its critical importance as a medium is becoming increasingly apparent. Many of the major short story writing awards now have a flash fiction category, and published collections are leaving in the super-short tales, rather than taking them out. Flash fictions fit neatly in the allotted timespan of an open-mic spoken word night, and as we train ourselves to speak brief on social media, our creative writings are evolving in the same way. Flash fiction is crucial – not a flash in the pan.   

Ultimately, flash fiction is just another way of saying ‘short story’ which, in turn, is another way of saying ‘story’, because the length of a thing does not necessarily determine if a tale has been told or not. I came to this realisation when I read the short story ‘Super-Toys Last all Summer Long’ by Brian Aldiss – which became the bloated and flawed film A.I: Artificial Intelligence in 2001. Aldiss’ tale is not short enough to be considered as flash fiction, but it is still surprisingly brief and packs a powerful punch – which the film takes a long and relatively weak time to deliver. Aldiss chose his words carefully and released just the right amount of information to kick that chill into my spine, and, in turn, my fingers onto the keyboard.

Aldiss showed me that even that most complex of genres – science fiction (another troublesome term) – could be delivered in a tiny amount of words for the same, or even greater, affect. But that affect does not come quickly. And here lies another problem with ‘flash’ – it implies the writing is quick. Well, compared to a novel, yes your flash fiction is going to be finished first. But that doesn’t mean you should trust your first words any more than you would the first draft of your novel. Flash fictions need gentle massage and brutal violence too; a shed word here, a change of tone there, a restructure of that sentence, a shift in point of view or, sometimes, a complete re-write. Make those words work hard, because they are no less important that the 100,000 words tussling to be free in that epic romance fantasy spy drama you’ve got going on deep in the back of your mind.


But really; it doesn't matter what we call them. As long as they get people to ink their quills and hammer all night on clunky keyboards in the creation of something beautiful, then their mission is accomplished. And if ‘flash fiction’ as a term has one thing going for it, its this; it still makes people frown, turn their heads and say ‘what’s that then?’ And when they discover what it is - and how accessible, exciting and experimental it is - there really is no turning back. 

Published on Leave a comment on ‘Garnet’ by Suz Winspear
It was a bargain on e-bay, a real garnet ring. There were no other bids, and she got it for £4.99, plus postage. She wore it every day, and almost everyone admired it.

Some people, however, told her that garnets were notoriously unlucky stones. She said this was nonsense, but sometimes she didwonder why hers had been the only bid. Still, she kept on wearing it. It was, after all, a beautiful ring; the stone was big and red and had lustrous sparkles within its structure. Yes, a few things had happened, but that was coincidence, nothing more. Her mother had died – but that was old age. Her aunt had died – ditto. Her cat disappeared – cats do that. The outbreak of e-coli following her sister’s wedding anniversary party was more of a shock. She was in hospital for a week, and three close friends died. But that was down to the caterers’ hygiene, nothing to do with the ring at all. How could it be? And the same was true of both car-crashes, the sinking ferry, the collapsing walkway, the flood, and the train derailment. She survived them all, and believed herself to be unusually lucky.
And then one windy November day, she was walking down the street when an advertising board blew off wall and struck her. As the emergency services retrieved the body, maybe someone noticed that the advertisement was for a jeweller, and the part of it that had crushed her skull carried an enormous photograph of a garnet ring just like the one she was wearing. But if they did, nobody mentioned it.

Two days after the probate had been settled, a new listing appeared on e-bay – a magnificent garnet ring, with an opening price of £4.99. What a bargain!

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Published on 1 Comment on A Poem or a Flash? – Suz Winspear
Poetry and Flash Fiction are fabulous forms within which to work, and I love writing and performing both. At their best, they make for concise and memorable works of convenient length for live performance, not going on for so long that the audience loses attention, and they can pack a lot of meaning into a limited space. Both are equally enjoyable to perform. Yet although they have shared features, the two forms of writing are different; they communicate in different ways. The main similarity between the two is that neither has space for extraneous words or slack verbiage. Every word has to pay its way; in crafting effective poems and Flashes, there simply isn’t time or room to ramble or digress. But the use of those carefully-chosen words, and the intended results, are not entirely the same in the two literary forms.

Poetry allows ambiguity, suggestion, and the delicate evocation of atmosphere. Serious (as opposed to comic) poetry often works by hints and implications, allowing the listener or reader to find their own meanings within the piece. It often says those things that cannot easily be spoken directly, working on the subconscious level, so that I have sometimes found that the imaginations of the audience will find meanings in a poem which the poet did not originally notice was there.

Flash Fiction is equally concise, but more direct. To communicate to an audience, the Flash Fiction has to hold together as a story; it cannot be just a beautiful invocation of ambiguous atmosphere. Of course there can be plenty of atmosphere and ambiguity in a Flash Fiction, but they have to be there in the service of the story, not as an end in themselves. A Flash Fiction is not the same thing as a poem re-written without end-stops. It’s a story; it needs narrative, structure and development, leading to a conclusion that audiences will find satisfying (if sometimes rather unsettling). Remember, a flash is something brief, bright, direct and illuminating. You can’t have a hazy or a misty flash.

Of course, this is a personal opinion, based on what I’ve found that out through trial and error, from writing and performing, and by learning from the effects that different pieces have on an audience. Still, I do think that there is a distinction between what sort of thing works best in a poem and what makes a Flash Fiction effective . . . . And when it comes to deciding whether the brilliant piece of inspiration that came to you in the shower this morning would be best turned into a poem or a Flash, well that decision is yours to make – try it out, see what works, write and enjoy!

Published on Leave a comment on ‘The Blank Page’ by Sandra Hessels
From behind a small Venetian mask - a cheap knock-off of a replica, of course - peaks a tome of Shakespeare's works. Next to it volumes and volumes of anthologies sit, their spines all turned to me as though they are critical of my words.

‘We’ve all been written before, my dear,’ some seem to say from the closed pages, while others dare me to read between their lines and find a different meaning for them.

‘What story could you possibly have to tell?’ a thick and haughty book with elaborate letters in gold-coloured relief sneers down at me from upon the dusty shelf, the five letters of the name ‘Grimm’ half-faded, barely legible from use.

I stare at my blank page and wonder exactly that. I’ve always loved stories big and small, murder mysteries and vampires’ broodings, spells and spelling, tales and tellings. Ever since that the great spinning wheel first began to thread the fabric of fairy tale around me, I was lost inside an imaginary world that was all my own.
And then it hits me. ‘What stories could I possibly have to tell?’

Why, my own, of course.



Sandra's blog can be found at http://en-blog.creativedifference.nl/

Published on Leave a comment on Flash Fiction – Sandra Hessels
This probably sounds familiar, but I’ve always wanted to write. Hopes of getting published someday, somehow? Check. One must be ambitious, and being a dreamer is inherent to a writer, right?

So I came across the term “flash fiction” this year. Not knowing what that was, I decided to investigate what on earth it meant. It turns out, flash fiction is just really short fiction. A short short story. A situation. A vignette. A small peek into something that might – or just as easily might not – grow into something bigger, like an actual short story or just a medium-sized story or even the full-length novel you’ve always dreamt of writing.

A piece of fiction of 500 words (or less)… That sounded like something I could actually manage. Better yet, it sounded like a challenge. Especially since the particular blog I’d found was this one, about to host Flash Flood day. It winked at me and  said: go on, submit your flash fiction to us before this deadline, and we might just publish it right here! I tipped my imaginary hat and accepted.

I decided to give it a shot. Better still, I discovered that I had actually been writing flash fiction all along. Imagine that. I did a little happy dance when I realised it, because that also meant I was a writer all along. Hooray! Those pieces of paper, the notebooks with barely legible handwriting, the many documents that have been saved to my hard drive without any apparent purpose… I’d been writing flash fiction all along!
That realisation made it easier to open up one of those ghostly white new documents and fill it with words. No more than 500. And it turns out that flash fiction is the perfect vehicle to voice, jot down, safe keep and organise all those stray thoughts that are swimming around in a writer’s head literally all of the time. (I thought it was just me, by the way.)

A short conversation between two people that replays in your mind. An incomplete, otherwise fleeting thought, that might grow into a tale, once upon a time... Something that actually happened to you but that you’re more comfortable voicing when it comes out of a fictional character’s mouth. An observation that was too pretty to discard. The snippets of history you’ve already imagined hiding behind the lines and creases of cashier’s reassuring face when she helped you pick up the broken eggs after you dropped the carton. The hazy memories of a dream that cling almost imperceptibly to your waking consciousness, ready to let go.

They say that to be a writer is to write. No matter what. I say: try flash. It doesn’t demand that much of your precious time, and it’s a perfect way to hone your skills and be at it. To find the right combination of words to achieve the desired effect in as few words as possible. Or just to commit to paper what otherwise may have been forgotten.

Published on Leave a comment on Update from NFFD New Zealand
Dear NFFD readers, writers and supporters --
We expect to notify you of the Long List and Short List from this year's competition in the coming days, but meanwhile mark your calendars for this year's events on or around 22 June.
The main prize-giving event will take place again this year in Auckland, in the Central City Library on 22 June from  2-4pm. Judges Vivienne Plumb and David Lyndon Brown will be there to present awards. Short-listed writers who can attend will present their work, and a handful of special invited guests will also present flash fiction for our enjoyment. The Auckland branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors is helping sponsor the event, and there will be a reception as well. Do come share a drink and listen to some of the best flash fiction in Aotearoa on this day.
Meanwhile, if you are geographically situated farther south, check out Wellington's flash fiction event on Monday 24 June at 7pm at the Thistle Inn. It's an event for readers and writers, hosted by the Wellington NZSA. 
Details for both these events can be found on the NFFD website. Check the website for local competitions and challenges, too. 
And if anyone is interested in hosting an event in Canterbury or elsewhere -- large or small -- , do let us know and we'll be glad to share your news. 
Finally, if you are interested in flash fiction in other places as well, stop in at FLASH MOB 2013, where more than 100 writers from all over the globe will share stories beginning on 20 June. The winning stories from this year's FLASH MOB competition will be announced on 22 June as well.

Wishing you the best

from Michelle Elvy and the NFFD NZ team