Category: News

Welcome to the last in our series of interviews with this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology editors and Microfiction Competition judges. This week, Diane Simmons chats with Alison Woodhouse, one of this year's judges for the 2021 NFFD Microfiction Competition, about novels, novellas-in-flash, favourite writers, and her advice to those entering this year's microfiction competition....

Diane: You won the NFFD micro fiction competition in 2019 and were Highly Commended in the 2020 competition. As a judge this year, is there any advice you can give to entrants to this year’s micro fiction competition?

Alison: Writing micros is (and should be) challenging! You’ve got to get a narrative arc and emotional shift into so few words. I usually start with an image or a phrase and work from there to get the first draft and then I do a lot of rewriting. As you go through your drafts you might write ones that are significantly longer or change the point of view, or where you begin and end. My advice is to track changes or print out versions. Sometimes, and I know I’ve done it, with all the editing and counting words you extinguish the spark, so make sure you can go back and find it. Another thing, and lots of people say this, read it aloud. You’ll hear any words that are out of place. If you can get a couple of people to read it before you submit, that’s also a good idea. If they both point out a problem, they’re probably right.

Diane: Your novella-in flash, The House on the Corner, was recently published by Ad Hoc Fiction after being Highly Commended in the Bath Flash Fiction Award’s competition. Can you tell us a little about the novella and the process of writing it?

Alison: The House on the Corner is about family, love, longing for connection, nostalgia, regret, all the cheerful things! The Kings (Helen and Martin and their children, Joe and Natalie) move into a new house, full of hope for the future. I set it in the 1980’s and early ‘90’s and used specific historical events as a backdrop, such as the Berlin Wall coming down and the Lockerbie disaster. I wrote it very quickly for the competition. I had some time afterwards to edit although I didn’t change much, just added a few more stories where I felt there were gaps and rewrote the ending. It was such an intuitive book to write. I originally thought of the house as a character and a succession of families moving in and I still wonder about doing a continuation. Before I wrote this, I’d been working on a novel (I had about 60,000 words) that had similar ideas, but just felt very stodgy. It was an absolute joy to write in this far lighter, more flexible and exciting form.

Diane: I know you are an avid reader. Do you retreat into reading for long spells or are you someone who always has a book on the go and steadily reads a little every day?

Alison: I’ve hardly read any novels recently. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I look at my phone too much! When I do read, I get totally absorbed and everything else falls by the wayside so no, I’m not a steady little bit everyday kind of reader. I’m really not very patient. I do like a short novel! One of the advantages of the phone or Ipad is I read a lot of short stories and flash ‘on the go’. The disadvantage is I tend to read them quickly then move on, whereas when the story is in a collection I linger over it, or go back and reread. Every now and again I’ll do a reading journal, which I find very useful. I’ll jot down thoughts about what I’m reading, what I’m learning from it as a writer, what I think works or doesn’t. I’m quite critical!

Diane: Can you remember where you first heard about flash? Do you remember any early flashes you read that left an impression on you?

Alison: My very first exposure would have been before I knew it was called flash! Tania Hershman’s The White Road was the first collection I bought and I thought it absolutely wonderful and then loved My Mother was an Upright Piano and Vanessa Gebbie’s Storm Warning. I knew I liked the idea of writing short, shorter, shortest, but didn’t think it something I could ‘do’. Then I moved to Bath in 2016 and met you, Diane, and you were writing a Nif and I had no idea what that was but from then on I didn’t look back!

Diane: What books or authors have most influenced your own writing?

Alison: That’s so hard to answer because different books have meant so much to me at different times and there are many that affected me deeply both as a reader and writer when I was, say in my early twenties, that I probably couldn’t read again now. However, sometimes you come across that thing in a story or a novel you can just sense, when it’s telling a truth and you feel it deeply in way that goes beyond analysing, that isn’t to do with structure or language or technique but uses all of those things - that’s the writing that makes me want to strive to be a writer who can do that, using just these clumsy words, because it’s a miracle isn’t it! I felt that reading Conrad’s Lord Jim a million years ago, even though it’s a terribly written book in some ways. I couldn’t get the idea of it out of my head, this devastating moment of self-realisation, that you’re not the person you’ve always believed you were, and what that does to you? How do you live? More recently I found it in Danielle Mclaughlin’s Sunday Times Short Story prizewinner, A Partial List of the Saved. I had to read it over and over and I’ll never forget it. I felt it with Cynan Jones’s The Dig and Marilyn Robinson’s Home. Writers construct a mirage, a lie if you like, to convey a truth and every now and again you only see or feel the truth, not the scaffolding around it. It’s a quality in the work, and it’s entirely personal, but when I read it, I know it and it makes me want to be a better writer.

Alison Woodhouse is a writer and teacher. Her flash fiction and short stories have been widely published and anthologised, including In the Kitchen (Dahlia Press), With One Eyes on the Cows (Bath flash fiction), Leicester Writes 2018 & 2020 (Dahlia Press), The Real Jazz Baby (Reflex), A Girl’s Guide go Fishing (Reflex), National Flash Fiction Day Anthologies and Life on the Margins (Scottish Arts Trust Story Awards). She has won a number of story competitions including Flash 500, Hastings, HISSAC (flash & short story), NFFD micro, Biffy50, Farnham, Adhoc and Limnisa and been placed in many others. In 2019 she was awarded an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. Her debut novella-in-flash The House on the Corner is published by AdHoc Fiction. Contact her at:
alisonwoodhouse.com
Twitter: @AJWoodhouse
Facebook: Alison Woodhouse

SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN for this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and Micro Fiction Competition. Submissions close on 15th February 2021. For more information, please visit our Anthology and Competition guidelines.  

• Judge - Sophie van Llewyn
• First prize is £300 and publication by the National Flash Fiction Day Press as a single author novella-in-flash
• Second prize is £100
• Third prize is £50
• Word count: 6,000 to 12,000
• Individual flashes: 1,000 words max
• Entry fee: £14
• Free submission is available if you feel the fee is a barrier to entry. No questions asked
• Simultaneous subs: Yes
• Theme: None
• Mutiple entries: Yes, but entrants may only win one prize

Our judge and readers look forward to reading your work!

Welcome to the fifth in our series of interviews with this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology editors and Microfiction Competition judges! This week, Diane Simmons chats with Nod Ghosh, this year's Guest Editor of the 2021 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology, about her most recent collection, the writing of novellas in flash, and the flash fiction scenes in New Zealand and the UK, as well as what she's looking for in the NFFD anthology submission queue....

Diane: I very much enjoyed your novella-in-flash (NiF) The Crazed Wind (Truth Serum Press) and am looking forward to reading Filthy Sucre (Truth Serum Press). Do you have any tips for writers who are considering writing a novella-in-flash?

Nod: Thank you, Diane. I enjoyed writing the stories for The Crazed Wind.

Consider these statements: 'Flash fiction pieces within a novella-in-flash should stand alone without relying on the reader having to read the other of the stories in a series. They could be read in any order and still make sense.'

Are these statements true? Yes and no. In theory, the stories don't rely on anything else in the series. However, without severe paring down, and 'leaving space for the reader's creative response' (as all flash should), there would be unnecessary repetition cluttering a NiF.

As for order, I was taking part in Nancy Stohlman's online course To Get the Words Right in 2018, when I started writing The Crazed Wind. Nancy taught me the importance of placement in a NiF or flash collection. You have to consider the reader's whole experience. Adjacent pieces may be linked through common characters, content or ideas. More importantly, the writer should omit anything that doesn't fit, and create 'fillers' that bridge stories that might otherwise appear disparate.

Stohlman covers this and other topics in Going Short, An Invitation to Flash Fiction.

I can't improve on the advice offered by Michael Loveday in his interview for the Bath Nif Award here: https://bathflashfictionaward.com/2019/07/top-tips-for-writing-a-novella-in-flash-by-michael-loveday-2020-novella-judge/

Loveday states NiF are less successful if the common thread between the stories isn't clear.
The timeline shouldn't be too convoluted to follow.
In another interview, he has emphasised the importance of a cohesive unifying ending.

Diane: Together with Santino Prinzi, you are editing this year’s NFFD anthology on the theme of MAGIC. Is there anything in particular you are looking for from a submission? Or anything that you don’t want to see?

Nod: I aim to select purely on the quality of the writing. Having said that, as the NFFD stories are destined for an anthology, originality would be welcome, so the best stories provide a balanced and entertaining read. However, I wouldn't eliminate a well-constructed piece if its theme were overused. In a way, that might reflect the zeitgeist of 2021.

Here is my message to anyone submitting:

Interpret 'MAGIC' in any way you want.

The only thing I don't want to see is unpolished writing. Learn your craft. Revise your pieces until your brain and fingers hurt. Respond to critique from other writers.

Diane: You currently live in New Zealand, having previously lived in the UK. Both countries have vibrant flash communities and independent National Flash Fiction Days. Can you tell us a little about NFFD in New Zealand and how it came about?

Nod: New Zealand has a rich history of renowned short story writers such as Katherine Mansfield. The shorter form was in evidence too in the last century, for example, Graeme Lay's anthology 100 NZ Short Short Stories (1997).

Michelle Elvy was a pioneer of flash fiction in Aotearoa New Zealand. She started the NZ National Flash Fiction Day competition, and the online journal Flash Frontier, an Adventure in Short Fiction in 2012. Over the years, a large number of writers from all over the country have helped organise events to celebrate placed authors in NZ NFFD. There are regional awards, and the more recently introduced youth and micro (100 word) sections. This year, for obvious reasons the award ceremony was online.

Diane: Have the coronavirus restrictions in New Zealand affected your writing routine at all?

Nod: Back to those 'obvious reasons'! Many events moved to an online format (e.g.: via 'Zoom') after the pandemic restrictions began in Aotearoa at the end of March. A happy side effect of this is that we can now 'attend' overseas functions such as book launches we may not have otherwise been able to. As in other areas, such as work, these adaptations are likely to stay.

On a more personal level, and I think I share this with others, the effects of SARS-CoV-2 have been devastating. We probably all know people who have lost family members to COVID-19. The sequelae of the epidemic will likely be catastrophic both in terms of disease, but also economics on a worldwide scale. That can make it seem futile to write a story.

Currently (late 2020), we are lucky in New Zealand. There is only occasional community transmission of the disease. However it has been hard to focus on frivolous activities such as creative writing, when there is such hardship on a global scale. I felt guilty for being disappointed the launch for Filthy Sucre (Truth Serum Press) was cancelled. Also, it was frustrating seeing opportunities for mainstream publication dry up globally, as publishing houses struggled with the situation.

Ending on a positive note, a semblance of normality here means we can return to our usual practices. I have to thank Nancy Stohlman again for the Flash Nano group online, which has allowed me to make my latest (as yet untitled) Nif. Also, there were some reports that sales of books increased in New Zealand during our lockdown. So while there are difficulties faced by publishing houses, they are still picking work up.

Diane: Do you enjoy performing your flashes? Do you have many opportunities to perform locally?

Nod: I love performing flash fiction, especially the ones where you can get into different characters' heads and do their voices. Last year, there were readings from Best Small Fictions at our central library. The Canterbury Poets Collective features a series of readings each spring, and have often invited flash fiction writers. The recent WORD Christchurch literary festival offered opportunities to read, for example at the launch of The Quick Brown Dog, the journal of my alma mater The Hagley Writers' Institute.

Thank you for the opportunity to answer these interesting questions.

Originally from the U.K., Nod Ghosh lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. The Crazed Wind (novella-in-flash 2018), and Filthy Sucre (three novellas 2020) were published by Truth Serum Press. Details can be found at http://www.nodghosh.com/about/

SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN for this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and Micro Fiction Competition. Submissions close on 15th February 2021. For more information, please visit our Anthology and Competition guidelines.  

Welcome to the fourth in our series of interviews with this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology editors and Microfiction Competition judges. This week, Diane Simmons chats with Sharon Telfer, one of this year's judges for the 2021 NFFD Microfiction Competition, about historical fiction, favourite authors, and her starting point as a flash fiction writer, as well as her advice to writers entering the microfiction competition....

Diane: You are an editor for FlashBack Fiction and obviously enjoy reading and writing historical fiction. Is there any period of history that attracts you to write about more than others?

Sharon: ‘When’ is as much a setting as ‘where’ for me. Time adds another layer for thinking about how we live now. We walk through those layers every day. My small town, for instance, is named in the Domesday Book, there’s a WW2 airfield (now a gliding club), a medieval church built with wool money, a 500-year-old school, a 1930s cinema (now an arts centre), a half-demolished hall (now a Buddhist centre), a Victorian water lily collection, a disused canal head, and an ancient pond that originally supplied trout to a long-gone monastery. My regular walk takes in a footpath used by the Pilgrimage of Grace. Recent building round the edge of town has unearthed Bronze Age warriors and an Iron Age chariot (complete with horses). I’m fascinated by these changes and connections. So, I don’t really think of myself as writing historical fiction: the time setting depends on each story. I hope FlashBack shows anyone – editors, writers, judges, readers – who might still be tempted to set historical flash aside in a separate box just how versatile, relevant and powerful it can be. We’ve published some amazing flash.

Diane: As a micro fiction judge this year, do you have any advice for entrants? I know for instance that you consider language to be very important in a flash.

Sharon: Use everything. Use the title. Use the space between the title and the opening. Use the music of the language and the pace of the telling. Use the length of your words, sentences and paragraphs. Use segments or subheads or the headlong rush of a single paragraph. Use your reader’s expectations to complete patterns and to surprise them. Use those ghosts of other words hovering round the ones you put down. Use every comma and full stop. Use tenses and moods. Use that crystal ring at the story’s end. You have so much more than 100 words in your toolbox.

Diane: Can you remember when you first started reading flash? Is there any particular flash that you remember admiring from that time?

Sharon: I started writing flash by chance, before I started reading it. In 2015 I spotted Faber Academy’s competition on Twitter and thought I’d have a go. Every Friday, QuickFic set a prompt, then published their favourite three stories (max 250 words) that afternoon. Next I discovered AdHoc Fiction, another weekly prompt, with a little longer writing time but only 150 words. These were wonderful reading and writing playgrounds. Inspired, I entered the first Bath Flash Fiction award. I got absolutely nowhere. But the two top stories, by William Davidson and Eileen Merriman, blew me away. After that, I was hooked.

Diane: Who is the writer you most admire?

Sharon: The impossible question! One writer I’d urge anyone who loves reading or writing short fiction to read Carys Davies, especially her two collections, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike. These are mostly short stories, although there are some flash pieces and some brilliantly imagined historical(ish) settings. The rich, detailed worlds she creates are utterly recognisable and believable, while also sharp and unsettling. The endings make you rethink everything you’ve read before. I don’t know how she does it – though she has said that the title story of Galen Pike took her 10 years to get right!

Sharon Telfer cut her micro teeth on the weekly @AdHocFiction competitions. Her flash fiction has won prizes, including the Bath Flash Fiction Award (2020 and 2016) and the Reflex Flash Fiction Prize (2018). Her stories have also been chosen for the ‘BIFFY50’ (2019 and 2020) and Best Microfiction 2019. She’s a founding editor at FlashBack Fiction, the online litmag showcasing historical flash.

She grew up on Teesside and now lives in the Yorkshire Wolds. In 2018, she was the New Writing North/Word Factory Short Story Apprentice. She placed second in the 2020 Bath Short Story Award. Another story has been selected for the Test Signal anthology of the best contemporary Northern writing, to be published by Dead Ink Books and Bloomsbury in 2021. She tweets @sharontelfer.

SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN for this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and Micro Fiction Competition. Submissions close on 15th February 2021. For more information, please visit our Anthology and Competition guidelines.  

Welcome to the third in our series of interviews with this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology editors and Microfiction Competition judges! This week, Diane Simmons chats with K.M. Elkes, one of this year's judges for the 2021 NFFD Microfiction Competition, about writing, walking, teaching, and the process of editing a collection....

Diane: National Flash Fiction Day started in 2012. Can you remember when you first heard about it? Is there a story from any of the anthologies that stays in your mind?

KM: My first encounter was in 2013. I’d not been writing long, but luckily had some early success, including winning the Fish Flash Prize and being shortlisted for the Bridport (Flash) Prize. I think this raised my profile enough to be invited by Kevlin Henney to read at a NFFD event in Bristol. The line-up included authors like Paul McVeigh, Jonathan Pinnock, Clare Reddaway, Sarah Hilary, as well as hosts Calum Kerr and Tania Hershman. It was one of my first literary/reading gigs, but it was a very welcoming atmosphere as I recall.

One of the stories that I remember from previous anthologies was Helen Rye’s title story from the 2017 anthology Sleep is a Beautiful Colour – it’s warm, tender and funny. What more do you need?

Diane: Your full flash collection All That is Between Us was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2019. Could you tell us a little about the process of putting the collection together?

KM: The book was an unplanned baby. Like much flash fiction, it came about as the result of a prompt - a question from Jude Higgins, of publishers Ad Hoc Fiction, who asked if I had considered publishing a flash fiction collection. The answer was, categorically, no. I thought my flash stories had very little in common, so why would anyone want to read them all together?

But after Jude’s question, I made a tentative list of stories and spotted a thread running through them, a focus on the fragility of human relationships, particularly how much we are shaped by a need to connect and belong, and how that need brings both pleasure and pain. To make the collection complete, I created about some new stories and devised a triptych structure, with the first section covering relationships between parents and children, the larger centre section concentrating on couples and the final section examining relationships between friends and strangers.

After that it was the usual effort of revisions and editing and falling in and out of love with the thing. I spent a lot of time fussing over the cover design. It was the equivalent of making sure you wear clean pants when you go out, just in case something bad happens. I wanted to ensure that even if the book fell flat and got no critical acclaim or sales, then at least it would look pretty.

Diane: I notice that as well as writing, you have been running online writing courses. Is teaching something you enjoy. Do you have plans to run more courses in the future?

KM: I started running the online courses in January 2020, as a way to encourage writers to look at their craft in less conventional ways, to take risks and really lean into their unique voice. I also enjoy the opportunity to learn more about the writing process myself and be challenged by other writers. Plus, it means I get the chance to geek out by reading and analysing great short fiction in the company of other enthusiasts. I’m not sure how much any of that could be labelled as teaching but it doesn’t really matter as long as the participants feel they have got some benefit.

The courses are part of my income but have also been an opportunity, in a small way, to help people from marginalised groups as I offer discounted places on each course. As a writer from a specifically rural working class background, I know how tricky it can be to access learning and support, so I think it is incumbent on me to do what I can to remedy this.

I’m hoping to create some longer, less intensive online courses in 2021 and, fingers crossed, get back to some face-to-face stuff too.

Diane: Writers often feel they should be tied to their desk writing. Do you find time away from your desk helpful? Is there a particular activity that helps you to come up with ideas or solve problems?

KM: Yes, I have to go do other things as being in front of a screen too long leaves me, literally, with a headache. Research has shown that walking can boost creativity. The Australian author Tegan Bennett Daylight put it best “scratch a writer and you’ll find a walker.” My courses usually feature a walking exercise when I encourage people to go for a walk with their brains creatively engaged to see what kind of weird, compelling prompts they can find.

I also need more intense physical exercise, not necessarily for mulling and thinking but just to feel part of the real world and that my body is not just an increasingly loose bag of bones and fat for my brain to stew in. So I run, cycle, play football, occasionally climb up things I shouldn’t climb up (that’s not a metaphor, I just have a potentially hazardous ‘I wonder if I could get up that’ habit). I’ve usually got quite a lot of energy to burn off, much like a dog that needs walking, though I’d like to emphasise that I am toilet-trained.

Diane: Did you write as a child or teenager? If so, can you tell us a little more about what you wrote at that time?

KM: I wrote some risible poetry as a teenager, full of hormonal angst and loiny longings. And I was always, always reading. But growing up in tiny villages in a rural county, there wasn’t much of a literary scene. It seemed a remote pursuit for posh, well-educated people. However, there was a structure in place to encourage children from lower income families to take up a musical instrument, which I got involved with. It was music that fed the creativity that eventually led to me becoming a writer. It also gave me some early craft lessons - having our ‘known arsonist’ neighbours yelling up at my bedroom while I clumsily farted my way through scales on a bassoon helped me understand concepts like tension and jeopardy.

KM Elkes is the author of the flash fiction collection All That Is Between Us (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019), which was shortlisted for a 2020 Saboteur Award. His flash stories have won, or been placed, in competitions including the Bath Flash Fiction Award, Reflex Fiction Prize, Fish Publishing Flash Prize and the Bridport Prize. His work featured in the Best Microfiction anthology 2020, and he has been a Best Small Fictions and Pushcart nominee. His stories have appeared in more than 40 literary anthologies and journals. He is also an award-winning short story writer and has been successful in competitions such as the Manchester Fiction Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Award and the BBC National Short Story Award. A short fiction tutor for Comma Press, he also runs flash fiction workshops online and at literary events. As an author from a rural working-class background, his work often reflects marginalised voices and places. Twitter: @kenelkes

SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN for this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and Micro Fiction Competition. Submissions close on 15th February 2021. For more information, please visit our Anthology and Competition guidelines.  

Welcome to the second in our series of interviews with this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology editors and Microfiction Competition judges! This week, Diane Simmons chats with Rachael Dunlop, one of this year's judges for the 2021 NFFD Microfiction Competition, about writing, resilience, social media, and what she'd love to see amongst the competition entries....

Diane: You have been an enthusiastic supporter of NFFD from the outset and are a judge in this year’s Microfiction Competition. Having been in a number of NFFD anthologies yourself, can you give any advice for people submitting to the micro fiction competition.

Rachael: I always hesitate to give writing advice, because even though I’ve been writing flash fiction for over a decade, every time I start a new story, it’s like the first time, and I’ve no idea if I can produce the goods. When I’m struggling to get a story started, I will often use a specific and vivid memory as the seed and see where it takes me. These are often my most successful stories. Even in micro fiction I try to include sensory information, and the way to do this with such a limited word count is to make your vocabulary do double-duty: find words that are both specific and evocative. Mood and voice can also carry a lot of the narrative weight so try playing with that. And don’t forget to give your story a narrative arc: even in micro fiction, it’s important to get the sense that something has changed over the course of the piece. Or not changed, but there was struggle for change. Most of all, be ambitious — the best microfiction can encompass worlds.

Diane: You have a strong twitter presence. Do you think that it’s important for writers to engage with social media?

Rachael: I don’t think writers should feel any pressure to engage with social media if they don’t want to. It’s a myth that literary agents and publishers look more favourably on writers with large social media platforms and the days are long gone when a personal blog would be picked up for publication with a huge advance. Rather than using Twitter primarily as a tool to promote myself and my writing, I use it as a resource to connect with other writers and with writing organisations. I’ve made many real friends in the flash writing community through both Twitter and Facebook, people who are supportive, generous, funny and brilliant. On a practical level, Twitter especially is a great place to find out about competitions, flash fiction journals and writing courses. Connecting with other writers on social media has also really helped me to understand how the writing world works, which is really important in negotiating the highs and lows of acceptances and rejections.

Diane: What book is currently on your bedside table?

Rachael: I’ve just started reading Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers, which has been a big word-of-mouth hit in 2020. It’s set in 1957 in South East London and the period detail and atmosphere is superb. I’m already invested in the characters, just a few chapters in and it promises to be my favourite sort of fiction, which takes the particular and makes it universal.

Diane: Many people would say to be a writer you need to be sensitive, but that it is also necessary to be resilient – to be able to accept rejection and move on. Is resilience something you have had to work at?

Rachael: Absolutely. I’ve built up my resilience over time and in layers, like a lacquer shell. The sensitivity I need to be a writer is still there, under the armour. There have been two things that have made me more resilient as a writer: not shying away from exposing myself to failure; and understanding that both acceptances and rejections are subjective, and neither can be taken as a definitive judgement of your worth as a writer. I know many writers struggle not to see rejections as proof that they can’t write – so many of us start from a place of self-doubt rather than faith in our skills and talent. But it’s not just a platitude to say that rejection only means that particular story wasn’t right for that editor, or that competition, at this specific time. And yet so many stories get binned after one rejection, stories that might go on to be accepted somewhere else without so much as a comma being changed.

Successful writers are the ones that persist, who edit and resubmit stories they believe in until they land on the right desk. Successful writers have MORE rejections, not fewer, because they keep putting their work out there. I’ve had stories doing the rounds for years (yes, years) before being accepted. If I had given up on each story on its first rejection, my list of publications and competition listings would be tiny.

Ultimately, it’s a numbers game: the more you submit, the more you risk rejection, but the more chance you have of finding a home for your work, which in turn makes the rejections sting less. The two things go hand-in-hand.

Diane: I know that as well as writing flash, you have written several novels. Do you think that being a flash writer influences your novel writing?

Rachael: For me, flash and novel writing are very different disciplines, and I find it hard to switch between them. If I’m novel writing, I’ll write very little flash fiction and vice versa, so my first instinct was to say they don’t influence each other. But thinking about it, I can see that writing flash has given me several tools that have aided and improved my novel writing. For example, if I get stuck with a scene in a novel, I will often rewrite it as if it were a piece of flash fiction instead, and let the freedom that gives me lead the writing. Doing just this sort of exercise helped me find the distinctive narrative voice in my first novel. Writing flash has also taught me to let go of things that aren’t working, and trust that the second, third or further version of something will be The One, but that I have to work my way through the versions that don’t work to get to the ones that too. It’s easier, psychologically, to do this with pieces of work that are very short, but it’s an important part of novel writing too. Finally, while I’ve always been a concise writer, writing flash has definitely sharpened my prose further. Unnecessary words are always unnecessary, whether the word count is 100 words or 100,000.

Rachael Dunlop grew up in Belfast and now lives in London. She started writing flash fiction in 2009 when she won the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge. And thus an addiction to short-short fiction was born. Since then, her short and flash fiction has been published in anthologies from National Flash Fiction Day, Bath Flash Award, Bath Short Story Award, The Scottish Arts Club, Retreat West, and Stories for Homes. She has also been widely published online, including at FlashBack Fiction, Lunate Fiction, Flash Flood Journal, and Words with Jam. Her name regularly appears on various competition long and short lists, and occasionally she even wins things. Her flash fiction has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. She alternates writing short fiction with efforts to produce a publishable novel. Her two attempts so far have both been longlisted for the Bath Novel Award and remain works in progress.

SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN for this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and Micro Fiction Competition. Submissions close on 15th February 2021. For more information, please visit our Anthology and Competition guidelines.  

Happy New Year from all of us at National Flash Fiction Day!

This year's National Flash Fiction Day will be celebrated on Saturday, 26 June 2021 when we'll be marking our tenth anniversary with an online celebration of all things flash.  We hope you'll join us then, but to start the year off right, we've got some exciting things to share with you....

1.  Today we're launching our new banner for 2021, featuring artwork created by National Flash Fiction Day's talented Artist-in-Residence, Jeanette Sheppard.  She says, "I wanted the banner to look like a virtual outdoor party, an invitation for you to join in the celebrations, to read some flash, or to write some flash, or hopefully do both of those things." You can read more about Jeanette's artistic process and the inspiration behind the new image in her most recent NFFD artistic statement.
2. Today also marks the launch of our interview series with our 2021 NFFD Anthology editors and Microfiction Competition judges.  The first is an interview with National Flash Fiction Day's own Santino Prinzi in which he discusses his new collection, his history with National Flash Fiction Day, and what he's looking for in the anthology submission queue.  We are currently open for our submissions and will be posting one interview every Monday until submissions close on 15 February 2021.  Check out our Anthology Guidelines and Microfiction Guidelines and then send these wonderful people something to read...they can't wait to read your work!
3. Last but certainly not least, here's a little advanced notice that we've got something special up our sleeves for later this year.  National Flash Fiction Day is excited to announce that we will be opening our doors from 1 February to 31 October 2021 for novella-in-flash manuscripts between 6,000 and 12,000 words, with a maximum 1,000 word limit per flash. The judge is Sophie van Llewyn and yes, there will be prizes. We'll post full details on the 1st of February, but we thought we'd let you know early so you can start the new year with a great excuse to write and edit.

Again, Happy New Year from all of us at National Flash Fiction Day.  We wish you a creative and productive year of writing and reading, and hope you'll join us for all the fun on and around our tenth anniversary, National Flash Fiction Day 2021 on 26 June 2021.

Welcome to the first in a series of interviews with this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology editors and Microfiction Competition judges! This week, Diane Simmons chats with one of this year's anthology editors, National Flash Fiction Day's own Santino Prinzi, about his latest collection, his history with National Flash Fiction Day, and what he loves to discover in a submission queue....

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Diane: I very much enjoyed your flash collection This Alone Could Save Us which was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2020. Can you tell us a little about the collection?

Santino: I’m very glad to hear you enjoyed the collection! This Alone Could Save Us focuses on the theme of change, how well we do – or don’t – handle change, and how our expectations and perceptions of others don’t always match up with the reality.

The following quotation from Mary Shelley was at the back of my mind when I was compiling stories for this collection:

‘Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine, or the clouds might lour: but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day before.’

The stories are very varied and may not seem to fit together necessarily, but the way an unexpected event – minor or major – can suddenly and irreparably shift reality is explored in each of these stories. I also enjoyed exploring telling stories with a surreal edge, and I think this was something I was conscious of when writing some of these flashes. Flash fiction really enables authors to be playful and explore the weird and wonderful.

Diane: You have previously published two collections of flash fiction: Dots and Other Flashes of Perception (The Nottingham Review Press, 2016) and There’s Something Macrocosmic About All of This (V. Press, 2018). How has the process of publishing your new collection differed because of coronavirus restrictions?

Santino: Personally, I don’t feel the process of publishing my collection has been very different. If I remember correctly – which I may not, because trying to pinpoint exactly what has happened throughout 2020 feels like wading through thick fog – the collection had pretty much been finalised before the first UK lockdown, bar perhaps a few odds and ends.

The key difference for me has been around the physical launch and promotion of the collection itself. I feel uneasy marketing a book called This Alone Could Save Us during a global pandemic, as if I’m claiming you can shelve all your worries because this book is here to fix everything. I even considered changing the title at one point, but I kept it because stories widely do have the power to save us. For me, personally, retreating into various forms of narrative – books, films, videogames, etc. – has been how I’ve managed to navigate these unsettling times. I also like the title a lot.

We had planned to launch the collection at the Flash Fiction Festival, an annual festival held in Bristol where flash fiction writers and teachers from all over the globe descend for a weekend of words, workshops, readings, wine, and karaoke. Obviously this couldn’t happen, but we instead published and launched the anthology a few weeks later at the beginning of August.

The launch via Zoom was truly wonderful and a highlight of 2020 for me. While it would’ve been great to launch the collection with an in-person event, an online event enables so much flexibility. People from all over the world were able to come to the launch, many who may not have been able to come otherwise, and I was able to have a number of guest authors to help me celebrate the launch by reading their own stories too.

And, of course, the book is out there in the world finding its way to readers, and being able to share the stories I wanted to share with the readers who want/need to read them is to me the most important part about publishing anything in the first place.

Diane: Together, with Nod Ghosh, you are an editor for this year’s anthology. The theme is MAGIC. Is there anything you are particularly looking for in submissions?

Santino: No, I try not to anticipate what I’m looking for because then you’ll only be looking for that story and your eyes will be closed to all the other stories sent your way. The only things I ask for are for authors to tell the story they want to tell and to share with me the stories that they love. I’ll know what I’m looking for when I see it. Other than that, authors must interpret the theme in some way and must not put their name on their submission.

As always the theme of the National Flash Fiction Day anthology is open to interpretation. Editing this anthology is a joy because I’m consistently blown away by the inventive ways authors respond to the themes we choose – and that’s not to mention the quality of flashes themselves – so send me the magic you want to share.

Diane: Do you listen to music when you write or do you require complete silence? If you do listen to music, do you find it influences the way you write?

Santino: This completely depends on my mood or what I’m writing. Sometimes I need silence to concentrate, but sometimes I need music to block out all the other distractions. I find the same happens when I read.

I’m unsure if music influences what I write when I’m writing because I’ve never interrogated this idea in my own work, but I do believe we’re all influenced by everything we consume – consciously or unconsciously. So, music probably has influenced my writing, as much as the books I’ve read, the experiences I’ve had, the people I’ve met, the conversations I’ve overheard…and on and on and on…

Diane: You have been involved with National Flash Fiction Day since 2015. What has been the most exciting thing about your time with National Flash Fiction Day?

Santino: The best thing about National Flash Fiction Day throughout my years of involvement has to be the many authors and stories I’ve had the pleasure to be introduced to. I have made so many friends within the flash fiction community who I truly appreciate and have made many memories. It has also been incredibly fascinating to see how flash fiction has changed and evolved over this short period of time. Writers of flash fiction have become more daring and experimental over the years and continue to find new ways to telling stories. It has been, and continues to be, incredibly exciting.

Santino Prinzi is a Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day in the UK and one of the founding organisers of the annual Flash Fiction Festival. His debut, full-length flash fiction collection, This Alone Could Save Us (2020), is available from Ad Hoc Fiction. His flash fiction collection, There’s Something Macrocosmic About All of This (2018), is available from V. Press. His writing has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including Best Small Fictions 2019, Best Microfiction 2020, SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Jellyfish Review, and many more. To find out more follow him on Twitter (@tinoprinzi) or visit his website: santinoprinzi.com

SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN for this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and Micro Fiction Competition. Submissions close on 15th February 2021. For more information, please visit our Anthology and Competition guidelines.  

National Flash Fiction Day is gearing up to celebrate its tenth anniversary, and we're ringing in the new year with brand new artwork by our Artist in Residence, Jeanette Sheppard.  Here, Jeanette gives us a glimpse into her artistic process and the inspiration behind her latest work for National Flash Fiction Day....

Before I begin explaining my process, I’d like to say what an honour it is to create the social media banner for National Flash Fiction Day’s tenth anniversary. My first publication was thanks to NFFD, so it’s a huge thrill to be here ten years later revealing the image for this year’s special celebrations.

In the early stages of creating the banner I experimented in watercolour with ways to escape the conventional zigzag flash or crack of lightning across a dark sky that are often used to represent flash fiction. I like the freedom experimentation brings — diving in means I don’t freeze or overthink things. As a writer of flash any desire to overthink the artwork in the early stages was thankfully kept to a minimum — images about what the form is or might be are embedded in my mind. As I explored my instinctive attraction to light in dark places it occurred to me that the skeletal outline of a tree often echoes the shape of lightning. This realisation dovetailed with an image in my head of lights in trees. Lights in trees always say ‘celebration’ to me. I joined the trees to suggest the linking of flash into the longer form of a novella-in-flash.

The flash of a lighthouse beam and an electric torch were also in my mind. One of my favourite definitions of flash fiction is that it’s like a torch in a darkened room. I’ve forgotten who said it, so I’m hoping someone might tell me who came up with the idea. A firework also fizzed in my mind. I first came across this as an image for flash fiction in Rose Metal Press’ excellent, Field Guide to Flash Fiction. Here, Vanessa Gebbie talks about a firework in relation to the resonance of flash. These ideas merged and to my surprise the flashes of light worked well as a variety of zigzags.

I set the sketches aside for a few days to see which one stuck. While I mused on whether to go with the zigzag images social media rumbled, as it does every so often, about whether flash fiction is the best name for the form. Alongside this, I read a wonderful interview in Splonk (Issue 4) where Stuart Dybek ‘says’, ‘Flash spirit is not a matter of word length.’ The inspirational Kathy Fish talks about movement, resonance, and emotion in flash. It’s those three things I hold onto when I’m creating flash and it was those three things that I held onto when I was composing the final image for the NFFD banner. All of this fed into my thinking, especially the idea of a ‘Flash spirit’, and confirmed to me that the idea of the zigzag images was the way to go. The debate will rage on about whether or not flash fiction is the best name for the form, but for me flash does indeed have its own ‘spirit’, able to convey a story in unconventional ways. For many flash fiction writers the zigzag has become synonymous with that spirit — I saw it a great deal when National Flash Fiction Day began. I wanted to pay homage to the flash fiction community. What a supportive bunch they are!

Weaving through all of these ideas was an awareness that National Flash Fiction Day 2021 would be online. I wanted the banner to look like a virtual outdoor party, an invitation for you to join in the celebrations, to read some flash, or to write some flash, or hopefully do both of those things. Finally, I hoped to capture the excitement I felt when I discovered National Flash Fiction Day, ten years ago.

Jeanette Sheppard’s collection Seventy Percent Water won the 2020 Ellipsis Zine Flash Fiction Collection Competition. Her flash fiction appears in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, Reflex Fiction, Mslexia and four National Flash Fiction Day anthologies. One of her flash fictions pops out of a vending machine in Canada. She is currently redrafting her novella-in-flash that was Highly Commended by Ellipsis Zine in their 2019 competition.

As an artist, Jeanette creates artwork for small press book covers. In 2020 she created the cover for her own collection of flash fiction. Her work can be also be seen on the covers of Alison Woodhouse’s, The House on the Corner and Diane Simmons’ Finding a Way, both published by Ad Hoc Fiction. Jeanette is in her third year as artist-in-residence for National Flash Fiction Day. The 2019 and 2020 NFFD anthologies, And We Pass Through and Root, Branch, Tree, feature her artwork on the front covers. In 2021 she created the social media banner for the ten year anniversary celebrations and she will once again be creating the cover for the annual anthology due to be released in June.

You can find Jeanette online at jeanettesheppard.com and on Twitter @Inklinked.