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We had to cancel our NFFD 2020 live event, so we've brought our celebration online. In our Flash Feast series, we've invited some flash superstars to share some videos and posts over the course of the day.

In our second Flash Feast, Jonathan Cardew of Bending Genres shares some insights about fun and form in flash...

 

Eighteen Bullet Points, or (re)Forming Flash,
Making It Not Crap

by Jonathan Cardew

  • If you are like me and you’re rubbish at writing and you’ve got nothing of real worth to say and you’re just counting down the minutes on this earth waiting for inspiration, then you might just need to form the crap out of your flash.
  • By form, I mean structure. By structure, I mean a straightjacket.
  • Paragraphs are a straightjacket.
  • But we’re bored of paragraphs, aren’t we?
  • When we write a well-structured paragraph, with a nice lead in and logical close, we want to kill ourselves, don’t we?
  • Every woman and her labradoodle has written a paragraph.
  • We are not every woman and her mixed breed canine.
  • So, we’re going to blow the pants off form!
  • We’re going to do what Jennifer Fliss does in Barren Magazine and we’re going to write a story on the side of a cleaning product bottle.
  • We’re going to forget about narrative ENTIRELY (well, not entirely) and we’re going to write a list of objects like Thaddeus Gunn does in Kenyon Review Online.
  • We’re going to madlib a story like Kim Magowan does in her flash over at Okaydonkey.
  • We’re going to read EVERYTHING at Diagram because form is the name of the game there, and we’re definitely going to read everything there right now this instant.
  • There is no such thing as crap writing.
  • We just sometimes need bullet points.
  • Bullet points are a liberation!
  • They keep going.
  • And going.
  • Also, paragraphs are fine.

Jonathan Cardew is a contributing editor for Best Microfiction and blog editor/ workshop leader for Bending Genres. His flash fiction appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, wigleaf, Passages North, Atticus Review, Craft Literary, Superstition Review, and others. Originally from the UK, he lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

 

For more craft articles and workshops on hybrid writing, check out the Bending Genres website.

 

We had to cancel our NFFD 2020 live event, so we've brought our celebration online. In our Flash Feast series, we've invited some flash superstars to share some videos and posts over the course of the day.

In our first Flash Feast, Michelle Elvy shares some thoughts about flash in an essay first appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly on 26 January 2017 as part of their Why Flash Fiction? series.

Four Vignettes on Flash Fiction
by Michelle Elvy

  1. Prélude

When I was a kid, I studied classical piano. I played the requisite Bach and Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, sure. But my favourite works, hands down, were Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Russian Easter (Suite No.1 for Two Pianos, op.5 mov.4) and Claude Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin (The girl with the flaxen hair, also known as Prélude No 8). I played Russian Easter with my two-piano partner; the relentless ringing of those bells rumbled my soul. The composer said he had written the suite to paint a picture – and I believed it. At around three minutes, it was demanding and challenging. It required control and focused energy. It told a story in a short interval with a bang – that piece, more than any other we played, was the very embodiment of intensity and precision.

But if I loved the technical challenges of Rachmaninoff, my favorite piano piece to play, when I was sixteen, was Debussy’s No 8 in his Book of Préludes. I could bang out more outwardly impressive works, sure, and even longer ones. But I was in love with that piece because of the apparent simplicity hiding a rich well of emotional content. I loved the colours, the harmonies. I loved all 39 measures, all 2 ½ minutes. I loved it for its brevity, and for its emotional impact. I loved that, precisely because of the quiet nature of the piece, every single note mattered. I loved it for its deceptively complex expansiveness, for the challenge of the phrasings, for the rolled chords. I loved it for the hushed legato, the subtle phrasing. I loved it for the quiet echoes that remained after I’d reached the last note. Playing Debussy’s Prelude No 8 was my first introduction to something so short and so powerful and so beautiful.

  1. Birds

In a recent discussion about prose poetry, New Zealand poet Michael Harlow wrote about the idea of story and language:

Inherent in all poems (there may be some exceptions) is some ‘story’ or fragment of a story wanting to be told or beginning to be told. It is in the nature of language that one word is always in search of another word, and then another.

I like this idea of words chasing each other, or perhaps singing to each other. Flash fiction can be as wee as two birds on a fence – but they can’t just be sitting there; they have to be shifting, or chatting, maybe even singing. Singing may be too much – trending toward the expected thing birds would do. But they must be doing something. That’s what makes it a story. Two birds in collusion, or in conflict, or in love – something about their relationship is central to them sitting there on the wire. The birds/ words seeking the relationship: that’s what makes the story.

Someone asked me recently how ‘What we ate’ is a story. I think the answer lies in the idea that the words must be seen in relation to each other, as Harlow suggests. We like to trim away adjectives and adverbs in flash fiction – but this story is going too far! It’s all nouns! Look:

Honey

Honey, fish and toheroas

Honey, fish and toheroas, plus eels

Honey, fish, and toheroas, plus eels, and also ducks

Honey, fish, and toheroas, plus eels, and also ducks, and pheasants and hares

Honey, fish, and toheroas, plus eels, and also ducks, and pheasants and hares, and godwits

Honey, fish, and toheroas, plus eels, and also ducks, and pheasants and hares, and godwits and snipe

Honey, fish, and toheroas, plus eels, and also ducks, and pheasants and hares, and godwits and snipe, plus kumara, spuds, corn and watermelon from Spirits Bay

And yet, there’s an implied relationship to the nouns – a before, and before, and before. Or an after, and after, and after. Either way: the words are chasing each other. There’s a momentum in their arrangement on the page. The language is what matters here. Content matters (though content in this case is limited by a historical document – this is found material), but content can only be achieved via language. It’s a bit of a leap to find the story in lines that are essentially lists of nouns. But if you look, I think it’s there, possibly in the implications of the words ‘and’ and ‘plus’. To me, flash is about play, about breaking down expectations. Look again: maybe you’ll see that’s not merely an arrangement of nouns. Something happens. Something changes over time. And it happens in a particular place, too. Whether it’s a good story or not – well, that’s not for me to decide.

But there they are, those words, chasing each other line after line, like a family of birds.

  1. Beast

I don’t count words when I wrote flash fiction. Not anymore. I write and the story takes shape. I know the feel of a 250-word story versus a 1000-word story versus a micro. I know if it’s going to sprawl into something more; some things you can’t say in 1000 words. With flash, I count at the end, yes – to see where I’ve arrived. Then I step back and see if the word count matches the feel of it. And the feel determines what kind of story it is – not the word count. That’s why I balk at the six-word story, never mind Hemingway’s mythically proportioned napkin. The six-word story is, for me, too brief. There can be expert six words. But they are rare, and they seldom reach the brush stroke beauty or the emotional mystery of the simple haiku. An awful lot of six-word stories result in summary (the tiny memoir is a classic) or declaration (see me or don’t: I matter) or the overly clever (giveaway: wedding dress, worn and fucked). Those are pithy and maybe even fun, but they don’t breathe much life. How can there be life if there’s no pulse, no movement? Life happens beyond gimmick. And so does a really good story. The pulse is what matters. The essence, the pull, the rhythm and music. Not strict word count. Sure, we impose word counts in journals we edit: 1000 here, 500 there, 250 there. But that’s merely a framework, something that helps tame the wild beast. The key is to let the beast roar, somehow, no matter which format the story takes. I like that in a 250-word story, or even a smaller micro, the beast growls below the surface. In the 500-word story, he may actually say something, and tangle with more than a couple other characters. In the 1000-word story, he may experience a full evolution of some kind. No matter the word count, it’s the deep reverberating hum of the beast’s heart that matters most. The scratching beneath the surface, the inevitable howl.

  1. Tell tales

Depart. Sail across an ocean. Arrive in port. Life has happened while you’ve been disconnected. But life is here, in this space, in your boat. Thirty days at sea: a blip or an eternity. Time and space collapse. Ocean swells lift you and drop you and lift you again. You think you stop time but no: time is relentless, neverending. Current flows. Wind comes and goes and comes again. Sometimes screaming, sometimes sighing. Your jib frays in light wind. You look up and see the tell tales have gone. When did they go? It doesn’t matter. Life is still happening, and you’re sailing on, tell tales or not.


Michelle ElvyMichelle Elvy teaches online at 52|250 A Year of Writing, edits at Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and Best Small Fictions and chairs National Flash Fiction Day NZ.  Recent anthology work includes Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand (Canterbury University Press 2018) and Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand (Otago University Press 2020). She has guest edited and judged competitions for  SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash 500Reflex Fiction, Bath Flash Fiction Award and the Whangarei Poetry Walk, among others. Her book, the everrumble (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019), launched at the 2019 UK Flash Fiction Festival. Michelle lives in Dunedin, NZ. michelleelvy.com

The ninth annual National Flash Fiction Day UK has finally arrived!

Check back here from 8:00 a.m. for Flash Feast and Flash Focus posts, but in the meantime....

  • Put on your wellies: the 2020 Flood has started!  Join us at FlashFlood, NFFD's online journal for 24 hours of flash, with a new piece posting every 5 to 10 minutes.
  • Or, if you fancy some writing, get out your favourite pen!  We're posting one flashy writing challenge every hour over at The Write-In.  If our prompts inspire some new writing, you can send it to us by midnight Sunday (BST) for a chance to be published at The Write-In over the extended NFFD weekend.  (See our submission guidelines for full details.)
  • Pre-order the print edition or buy the ebook of our 2020 Anthology from our Bookshop in preparation for our online launch party this evening.
  • Want to see what else is going on?  You can check out our 2020 Roadmap for full details.

Happy National Flash Fiction Day 2020!

National Flash Fiction Day kicks off in less than four hours!  Here's what we've got going on tomorrow, and where you can find it.

FlashFlood

For 24 hours straight starting at 00:01 BST, we’re publishing one flash every 5 to 10 minutes over at NFFD’s online journal, FlashFlood.

The Write-In

Over at NFFD’s The Write-In, we’re posting a flash prompt every hour on the hour from 00:00 – 24:00 BST on 6 June 2020. You have until 23:59 BST on Sunday, 7 June to submit your responses for a chance of publication.

2020 NFFD Anthology Launch

Join us from 7 – 10 pm BST for the 2020 NFFD virtual anthology launch. Readings from the anthology will be posted on our YouTube channel and we’ll be celebrating with chat and virtual toasts on Twitter and our dedicated Facebook event. All welcome!

Flash Feast

We had to cancel our NFFD 2020 live event, so we've brought our celebration online. In our Flash Feast series, we've invited flash superstars Michelle Elvy, Jonathan Cardew, and Nik Perring to share some videos, posts and ideas on the NFFD newsfeed over the course of the day, starting at 10:00 a.m. BST.

Also, the legendary Jude Higgins is running a NFFD workshop for NFFD from 3:00 - 6:30 p.m. for those who managed to snag a place. Contact her directly to enquire about last-minute places.

Flash Focus

Throughout the day, we’ll introduce you to a few independently-run flash fiction projects carried out by individuals and organisations across the UK. Keep an eye on our newsfeed to find out more about these brilliant projects, starting at 9:00 a.m. BST.

Beyond 6 June...

We’re coordinating with National Flash Fiction Day New Zealand to continue the celebration of flash through the month. Their full programme of events can be found on the NFFD NZ website.

We're gearing up for our virtual launch of the 2020 NFFD Anthology tomorrow, but in the meantime, here's a sneak peak at the beautiful cover featuring art by our artist-in-residence, Jeanette Sheppard.

Huge thanks to Jeanette, and huge thanks also to Sharon Telfer who kindly let us use the title of her flash for the title of this year's anthology.

We'll be celebrating the anthology online tomorrow with readings from the anthology which will begin posting on our YouTube channel at 7:00 p.m. BST and carry on celebrating until 10:00 p.m.

Feel free to join us for chat and a virtual toast to our authors in our dedicated anthology launch celebration on Facebook.

Enjoy!

National Flash Fiction Day 2020 is just around the corner, and we'll be celebrating as usual with a veritable flood of flash, starting from 00:01 BST and ending at midnight on Saturday, 6 June.

If you'd like to be a part of this year's Flood, do send us some work!  We are open for submissions through the week and are happy to read up to three 500-word stories per author on any theme, in any style.  Submissions are free.

Full submission guidelines can be found on the FlashFlood website and you can read about our wonderful team of editors here.

Don't have anything new?  No problem!  Previously published submissions are fine as long as you retain copyright and any period of exclusivity has lapsed.  We consider all previously unpublished work for award nominations such as Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and the Pushcart Prize.

We can't wait to read your work!

FlashFlood will be open for submissions from 00:01 BST Monday, 25 May to 23:59 BST Sunday, 31 May.

We are happy to read up to three 500-word stories per author on any theme, in any style.  Submissions are free.

Previously published submissions are fine as long as you retain copyright and any period of exclusivity has lapsed.  We consider all previously unpublished work for award nominations such as Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and the Pushcart Prize.

Full submission guidelines can be found on the FlashFlood website.

1

First of all, a huge thanks to everyone who submitted work to this year's anthology. We had nearly double the submissions this year as last, and it was a treat to read each and every piece.

We were incredibly impressed at the overall quality of submissions, so much so that we've decided to publish a slightly larger number of pieces this year. However, we did have to make many painful decisions, particularly when it came to common themes. (For example, we received a huge number of pieces about death, and about the death of a parent in particular.) Both editors read each piece anonymously, and we read a good proportion of the submissions many, many times more.  There are so many extraordinary stories that just missed out on our final list, and we'll be rooting for them as they go on to be published elsewhere.

Thank you to everyone who submitted for sharing your words with us. And to those of you who made our final list, huge, huge congratulations.

And now, without further ado, here is the list of titles for the 2020 National Flash Fiction Day anthology:

  • '<3' by Margaret LaFleur
  • 'A summer of sorrows, 1847' by Barbara Buckley Ristine
  • 'After the Flood' by Stephanie Hutton
  • 'All The Birds Have a Death Wish Today' by Rebecca Field
  • 'An Encounter with Hope (the Blue Whale at the Natural History Museum)' by Su Yin Yap
  • 'Arc of Colors' by Lois Baer Barr
  • 'Bath Time' by Helen Rye
  • 'Beneath a Steel Sky' by Natalie Pocock
  • 'Bye-Bye Blighty' by L. A. Wilson
  • 'Catch and Release' by Sara Hills
  • 'Chemical Bonds' by Sarah Mosedale
  • 'Closest to the Edge' by Marissa Hoffmann
  • 'Curb Appeal' by Timothy O. Davis
  • 'Diadem Through the Eyes of the Bear' by Donna L Greenwood
  • 'Endless Possibilities' by Nora Nadjarian
  • 'Family Album' by Amanda Quinn
  • 'Fault Lines' by Lisa Kenway
  • 'Feel For You' by Aisha Phoenix
  • 'Flock' by Nuala O'Connor
  • 'Footnotes' by Jo Withers
  • 'For courage' by Jude Higgins
  • 'Four Plus One' by Carrie Etter
  • '[From Below, The Noise of a Door Slamming]' by Anna Giangiordano
  • 'From the Outside, Everything Looks Fine' by Damhnait Monaghan
  • 'Give You the Stars' by Sheila Scott
  • 'Harbinger' by Epiphany Ferrell
  • 'Homemade food is made with love' by Anita Goveas
  • 'How to talk to your children' by Cathy De'Freitas
  • 'I Often Wish' by Chris Walters
  • 'If My Mother Really Loved Me, She Would've Had Sex With Gene Kelly' by Debra Daniel
  • 'In the Ménagerie D'animaux' by Anna Kisby
  • 'Intimates' by Amy Barnes
  • 'Lobster' by Meg Pokrass
  • 'Look After the Pennies' by Caroline Burrows
  • 'Made With Love' by Lydia Clark
  • 'Mothers' Day' by Alison Wassell
  • 'Music To Mourn Your Dreams By' by Mileva Anastasiadou
  • 'My Grandmother’s Recipe for Victoria Sponge' by Charlie Swailes
  • 'My Mother Had A Stone' by Nod Ghosh
  • 'My sister makes stupendous guacamole but it doesn't get to the root of my problems' by Rob Walton
  • 'Nana’s Biscuit Tin' by Frances Gapper
  • 'Nesting' by Gary Duncan
  • 'Open House' by Hema Nataraju
  • 'Out in the Cold' by Andrew Anderson
  • 'Peter Pan' by Bayveen O'Connell
  • 'Peter Rabbity' by Clementine Burnley
  • 'Picking' by Vijayalakshmi Sridhar
  • 'Rain' by Laura Tickle
  • 'Rock Pools' by Jonathan Cardew
  • 'Root, branch, tree' by Sharon Telfer
  • 'Ruins' by Charlie Swailes
  • 'Second-Storey Window' by Niamh MacCabe
  • 'Shit Parents Say' by Hannah Whiteoak
  • 'Sisters' by Patricia Q. Bidar
  • 'Smoke & Cinnamon' by Trasie Sands
  • 'Taking Stock' by Lara Frankena
  • 'The Flagpole' by Guy Ware
  • 'The Long Walk' by Chella Courington
  • 'The ocean inside my head' by Sam Payne
  • 'The Taxonomy of the Blacksmith's Daughter' by Anne Howkins
  • 'The Tent' by Catherine Ogston
  • 'The Top Family Attraction in Warwickshire 2020' by H. Anthony Hildebrand
  • 'The Wild Side' by James Northern
  • 'This is How it Starts' by Sara Hills
  • 'Traces' by Tracy Fells
  • 'Understanding the Universe' by Jeanette Sheppard
  • 'Wants' by Eilise Norris
  • 'We Are Kin' by Tabetha Newman
  • 'We’ve Been Married Eight Years and My Husband Still Brings Me Flowers ' by Paul Beckman
  • 'What is Incomplete Can Identify a Whole' by Rachel J Fenton
  • 'What Is Ours' by Corey Miller
  • 'What’s Inside a Girl' by Angela Readman
  • 'Worth a Try' by Diane Simmons

 

First of all, fear not; National Flash Fiction Day is not cancelled!

We are, however, moving our celebrations completely online and are working out the best ways we can serve the flash fiction community in this strange time. We will be posting more details in the coming weeks, but we’re excited about the possibility of bringing even more to the online flash fiction community worldwide for 2020.

We will still be printing the National Flash Fiction Day anthology, but we won’t go to print until it is safe for our printers to be at work. We can’t guarantee a timescale for the print edition at present, but our aim is to launch the digital version of the anthology on 6 June, regardless. We’re looking into various possibilities for a virtual launch party, so stay tuned!

Apologies for the delay in announcing the 2020 anthology line-up. We will post more details as soon as we can, but in the meantime, please bear with us.

Last but not least, we hope you and your loved ones are all staying safe and well.

It is with great pleasure that we announce the winning and highly commended stories of this year's National Flash Fiction Day micro fiction competition!

These ten stories can now be read at 2020 Microfiction Results and they will be published in the forthcoming 2020 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology, which will be out in time for National Flash Fiction Day on 6 June 2020.

Congratulations to our winning stories and their authors:
First Place Winner:
Second Place Winner:
Third Place Winners:
Congratulations to our highly commended stories and their authors:
Thank you again to our four judges. Their job this year was extremely difficult, requiring extra rounds of voting to reach our final ten. In the end, they were unable to separate the two stories vying for third place and we felt the fairest thing would be to award two third place prizes.
Congratulations again to all our prize-winning and highly commended authors, and to all those who were shortlisted. And, a big thank you to everyone who entered this year’s competition and trusted us with their stories.