Emma Ashmere

Yesterday in Byron Bay, the wild surf crashed and the winter sun flickered. In an upstairs room off main street, a dozen or so keen writers hunched over their notepads writing Flash Fiction. The workshop was timed to coincide with the inaugural Byron Flash Fiction Competition – now open across Australia.

More Flash Fiction opportunities are bobbing up all the time. Some are morphing into multi-platform affairs: animation, sound, postcards, dance etc. But what makes an editor or competition judge decide a piece is ‘good enough’?

In previous posts I’ve mentioned strategies for writing memorable short stories. In my post on microlit there’s a link to David Gaffney’s tips on writing Flash Fiction published in The Guardian. Gaffney has since revisited this. Apparently these ideas have ‘followed him around.’  See also Claire Fuller’s suggestions.

I’ve been sending work to journals and competitions for 20 years. Some stories have been picked up. Most are not. The main thing is to keep going. As Natalie Goldberg says in her classic how-to book Writing Down the Bones – when you finish a piece of writing – and start another.

Writing short isn’t easy. Sometimes the real story only emerges as you hack away the extraneous. Cut too much and the story withers. The great thing is you can go back to a piece years later, change a lazy word, or add a different title. Sometimes you have to take out the fire-bellows to coax a new spark in a piece that’s been slouching around your ‘rejected/needs edit’ file. It’s all about decision and precision. As New Yorker creative-nonfiction writer John McPhee says: ‘Writing is selection… You select what goes in and decide what stays out.’

Some competitions or journals call for a particular theme. With a bit of renovating a dormant story might fit. It might even catch the judge’s or editor’s eye. But once it’s sent, it’s out of your hands. As Priscilla Long says in her book The Portable Mentor – make your work as good as it can be. We only have an allotted amount of writing/living time. So send out your best.

It’s heartening to find some very short fictions tucked away in recent short story collection. Laura Elvery’s ‘Man about a Moon’ appears in her new book Trick of the Light (UQP). Roanna Gonsalves’ NSW Premier Literary Award-winning collection The Permanent Resident (UWAP) includes the short piece ‘First Person’. Mixing up short and longer stories isn’t new. Virginia Woolf’s twin shape-shifting meditations on colour ‘Blue and Green’ were published in 1921. See also Carys Davies’ ‘In Skokie’ in her collection The Travellers (Text), and Janet Frame’s ‘The Linesmen’ in You are Now Entering the Human Heart (Women’s Press).

There are many excellent fiction and non-fiction opportunities in Australia and beyond, including:

Bryon Bay Flash Fiction Competition

Spineless Wonders joanne burns microlit award

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2018/04/19/electric-lit-seeks-flash/

http://www.fishpublishing.com/competition/flash-fiction-contest/

https://mastersreview.com/flash-fiction-contest/

Happy writing and good luck!

Emma Ashmere’s new short story collection DREAMS THEY FORGOT is published by Wakefield Press. Her stories have been widely published including in the Age, Griffith Review, Overland, Review of Australian Fiction, Sleepers Almanac, Short Australian Stories, #8WordStory, NGVmagazine, and the Commonwealth Writers literary magazine, adda. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize, 2019 Newcastle Short Story Award, 2018 Overland NUW Fair Australia Prize, and the 2001 Age Short Story Competition; and longlisted for the 2020 Big Issue Fiction Edition, and the 2020 Heroines Prize, with another story forthcoming in the NZ/Aust Scorchers climate change anthology. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, THE FLOATING GARDEN was shortlisted for the Small Press Network Book of the Year 2016. Read more of her posts re short and long stories here.