Flash fiction by Helen Chambers

Meniscus Literary Journal

I’ve been experimenting with writing flash fiction this year. Something of an umbrella term, Flash Fiction (written by ‘flashers’, guaranteed to raise a snigger) generally refers to a piece no longer than 1000 words; typically, shorter. Many competitions and online journals ask for pieces around the 250/300-word mark. Micro-fiction usually means shorter still – anything from Hemingway’s infamous and powerful 6-word story: For sale: baby shoes, never worn – to 100 word drabbles.

Flash, in all its varied forms, can be found all over the internet in a multitude of online journals and competitions. I follow renowned expert Meg Pokrass (here for her website) on Facebook, where she often posts her stories or fiction prompts (often comprising an unusual theme and a random string of words, sending my brain off in unexpected directions). I also recommend Nancy Stohlman, Spelk and maybe considering subscribing to International Flash Fiction as good starting points. Find which stories you like best, and then look at the writer’s bio to see other online journals to try.

Don’t be fooled into thinking short equals easy. A good flash needs to tell a story, not simply describe. Often with flash, what is ‘not quite said’ tells the reader more than is in the story – good subtext is vital. Like a poem, a flash benefits from more than one reading, and is great fun to write. Every word has to work, to count; the writer still needs to show, not tell.

Here is my most recent piece at Meniscus, (scroll to p28 – but why not read the others while you’re there?!) an Australian journal. I first wrote this whilst doing an online course with Meg Pokrass which took me out of my comfort zone, challenged my perceptions and encouraged me to think differently about the role inanimate objects could play in a story… Over to you – Happy flashing!

How to get your short story noticed

I recently won second place in The 'Writers' Forum' short story competition, which means payment and publication (the two most important things for a writer after the actual slog of imagining and editing a story).

So what is my advice to get your story noticed?

• The first paragraph has to set up at least one question to engage the reader and it has to sustain their interest. This could be (and usually is) a dilemma the character is faced with.

• The reader needs to be grounded. Where are we? Make it concise and if possible simple, unless your character is a place, in which case it will have layers all of its own (think of the 'house' in Rebecca or the film: Monster House).  

• The character needs motivation and emotion. We need to know who's speaking and any dialogue must be believable but reduced to as few words as possible because no one speaks in full sentences.

• There has to be a structure (but not necessarily beginning/middle/end in that order).

• Unpredictable is good but no story should have an unexpected twist that hasn't had any build-up (foreshadowing is a must). There's nothing worse than feeling conned at the end.

• The dilemma the character faces must be resolved.

• A good story should leave you thinking, even if it's a 'how did I not see that coming?'  Personally, these are my favourite.

• The style should be all your own.

• A proof reader is a good idea because it's very difficult to spot your own mistakes. If you don't have this (many people write in isolation) an alternative method is to print out your story in a weird font.  It's much easier to see any mistakes when the print looks unprofessional.  Duplicate words can be caught out by reading aloud.

• Similies are great but only in moderation (a bit like everything).

Sometimes it takes a few submissions to get your story placed and that enforced 'drawer time' when the story is out there, is always positive.  I was lucky with this one but others I've had published before, have been rejected and rewritten before acceptance by another publisher.

Good luck!

Timeline of Lawn House Blues

 Lawn House Blues by Philippa Hawley

With just 2 weeks until the official launch of my new book, Lawn House Blues, I recently emailed a writing friend, Kathy who lives in America, to tell her the news. In my email I commented the book had taken two years to write and she replied, ‘Two years really isn’t bad for getting out a novel. I think James Joyce took ten’.

     I worried that, having promised myself I wouldn’t, perhaps I had rushed it (because looking back I knew I had hurried my last novel). This set me thinking about the timeline of this book’s creation.

November 2014 – first ideas about the novel; working title The Treehouse.

May 2016 – first chapters saved on to my computer after months of thinking, planning and making notes.

July 2016 – early manuscript sent to professional editor through Writers Workshop (much too early as it happened). One certainly learns by one’s mistakes - she was not impressed.

August - December 2016  - manuscript put away in a drawer!

***

December 2016 – The real Lawn House Blues began. I removed it from the drawer, took a deep breath and started a major re-write, with a new beginning and a change of point of view.

     Wivenhoe Writers (wivenhoewriters.blogspot.co.uk) were a great help at this time and have been ever since. We had fun finding a new name and eventually settled on Lawn House Blues.

May 2017 – I attended a symposium on ‘Finding an Agent’ run by Writers Workshop (now called Jericho Writers at jerichowriters.com) after which my sister and my husband graciously took on the roles of copy-editors and beta readers to help me prepare for the next stage ...

  

August 2107 - I submitted the manuscript to numerous literary agents in batches of ten. Each individual required research into their requirements, a personalised letter, a synopsis and a different number of words to be sent. This took months.

     I also entered three novel competitions, run by Lucy Cavendish College, Retreat West, and Good Housekeeping respectively. The competitions brought no success but it seemed a good exercise at the time. Most of the agents did reply after 8-12 weeks, with a kind ‘no thanks’ rejection letter. A couple were quite positive but said it wasn’t for them and wished me luck. One even forwarded the manuscript to a colleague she thought might like it, but still no plan emerged during a long and frustrating winter.

January 2018 – I was summoned to an afternoon of tea, cake and critique by the Wivenhoe Writers. That afternoon they picked the novel apart, allowing me to rebuild it for the third time, over the following weeks.

April 2018 – I approached Spiffing Covers(spiffingcovers.com.) who agreed to help me self-publish. One of their freelance editors, Kimberley Humphreys performed the final edit and the manuscript was finalised, while Stefan Proudfoot created a beautiful and relevant book cover.

July 2018 - All I had to do was produce the back page bumpf and an ISBN while Spiffing Covers sorted the typesetting, ebook conversion and distribution, ready for the official launch date of 21 September 2018. That's a total of 2 years and 8 months.

Winning and Losing by Helen Chambers

 

“You keep on winning,” said one friend. “You’re on a roll,” said another. True, I’ve had a run of good luck with my writing. Since 1^st January 2018, I’ve won the Fish Short Story Prize, a free place on a ‘Fantastic Flashing’ course with Retreat West and had a flash story up online with Who Writes Short Shorts? and a couple of longlists and one shortlist.

But. But…

I’ve just counted my rejections. A rejection is where you get a polite email if you’re lucky (many thanks Spelk, who’ve politely let me know three times now), and if you’re unlucky, you just notice the absence of your story title from the published longlist (no names – but I’m talking about a prestigious flash competition!). It can be demoralising when you’re sure your piece really isn’t bad.

I’m hit and miss with sending things in. I have long periods when I submit nothing, then in a flurry I may have a week where I submit four or five pieces. I’ve been writing a lot of flash fiction recently, where it’s short, giving me a higher output than say, short stories. I’m also (obviously) trying to write new things too and can’t always spare the time, or money, involved to submit.

Looking at things from the academic year, as a good teacher should, I’ve had 34 rejections since September 2017. At least I tried! I read an article by Kim Liao on LitHub that you should be aiming for 100 rejections per year, because that way, at least you’re writing new things and sending stuff out… On that basis, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do on my rejections!

Fishy business

Photograph by Ben Russell  

http://bensonrussell.com

So it’s 10pm when Marcus and I go into Ma Murphy’s Bar and Grocery Store in Bantry, as invited. Our eyes ache from tiredness (we got up at 4am this morning) and it’s noisy with Sunday-night locals, so we know it’s got the craic, despite its Facebook credentials. We congregate in the less-remarkable back room and shout, strain to hear each other, strain to remember whether we’ve read that person’s piece: ‘Oh, you’re THE Helen,’ and we reverentially pass round a single copy of the Fish Anthology 2018, surreptitiously checking for our own names. After half an hour I admit defeat and we slope away, only to find later that we weren’t the only ones to leave early.

On Monday at 6pm, cheered by a day spent exploring gorgeous Bantry Bay and the faded gentility of Bantry House, we congregate in The Windward Room of the hotel and receive copies of the Anthology. It is beautiful, and I flick back and forth through mine, reading the bios. What follows is excellent. All the attending writers in the Anthology – poetry, flash fiction, memoir and short fiction - are to read one page, and one page only of their piece. As winner, I go last. Some pieces are familiar – I remember them from when I read the proofs. They are varied and superb, and, ninety minutes later when it’s finally my turn, I have become very nervous. Everyone is so talented. My writing is no better than theirs. I was lucky the judge plumped for mine. They’ve largely funded their own trips, and mine is largely paid for (well, it will be, if and when I get my cheque!).

Some authors have just launched straight into their writing; some have explained and justified it; more frequently they have handed out bountiful thanks. They’re getting fidgety and they want to get to the bar by the time it’s my turn. I walk to the front aware I am shaking, and that my voice will wobble. I need to control myself. I pull an ex-teacher joke out of my foggy brain: ‘As a retired teacher, I can’t tell you how excited I am to be reading to a room of grown-ups who aren’t going to need the loo in the middle,’ and it gets a laugh and some friendly heckles. I laugh too. It’ll be OK. Now I can relax – I think this is the precise moment when the photo is taken, and I am smiling, thank goodness – and I read my page from Clippings, from the start, no explanations, no thanks (I did that when I found out I won), just straight into it. The applause at the end is far warmer.

After, that we mill around for a group photo and chat, and this time, I can match faces to stories. We chat longer in the bar. They are a fantastic group. I meet the radio-play writer who was shortlisted for flash fiction, the short-story writer who came second in the memoir, the guy who’d never written before, the accomplished writer who had two pieces in the top ten (and has been previously published by Fish). Some comment intelligently about my piece; some vow to go off and read it. This is a prize for ‘emerging writers’ but we’re none of us spring chickens! We connect on social media, such is the way of the world.

The next day, Marcus and I head North up the Wild Atlantic Way to the beautiful Dingle peninsula – County Kerry proper, and holiday proper – before two nights in fascinating Cork city. I read the Anthology at every opportunity and now it means so much more. I exchange messages with other writers and receive and send unsolicited messages of praise. I have had a fantastic time, and truly have had the luck of the Irish. Thank you, Tilly Emmerson and Fish Publishing!

Copies of the Fish Anthology 2018 will soon be available at the Wivenhoe Bookshop, and direct from fishpublishing.com.  The anthology is the 'culmination of a year's work, trawling through thousands of submissions to the Fish Short Story, Short Memoir, Flash Fiction and Poetry Prizes. The judges were Billy O'Callaghan, Marti Leimback, Sherrie Flick and Ellen Bass respectively.'

My Story - Memoir and writing from life

My Story 

A 6 week course with www.wordafterword.org.uk

Taking Word After Word’s course, ‘My Story – Memoir and writing from life’ has been my first sortie into this genre, apart from a little travel writing, and it has been both interesting and revealing. I realised early on that I hadn’t read many memoirs or biographies and therefore had a lot to learn. I signed up to the course with the idea of getting started on a new project I was planning, to write about the life of my maternal grandmother Lucy (1898-1982). Fiona, our tutor, had other ideas and I soon found I was writing about myself.

     Initially it felt self-indulgent to repeatedly use the words ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’ but it became easier with practice. It was liberating to be encouraged to do personal, free-writing exercises, where the words just flowed on to a page. Here we were encouraged not to edit or re-read, but to allow the stream of thoughts and memories, arising from suitable prompts, to develop without interruption. These could be private words, not necessarily to be shared, though with an option to do so if we wished. As the small group of students got to know each other we felt braver and more able to share our personal stories and it became therapeutic, even cathartic, to read out our stories in this safe environment. It could almost have been a counselling session (life-writing often being used in the counselling process) and as we wrote about our lives, our insightful tutor supported us with skilful professionalism.

         So what did I learn from the course? What did I gain?

 Th      The course was an opportunity to stay connected with people and the wider world, and I realise that is one of the reasons I write. Although the process of writing can be isolating, writers can through their work connect with others, in writing groups and communities (alongside the many online forums that also exist).

  

    I learned to value the concept of bearing witness, when writers ask readers to support or endorse an experience, so both writer and reader might reach a new level of understanding.

     I learned that truth can have many aspects; the truth (for sure), the truth as we see it (feasible), and the truth we tell others (fiction).

  

    I acknowledged the benefit of using all the senses; to try to ‘show and not tell’; to be true to myself and find my voice; and (as always) to be careful with point of view.

     I hope I will keep by me the list of opening ingredients for a story, be it fiction or memoir:

-a character

-a question

-a clear voice

-a vivid setting

-and an action.

     I will hang on to the good advice Fiona gave us at the end of ‘My Story’ about editing – to get the words down, then rest, leave them and come back refreshed, with some distance and new objectivity.

     I was reminded to try to write something every day if possible and to regularly exercise my writing muscles.

          I feel better prepared to get on with writing about my grandmother’s life, but might approach it slightly differently now. I hope I will be more respectful of whose story I am telling and considerate about how I might mix fact and fiction. It could be an interesting piece of social history, but I will write it primarily for my family to appreciate. They will be my audience and the first to bear witness but who knows where it might go from there.

Philippa Hawley

Running a poetry workshop about the Menopause

My poem 'The Change' appeared on a postcard for the Off the Rails project and was spotted by a writing friend who was involved in running a series of lectures about the Menopause at the University of Essex.  It was a pilot event to enable discussion about a difficult subject. I was asked to lead a creative workshop.
My original poem was in response to a portrait by Robert Wiseman and a theme of 'Change.'.

 

It's difficult to create a workshop when you have no idea of numbers or whether your audience has any experience of creative writing or in fact, the confidence to take part.  I decided to keep it simple and to base it on the 'symptoms' of menopause.

I also decided to use Acrostic poetry as a way to help people to express the feelings associated with the Menopause but also not to have to worry about rhythm and style (impossible in half an hour!).

I then wrote my own example, keeping in mind that anything too laboured over, tends to put novices off.   I wanted the workshop to create discussion without any awkwardness.

There were some great poems created during the session.  Some of the writers used their own words like 'Power', and others used a symptom and twisted it on its head. The one conclusion from the day was that we don't talk enough about the Menopause, despite the fact that more than half of the population have to deal with it, especially in the workplace where symptoms can be debilitating.  

Menopause is change and it can be a change for the better.

Reading Refresher - FutureLearn

When it comes to reading I am rather slow, both mechanically and intellectually. I am often conscious of reading in a superficial and non-analytical way, although clearly there is a difference between reading for pleasure, entertainment and relaxation and reading as an active process of discovery, enlightenment and challenge. Writers need to be readers and I recently felt in need of some kind of ‘refresher’. So I followed one of the free courses offered by FutureLearn, called How to Read a Novel, https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/how-to-read-a-novel#section-overview

at which a few of my friends laughed and commented. ‘Don’t you know how to do that already!’

What attracted me to the course was the fact that it involved no cost, was online and allowed participants to do as much or as little as they pleased. Also, and more importantly it featured four novels and two writers I had never heard of, but which were shortlisted for the James Tait Black fiction prize 2017: C. E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings, Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You, Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians, and Jo Baker’s A Country Road, A Tree. These were books I would never have chosen to read, (ranging as they did from a large American ‘saga’ type novel, to an erotic gay work) but guided by the excellent presentations by the course leader (Dr Alex Lawrie, University of Edinburgh), short articles and interviews with the writers, I was able to appreciate, if not to like, the particular qualities of each book.

The course took a fairly standard approach to the study of fiction, by considering the elements of plot, characterisation, dialogue and setting, but I liked being reminded of these basic ingredients and found the extracts used to elucidate them revealing. Whatever else the books did for other readers, for me they provoked a response and triggered some important questioning around the use of the certain techniques in fictional writing. Participants (from anywhere in the world) were invited to comment and answer questions at certain points in the course. Some of these offered very useful insights too. Overall, I found this course a refreshing and stimulating experience and I was also motivated to experiment with different techniques in my own writing.

Fish short-story prize-winner- Helen Chambers of Wivenhoe Writers!

I want to scream this from the rooftops: I’ve won the FishShort Story Prize for 2017/18 and this exciting, overwhelming, wonderful news has had to remain below the radar for nearly three weeks. I’m just about bursting!

The email, when it arrived (I’d submitted the previous November and, as advised, forgotten about it), was so unexpected and such a surprise, that I asked Marcus, my long-suffering husband, to check I’d understood it correctly. He agreed with me – I’d won! This means that it’ll be published in their 2018 anthology, that I’ll hopefully get to visit the West Cork Literary Festival in July and meet some of the other shortlisted writers and hear their work, but also so much more than that. I’m aware that it’s a prestigious competition and it’s going to make my writing CV look so much more impressive!

I’ve been walking around in a daze since then. I’m truly delighted. It’s a huge boost to my confidence, which, as a writer (I can definitely say I am a writer now!) tends to fluctuate wildly. Writing can be a lonely activity, so feedback – from friends, other writers and especially competition judges, is always welcome and helpful. I’m glad that judge Billy O’Callaghan liked my story ‘Clippings’ as I’m aware that a preference for one shortlisted story over another can be rather subjective. I’m especially fond of my protagonist, Tilly, as I’ve spent so much time with her, and I’m sure she’d be pleased for me.

The judge said:
'Clippings – Just exceptional. I was a bit sceptical at first of the structure, but the story unfurls wonderfully. Incredibly emotional, truthful and heartfelt. Beautifully drawn characters. I read this several times over the past two weeks and as I sit here now, I want to read it again. It’s a story that has left a deep impression on me.'

It’s boosted my enthusiasm too – to revisit a novel I’d put on hold, to carve out proper writing time for myself instead of letting it drop down the priority list, and most importantly, to keep writing. Don’t any of you ever give up – you never know what’s round the corner! Many thanks to friends, family and writing friends for their support and encouragement, and most especially to The Wivenhoe Writers, who all know Tilly too.