Amanda speaks to our Digital Writer in Residence, Emma Andrews, between drafts – three stories in one week for a single competition. Amanda is also preparing for the book launch of Flesh Fiction at the Words on the Waves Writers Festival.
‘There’s such a diverse range of shortlisted entries for the book. It’s fascinating to read,’ she tells Emma. “It’s a good place to look if you’re curious about this space.”
Like any good story, you as the protagonist have experienced a shift that’s taken you somewhere quite different from where you started. Let’s talk about that.
I was always in love with writing. Then, as I was approaching 30, and maybe having a third life crisis, I decided to write a book. How very novel of me!
It was a middle-grade fiction novel. I enjoyed the process of learning and was listening to lots of podcasts and attending workshops to try and improve. I completed three separate novel drafts: all iterations of the same story. But with a job and family, it was slow going. And then, as I was finishing the third draft, my husband had an accident.
Life changed a lot. I still wanted to write but couldn’t fathom the idea of finishing a novel. The ‘write every day’ manta wasn’t going to work for me. But I could write all day, for one day.
How did you come to land on flash fiction as your solution?
As a “genre”, I didn’t really know anything about it. But at around the same time I was starting to look into it, I got back in touch with an old friend and when we reconnected, we realised that we were both still into writing. We met up monthly, brainstorming and writing together. And we began writing short stories, submitting them to Furious Fiction. The way it works is you get a prompt plus a word count and a time limit to submit.
So it’s a bit like improv?
Yeah, kind of; but you usually have a day or a weekend to come up with something.
Sometimes it flows and other times it’s like banging your head against a brick wall. The prompt might not connect with you. But you’ve got to get inspiration and that’s hard as sometimes it doesn’t come.
Competition writing is pure dopamine. It condenses the pleasure and pain of a writer’s life into a shorter window. For, as many times as you’re longlisted, you’re not. When you write from the heart it can sting.
Now, I mainly exist in the flash fiction competition space and combine that with skills from my career writing training materials, my two passions coming together, hence why I run the workshops.
What is the definition of flash fiction?
It’s art so there’s no real definition because as soon as you make rules someone will feel the need to break them.
Generally flash fiction is prose of around 500 words; but it can be up to 1500. Under 500 is micro fiction.
The challenge is how to create an arc in those low word counts. Here’s how I think about it.
- In flash fiction you’re writing a scene; one pivotal scene out of a short story whilst still having a complete arc. The character will change, the world changes, there’s a pivotal moment. All of those things are happening in a tight space. In the workshop I talk about reducing the cast, perhaps focusing on just a single location, maximising the words used, emphasising and de-emphaising.
- In micro fiction, you can’t even get a whole scene. It’s more of an idea. You’ll still need some shift or change. You need to spark a feeling in the reader. But not with all the ins and outs. It’s about the feeling that the piece is giving.
Sounds like it can be tough. What are the positives to balance it out?
The competition circuit is very social and that’s one of the main aspects I love about it. Flash fiction is a quick win on the long, winding and painful journey to publication. So people dip in and out whilst they’re also working on novels. You can submit in a weekend and you’ve done a whole complete thing. That’s such a satisfying feeling if you’re finding frustration with longer work.
Sometimes it flows and other times it’s like banging your head against a brick wall. The prompt might not connect with you. But you’ve got to get inspiration and that’s hard as sometimes it doesn’t come.
What do you find particularly unique about this format?
How zoomed in you have to be with editing is what makes flash fiction unique.
The opening sentence and the end have to work really hard. Then the purpose of the messaging is the story.
Over, say, a three day competition, I recommend that the first day is spent on character, vibe, emotion. The second day is used to create a draft and then day three is the edit. Get beta readers involved to give you feedback on your work; so you’re not doing it alone.
Or (like I said about breaking the rules) sometimes you just smash it out in the last two hours before the deadline and no one else ever sees it!
The beauty of flash fiction is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s about trying to make a connection between you and the reader.
It sounds like you were quite busy with family, work and your own writing, but then started podcast. Can you tell us about that?
I’m type A to the core and Furious Fiction took a hiatus. It went from monthly to quarterly, so I needed to fill the time in between. Ed (the friend I’d reconnected with) and I had such a wild time hanging out that we wanted to share it so we decided to start recording our conversations. In the beginning, we just talked about something that we’d read or watched.
And it looks as though the format of the podcast has changed over time?
Yes, then we launched a competition. We took a punt. Ran it for free. We didn’t know how many entries we’d get. A friend who ran her own competitions told me she’d had 20 entries so that was the benchmark. We actually got 700! So we knew we had to get into it. And we run the competition four times a year.
A big part of our competitions is the online community that comes with it. People can share drafts before they submit and chat outside the competition. I’ve seen authors who level up every time they submit.
Reading other people’s work has given me huge insight when it comes to understanding how to make an impact through writing. My own work has improved massively. And now that’s a big part of what we talk about on the Podcast.
What can you tell us about the patterns that regularly come up in the work you receive?
Well lots of people are giving it a crack for the first time and don’t really know how to do it. They enter the competition, read others’ work, submit and get a bit educated along the way. Often what comes up is understanding the difference between what is a story and what is something else. A vignette versus a story.
A vignette is an image and even though it’s intriguing, nothing happens. Often it’s written as someone processing thoughts like a diary entry and they arrive at a conclusion that they had already reached from the outset.
In a story, something pivotal occurs. It can be just a tiny shift; something subtle (touching a coffee cup for example) but it carries sub-text or emotional weight. That’s what can be really beautiful about flash fiction.
So where to from here Amanda?
We’ve just had the biggest fee-paying competition ever with nearly 500 entries. We still love the regular episodes on the podcast, but it has shifted as you have seen. So we want to make the competition something bigger and do it full time. That would be our dream job.
Part of the prize for shortlisting is that we publish the winning entries along with the top six stories from each round of the competition with commentary from Ed, the judges and myself.
So readers get the story of what made us choose it as the winner.
Want to learn how to write award winning fiction? Enrol in Amanda Scotland’s workshop on 20 June from 10am to 1pm. Click here to secure your spot.