With just over three weeks left until the deadline for our 33rd Award, on Sunday June 7th, here’s a really interesting interview with Shelley Roche-Jacques who won first prize in the February Award. She talks about how the story came into being and the ways she worked on it, tells us about her other writing and teaching and gives some great advice on writing entries for a competition. Read her first prize winning story linked below. And judge Ingrid Jendzrejewski’s comments on it and the other winners.

Q & A

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the inspiration came from being in Morrisons (the UK supermarket) last November when they called the traditional two-minute silence (commemorating the WW1 armistice). I was struck by how incongruous it felt, and by the tension between paying my respects and reining in my wandering thoughts. I was particularly drawn into observing the responses of other shoppers and staff. Like most writers, I’m an inveterate people-watcher, and found the dynamics of the scene intriguing.

Thanks very much for your generous comments! Titles are so important in flash fiction, are they? This one is of the kind that almost feel a bit sneaky, but are extremely useful in flash fiction in giving readers the context they need; the place and the occasion, meaning the writer can jump straight into the moment without the need for that kind of exposition in the opening sentences. I also wanted the title to convey the slightly absurd juxtaposition of location and occasion (the mundane and the profound) that really struck me at the time.

As soon as I got home, I wrote a very rough first draft. I was intrigued by the idea of the two-minute silence as a powerful framing device for piece of flash, as a conceit or constraint almost. I knew I wanted the piece to read as a stream of consciousness, to give the sense that we were with this person in her thoughts, moment-by-moment.

The early drafts featured observations of the other shoppers and more wide-ranging thoughts going on inside the main character’s head. She had a grievance with her husband who had gone off with the trolley, leaving her balancing a precarious tower of groceries (yes, my husband does that!). The thoughts about the son were also much more autobiographical to start with.

When I came back to the piece, I saw that I needed a clearer central pre-occupation for my character and decided to tie the thoughts about the son to the thoughts of patriotism and respect for the two-minute silence.

Quite often my writing comes from a feminist standpoint. The slogan ‘the personal is political’ comes from an essay by second-wave feminist, Carol Hanisch. For me, writing about gender inequality means bringing the personal and political together. My stories often come from something rooted in the personal, but (as with my Morrison’s story) I almost always find I need to then step back and look at what the piece needs to succeed as a story on its own terms. The literal truth often isn’t the most effective way to articulate a truth, it seems.

With my BFFA-winning story, I wanted to try to say something about the community in which I live (on the outskirts of Barnsley – a former mining town in the north of England) and explore my unease at the recent phenomenon of people hanging and painting flags everywhere. It feels like political discourse of all kinds is becoming increasingly polarised, which is depressing. I think about that a lot and actively try to see things from competing perspectives and escape the echo chamber.

I’m obsessed with dramatic monologue. Most of the poems in my two poetry collections are dramatic monologues. It’s a form of poetry which really took off in the Victorian period, largely developed by Robert Browning. I’m a massive Browning geek! Many of his poems are set back in the renaissance, and indeed the form seems to lend itself to historical pieces, the idea of exploring and giving voice to people from the past. They are often also about balancing ‘sympathy and judgement.’ Is the speaker in the right? Is this version of events to be believed? And so on. I find this can be a really good way of exploring social and political themes without being too didactic or preachy.

I also think the monologue form lends itself to sequences. Both of my collections contain an extended sequence. One draws on material from an archive of Victorian compensation claims held by Sheffield Archives. The other is about the life and death of Pre-Raphaelite model and artist, Elizabeth Siddal. I also love pairing monologues that present the same events from different perspectives. I have one featuring the Russian writer Anton Chekhov and the theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski, who staged the first production of The Cherry Orchard, and another exploring the relationship between artists Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. There’s often a dry, dark humour to be found in presenting conflicting accounts, which I really enjoy.

Sadly my collections (Ripening Dark and Risk the Pier are no longer available direct from the publisher. I have copies though! Anyone who’d like to buy one is welcome to buy direct from me via PayPal or bank transfer for £7, inclusive of p&p. My email is: s.roche-jacques@shu.ac.uk

I absolutely love meeting the new students each year and hearing about their creative journeys to date and about their ambitions for the future. It’s really enjoyable to see people open themselves up to new forms and styles of writing they haven’t encountered or considered before, to see them start to find their feet in giving and receiving feedback in workshops, and of course to see voices develop and confidence grow.

Flash fiction is a fabulous form for the classroom. I love that we can read and discuss a whole text together in full, there and then, something I once thought only really possible with poetry. Many students leave us as enthusiastic converts to flash fiction. I should probably get commission, but from whom, I’m not sure.

I have a collection of short fiction (mainly flash fiction) that I’m currently hawking about and for which I would like to find a home! I’m currently writing a novel, something I never thought I would do. It’s a very fragmented affair, and I’m treating each chapter as a short piece in its own right. It’s the only way I can make the terrifyingly colossal task of novel-writing feel manageable.
Research is another aspect of my job at Sheffield Hallam, and in recent years I’ve been enjoying researching and writing scholarly stuff about flash fiction.
I’m currently editing a volume for the academic publisher Routledge titled Flash Fiction: Theory, Practice and Pedagogy. The collection brings together twenty new essays by leading writers and scholars in the field and is aimed at both creative writers and students/scholars of literature. It covers topics such as the key elements of the form, flash fiction around the world, and flash fiction in the classroom and digital world. Many of the contributors will be familiar names to those reading this, and several are winners and/or judges of previous Bath Flash Fiction Awards. It should be out late 2027, but don’t worry, I’ll be shouting about it from the rooftops!

When I start a piece, I often find there is more than one central idea, sometimes several, leading off in different directions. It’s usually a matter of paring most of them away to leave what really matters for the piece in hand. It’s almost always a case of murdering at least a few of my darlings. I can always resurrect them elsewhere later.

It can be helpful to think carefully about the use of time. What is sometimes called ‘single-scene’ flash, where we remain rooted in the moment, can be especially effective, creating a pleasing sense of immersion. If a piece spans a longer stretch of time, it’s worth considering how you signal movement through it. Time markers (‘the next day’, ‘later’, ‘five minutes earlier’) can help negotiate shifts and can sometimes be put to playful effect. Flash fiction lends itself to strict structure and patterning, and thinking consciously about the presentation of time can be one way of achieving this.

This has been said a million times before, but every word counts in a story under 300 words. Be picky, be pedantic, read the piece aloud to hear the sound-patterning, the rhythm, the cadence, and to see if anything trips you up.
Finally, another thing people always say, but it may be worth saying again – once you’re relatively happy with it, put it away to rest for a while – then come back and try to look at it as if it was written by someone else. I like to think of this as sneaking up on the work, trying to catch it, and myself, unawares.