Thanks to everyone who has entered our 28th Award so far. We’re getting busy with just two and a half weeks to go until the deadline of Sunday 6th October. Matt Kendrick our judge will read the longlist and select a short list and the top five by the end of October. £1460 in prizes. We’re looking for stories 300 words or under on any subject or theme.

A few more thoughts about themes and subject matter. We receive many very good, yet sad stories about contemporary life, fewer historical stories and fewer humourous or uplifting stories. So if you submit an entry with a great title that is humourous, historical and not trqgic it certainly might catch the attention of our initial readers and cheer them up.

Flashback Fiction, (the magazine that publishes historical fiction, which is not currently open) has an interesting historical timeline of their published stories https://flashbackfiction.com/index.php/timeline/. It’s worth reading some of the stories linked. I have a couple in there. They are tragic, however. Many of us default to tragic in our stories. But we don’t always need to. Here is picture that might prompt a last minute submission. It’s early morning on an autumn day. There’s a hot air balloon in the sky. Maybe locate the story in a different century and keep it light, like the balloon. No crash landings!

Jude
September 2024

It’s not long (under one month) until our 28th Award judged by the amazing writer, editor and teacher, Matt Kendrick closes on Sunday 6th October at midnight GMT. For up to 300 word flash fiction. £1460 prize fund. The 50 stories longlisted are offered publication in our 2024 anthology. Results out, in our quick turn around, at the end of October.

To get you inspired, if you haven’t written anything for the competition and have no idea what to put on paper, do read my interview with him. I also asked Sara Hills the first prize winner from the June 2024 round of Bath Flash to give us a prompt when I interviewed her.. Here it is again:

Drop a character into a public space and have something wildly unexpected happen in the first sentence, bringing the conflict front and center. What does your character observe? What’s at risk—both externally and internally—and what do they do about it? Try to use all the senses if you can and zoom between the overall scene and smaller details that evoke emotion. Don’t get bogged down by rules; let yourself play on the page. But do think about agency and action, and make something happen. If you’re feeling stuck, throw a dog into the mix (figuratively, of course!).

If you are a subscriber to her Substack you could also read the newly published article by Kathy Fish on The Art of Flashh where she goes through the process of how she found an old story that was ‘a bit flat’ which she boldly altered in just an hour to submit to a deadline at Wigleaf. It ended up being called ‘Chicago’, was published in Wigleaf and selected for Best Small Fictions. I thoroughly recommend signing up for Kathy’s substack. It is always packed with excellent writing tips, instructions and examples.

Finally for more last minute inspiration, if you are nearby and want to attend a face to face event, do come to listen to flash writers reading their stories at St James Wine Vaults, Bath on Saturday 28th September from 7.30 pm to 10.00 pm. Free with snacks and a late bar. Diane Simmons and Flemming George will be reading a few stories from their new novellas in flash and I will be reading from my new collection. And we have lots of others reading a story each. In no particular order, Abigail Williams, Alison Powell Jupiter Jones, John Wheway, Grace Palmer, Mark Barlex, Deb Tomkins, Cole Beauchamp, Sara Hills, Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, Kevlin Henney, Andy Lavender, Anna Wang, Katja Sass and Nick Havergal These evenings are always really good fun with a fantastic variety of stories And there is a raffle and we sell books, many discounted.

Jude, September 10th 2024

Back in April, we posted the news that there would be a 2025 Bath Novella in flash Award, this year judged by Jude Higgins, BFFA founder, who has read hundreds of NIF competition entries since 2017 when the inaugural award was launched, while preparing the longlist for the judges. This year, Jude is also selecting a short list and the winners. Read the Q & A with her about it here The Award is open now (20th August) and is closing 31st October, (a month later than we said back in April). Results will still be out in January, 2025 and the winners published by Ad Hoc Fiction, in late Spring. You still have time to write a short novella perhaps? Sarah Freligh’s novella was inspired by writing for the August micro-a-day challenge, currently on the go this year too. And you can read about how she went about it in this interview Read in Full

Matt Kendrick is a writer, editor and teacher based in the East Midlands, UK. His work has been featured in various journals and anthologies including Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Cheap Pop, Craft Literary, Fractured Lit, Ghost Parachute, and the Wigleaf Top 50. He writes a monthly craft essay called “Prattlefog & Gravelrap”, and facilitates the “Mondettes” newsletter where he invites different writers to pick their favourite pieces of flash fiction and analyse what makes them tick. He also runs the Welkin Writing Prize. Find out more about him on his website: www.mattkendrick.co.uk

We are delighted that writer, editor and writing tutor and awesome all-round supporter of writers in general, Matt Kendrick, has agreed to judge our 28th Award. Read my Q and A with him. Such interesting answers!

• You will have read hundreds of flash fictions through your editorial and teaching work as well as those from previous competition judging. What do you think are the components of the most successful pieces?

I recently calculated that, between those different hats, I’ve critically engaged with over 8000 pieces of flash in the past five years, so I’ve seen a whole breadth of different approaches, narratives and voices, and I’m continually blown away by the number of talented writers out there. In terms of what makes a piece successful, that of course is a very subjective thing. If a story lands on the page from a reader’s perspective in a way that matches the writer’s intention, then for me, the piece is successful. However, it might not be the most successful in a competition. Competition success, I think, is its own beast. Especially, in a big competition like the BFFA, you need to tick several boxes in order to do well. First, I’d say make sure you’ve found that glint of originality—what makes your piece stand out from the crowd? Second, distil the story down to something that fits the container. 300 words is a tiny space—make the idea simple enough so that it doesn’t feel crammed in. Third, make sure the surface layer of the story is working—often in the search to add ambiguity, nuance and depth, writers don’t pay enough attention to the surface layer. Fourthly, you do still want those depths—I’ll read each piece several times before making my final decisions, so give me something new to discover on every pass. Fifthly, make me feel something—that’s so important! And as a final bonus component, don’t neglect the level of words—can you weave in some language highlights? Can you create textural contrast and tonal shades?

• Can you give us a brief rundown of the many services you offer to writers? What do you enjoy about creating courses and teaching?

I teach a series of two-week courses under the umbrella term “Write Beyond the Lightbulb” which currently includes “Colourful Characters”, “Glorious Words”, “Go With The Flow”, and “Lyrical Writing.” These are all online, asynchronous courses, and are a chance to play around with sentences and words in a safe-space environment. As an editor, I work with writers on everything from microfiction to novels, and I also mentor writers on a one-to-one basis. In all these different roles, I feel very privileged to be entrusted with a writer’s work. A lot of writing involves bearing your soul on the page, so asking someone to read that work in a critical fashion can be a scary thing to do. Hopefully, my feedback style makes a writer feel encouraged and excited, but it is still a privilege to be trusted in this way. Another thing I love about my work is seeing writers travel along their writing journeys. Some of the writers I started working with three or four years ago are now getting publishing deals or finding their flash fiction on the Wigleaf Top 50, but it’s also wonderful to see the less talked-about successes—writers who gain a confidence they didn’t have before, writers who achieve their first ever publication, writers who manage to complete the first draft of their novel.

Further details on my courses: https://www.mattkendrick.co.uk/courses-workshops
Further details on my editing services: hhttps://www.mattkendrick.co.uk/editing-feedback

• When did you become interested in writing very short fiction? What do you like about writing in the short-short form? Can you link us to one of your favourite pieces of writing?

I first became aware of flash fiction around ten years ago, but I didn’t really fall in love with it until I started reading pieces by the likes of Kathy Fish, Gaynor Jones, Nuala O’Connor, and Sharon Telfer. Then I tried to write my own and discovered it was really, really hard! Now that I find it slightly less hard, I think the thing I enjoy about it most is the potential to add so many layers of meaning right on top of each other. You can’t necessarily do this in a novel, but in flash, you can keep on excavating to your heart’s content. One piece that, for me, does this wonderfully well is “Things Left And Found By The Side Of The Road” by Jo Gatford. I also love the form of this story and the way it indulges in language—these are two other aspects of flash that I really love; it’s a genre with so much creative freedom.

• How is your novel going? We’d love to know what it’s about… unless that’s a secret

My novel? Eek! It’s currently at the stage of a relationship where it has survived several tempestuous arguments, a break-up, a couple of restraining orders and a half dozen counselling sessions, but mostly it’s going well. A couple of years ago, I firmly switched my writing motivation from writing for publication to writing for joy, so the only person I’m really trying to please is myself, and so far, I’m managing that. As far as the plot goes, it’s slightly (very?) off-the-wall. It’s about a man who sets up a museum for old sayings which he illustrates using flash fiction, and since I’m method writing as the character and writing all the stories that he references, I’m keeping my hand in with writing flash at the same time. My hope is that I’ll end up with a mirrored collection of flash and prose poetry that chimes against the novel. And if I’m very ambitious this might become something much more interdisciplinary with artwork and music (possibly my own), and dance, spoken word and mime performances (definitely not my own) to interpret the various stories and sayings. So, you know, a small project! It will probably keep me occupied for the next ten years.

• Do you like a musical soundtrack when you are writing?

Music was my first artistic love. When I was younger, I attended Trinity music college and I used to play the piano to a pretty high standard (past me was a lot more talented than current me!) So, I guess people would expect me to answer yes to this question, but instead, it’s a definite NO! This is because my method for writing involves listening to the rhythm and sound of the sentences. If there were music in the background, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. However, I often listen to music for inspiration, and some of my published flash could definitely be described as musically ekphrastic. And with my current project, I’m attempting to do the opposite—to create pieces of music that interpret a story or saying. For example, I recently published a story called “Maybe there is” that features a dripping bucket of milk and I’ve written a piece of music where the drip is represented by an increasingly repeated note.

My top tip is to focus on your ending. Everything pivots around that. How does it connect with the start? Now that you know where you’re going, have you started in the right place to create a journey through the piece? Does that journey work with your endpoint? Look at your title—does it chime with the ending in some way? In terms of the ending itself, does it leave a reader on the right emotional note? Is that emotion being earned? Does the ending give a reader a springboard to both reflect on what they’ve just read and allow them to imagine what might come next? Is the rhythm and tempo of the ending working in the strongest way? For me, the ending is the most important piece of the puzzle. A brilliant ending can elevate an otherwise ordinary piece. A slightly flat ending can puncture an otherwise dazzling story.