The OU is due to launch its forthcoming flash fiction competition #OU50words. The multi-award-winning campaign invites those interested to write a piece of flash fiction in no more than 50 words, in response to the university’s daily video writing prompt. To support the competition, OU academic Gwyneth Jones shares the content below about ‘Literature’s Delinquent Offspring’.
Flash fiction is an iridescent flying beetle, a top-shelf shot of something you neck back for a dare, a soundbite overheard in a queue at the museum, a sketch on a napkin that nails the dynamic between the odd couple at the next table.
In a couple of minutes, flash can tickle your ribs, open a door – or a can of worms. It can break your heart, brighten your day, upend your world. Dive in.
Very short fiction has been around for ever in texts such as Aesop’s Fables, but flash fiction really began to gain traction as a genre in the late 1980s. Today it has a wide international fanbase and is published in literary magazines, anthologies, single-author collections, and also of course on the internet. Warning: Flash is addictive. Those iridescent beetles swarm – read another, write another. And another.
Do you want to break some rules?
- Stories should have a beginning, middle, and end. Scratch that! Flash hardly gets past the beginning. Flash is always close to the end. You might start in the middle, in media res, or you could squeeze that out altogether and trust the reader to fill in the gaps. Flash may not have a fully worked out ending, but it should ‘land’ with the reader and definitely resonate.
- Create original characters. Sure, you could. Or you could use archetypes and save thousands of words. Take Goldilocks: your reader already knows she’s an adventurous, entitled, blonde who’s very, very picky.
- Stories need a plot. Whilst something certainly shifts over the span of the text, flash tends to have a situation, that only by implication extends to a traditional plot – and you can leave that to the reader (you trust your reader, right?)
- ‘Show’ not ‘tell’. It’s a great rule, but sometimes, in the pursuit of brevity you need to turn it on its head – but still, be specific, startle the reader, bruise them, or make them blush.
Two Rules Worth Keeping:
- Every. Word. Count. Aim for pin-sharp specificity, nothing anodyne, clichéd, or generalised. Pay careful attention to the sound of the words because flash is great for reading aloud. And while you’re making each word work hard, think also about what you are not saying, those gaps and omissions are part of the story.
- Sweat the title. For comps and litmag subs, the title isn’t included in the word limit, so don’t waste free words; choose something long or short but make damn sure it interacts with the text to produce meaning.
Finally, on the subject of subject matter, there are no rules. Flash can handle some very serious subjects, often by ‘telling it slant’, but the form is inherently playful. Flash gifts the writer a chance to do things not sustainable in long-form fiction, and through the constraint of brevity, other freedoms become apparent. So, experiment! Write in one breathless sentence, write a lipogram, write from an unusual point of view, or in the negative, write in a Fibonacci sequence, write your story as a list, or a set of instructions (flash appropriating another form like that is known as a hermit crab), but above all, abbreviate, condense, distil, then polish until it gleams.
Author Bio
Gwyneth Jones lives in Wales and writes short and flash fictions under the pen name Jupiter Jones. She is the two-time winner of the Colm Tóibín International Prize and her most recent novella-in-flash, Gull Shit Alley and Other Roads to Hell was published by Ad Hoc Fiction. She is currently a PhD candidate at The Open University researching form and narrative purpose in the novella-in-flash.
https://www.open.ac.uk/research/people/gsj52
Check out the OU’s social media channels between 12-18 June to be in with a chance of penning a prize-winning story, selected by the OU’s Dr Gwyneth Jones. Find out more, here Award-winning 50-word flash fiction competition returns! – OU News
Main picture: Shutterstock
