Flash In Five – September 2023 Emily Devane

This month our Flash In Five comes from writer Emily Devane

The Word Swallower (2018) Ellipsis Zine (click title to read)

Idea: This story came about by accident. I wanted to write a piece of flash for the National Flash Fiction Day anthology, on that year’s theme of ‘food’. I still have my notebook, filled with abandoned notes. I wanted to write something that would stand out. It was in thinking around the theme that an idea came to me: what if I told a story about people who eat things that aren’t food? I was familiar with stories about pregnant women craving coal, earth or chalk. I have hypo-sensory tendencies, so this was something I could relate to, albeit in a small way. I went down a lengthy research rabbit hole, exploring the phenomenon of people eating non-food substances. Pica, as it’s known, is classed as an eating disorder. The story started life as a paragraph with the holding title ‘The Paper Eater’.

Development: At the back of my mind was the expression: you are what you eat. I became interested in the concept of a person eating paper, and somehow becoming the words on the page. The story set out in a playful direction. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this but the tale about the eaten lunch ticket actually happened to me, and it provided a humorous jumping off point. Then I thought of other things that might be eaten – and what might be rejected by the discerning paper eater (I had fun with that part!). But at this stage, the story was a series of anecdotes. As I worked on the story, it became clear that this character was eating paper due to a lack of something. By the final draft, this girl has become so shaped by the words she has consumed, she is now unrecognisable to her own mother. Everything slotted into place with that last line – another literalised metaphor. Sometimes that happens, and it feels like magic – a ‘ta-da’ moment.

Editing: During the editing stage, I switched perspectives. In the first draft, the story was told from the mother’s perspective but that made it harder to convey the final message. Third person allowed me to shift tones as the story progressed. I decided the title, ‘The Paper Eater’, wasn’t doing enough work. This girl wasn’t just eating paper, she was consuming words – and swallower seemed to have more resonance as a word. We talk of people swallowing a story whole or being swallowed up by something. That word seemed to better reflect the transformation at the heart of the story, and I felt it would prime the reader for something a little deeper. I still have the first draft of this story and it was one that grew and evolved rather than being honed and polished. I know I’m unusual in this, but I resist over-editing. First drafts have an energy and rhythm to them that’s hard to replicate.

Submitting:  I ended up not sending this to the NFFD anthology – ironically, in my attempt to think outside the box, my story had become too removed from the theme of ‘food’. I submitted the story to Ellipsis Three (the print edition), along with another story, ‘Night Music’. Steve told me he’d like to publish both stories – ‘Night Music’ ended up in the print zine, and ‘The Word Swallower’ was published online. I was thrilled when it was later nominated for Best of the Net and went on to be a finalist.

Reflections: I’m still fond of this piece because it reminds me to play. Too often, I forget that bit!


Emily Devane is a writer, editor and teacher based in Ilkley West Yorkshire. She has taught workshops and courses for Comma Press, Dahlia Press, London Writers’ Cafe and Northern Writers’ Studio. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, a Northern Writers’ Award and a Word Factory Apprenticeship. Emily’s work has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Best Microfictions Anthology, Lost Balloon, Ambit and others. She is a founding member at FlashBack Fiction. Emily co-hosts Word Factory’s Strike! Short Story Club and runs a monthly social writing group at The Grove Bookshop, Ilkley. Find her on twitter @DevaneEmily and @WordsMoor

Refraction: Combining Contemporary and Historical Fiction

Today on our blog we have a guest post from Jennifer Harris with a fascinating insight into the writing process behind her novel, The Devil Comes To Bonn. And we’re delighted that the book was written on our Novel Creator Course, a year-long online course with support and mentoring, plus the option for a lower cost un-mentored version too.

Straddling past and present via backstory is a standard novel writing tool, but some novels continue the past-present dichotomy throughout, therefore, requiring readers to jump between stories. Well known examples are Restless(2006) by William Boyd and Sarah’s Key (2008) by Tatiana de Rosnay. 

I thought frequently about these novels while writing The Devil Comes to Bonn (2023). I do not know how Boyd would articulate his technical aim in writing Restless, but mine was refraction. I wanted readers to read the contemporary story in The Devil Comes to Bonn as refracted or angled through the historical story.

My 2015 story of Stella, a woman who is bullied at a conference in Germany, was planned to be angled through the experiences of Hildegard, a woman who in 1941 finds herself pushed into the position of chambermaid to Hitler in one of his favourite hotels. By contrast, in Restless, the daughter discovers the historic story of her mother and thus must cope with the unravelling of the life she thought that she lived. In the other example, Sarah’s Key, the present resolves and heals the past as the contemporary story focuses on discovering what happened long ago. The two timelines of these novels have clear narrative links.

At first sight, the 2015 and 1941 stories in The Devil Comes to Bonn have little in common, but the differing responses by the women protagonists to life challenges are the links. In my novel, the women characters have different reactions to what has happened to them and make different life choices. There is no resolution. The refractive angling continues beyond the end of the novel. One woman seems honourable and the other not — or at best confused rather than dishonourable — but at the end who has taken more life leaps? Who has remade herself? 

Refraction in writing distorts and angles and thus creates new ways of seeing, sliding us sometimes subtly between stories, and sometimes brashly. Writing with refraction as my chief tool, meant that neither of the stories in The Devil Comes to Bonn could be told in a straightforward manner; they interrupt each other constantly, sometimes only a page separates them. The aim of the sudden halt of one story and jolting re-starting of the other creates a space for readers to ponder beyond the compulsion of the narrative drive of ‘what next?’  Refraction is a technique of rupture which propels readers into thought; the theoretical aim is for readers to use each story to reflect on the other.  This is not to say, however, that as a writer I want readers to be emotionally detached — far from it.  I want readers to feel strong emotional attachment to relatable characters. 

In Restless, Boyd brought the two timelines together via the plot as the main characters, mother and daughter, confront the antagonist. In The Devil Comes to Bonn, the two storylines come together differently: first via having the two protagonists talk to each other, and secondly by having them overlap in places. They meet repeatedly in the contemporary 2015 story on the shore of the River Rhine. Then they overlap in one room in Hitler’s hotel — but seventy-four years apart. 

I wanted the slightly secondary 1941 story to be as compelling as the modern story without overly reducing the presence on the page of the main protagonist, Stella. That was an on-going challenge. The two women protagonists have well-meaning, loving husbands who overstep loving relationships into the coercive. I use the historical-contemporary refraction to illuminate the long history of moral ambiguity that women often find themselves in — apparently loved and coerced. How should they respond?

My novel also contains references to other historical periods: ancient Roman settlement on the Rhine, and Japanese enslavement of Koreans during World War II. It was a risky leap to use these apparently extraneous historical times as plot points because of the possibility of diluting the central stories. I enjoyed the challenge of keeping readers close to the main protagonist, Stella, while she had life altering emotional responses to historical periods beyond either of the two timelines. With the main character being an historian, it was not unreasonable that she might think beyond the contemporary everyday. 

No-one has yet said to me that it is outside the scope of the intensity of a novel to invoke several other eras. I look forward to more responses.


About Jennifer Harris:

I write literary fiction inspired by the historic environment—not historical fiction, but fiction set in the contemporary era that responds to the past, remembered either publicly in monuments and memorials, or in subtle, private ways. My PhD is in Cultural Heritage theory and I have lectured in and researched cultural heritage and museums for many years. I have run a small museum, and worked as a journalist in Australia and London. I am from Western Australia and have lived also in France and the UK. In 2020 I relocated to Seattle in the spectacular Pacific Northwest of the USA. I enjoy water colour painting, hiking, skiing, dogs – and, of course, visiting heritage sites and museums. Website: https://www.jenniferharriswriter.com

Meet The Writer – Shrutidhora P Mohor

Today on our blog we have a Q & A with writer Shrutidhora P Mohor who is a contributor to our final competition anthology, Swan Song

Can you tell us a little about your story in the Swan Song anthology?

Salt Colonies is a story which developed as a dream out of a relationship lived largely in my dreams. It is a story of an unstructured, undefined, asymmetrical relationship between a man as a mentor, and a younger woman as a learner/ devotee/ giver, the latter’s enthusiasm for love and life reflected in her passion for art as well just as the mentor’s emotional indifference towards life in general and towards her in particular is captured by his coldness for art even though he is a brilliant creator.

I have always been mesmerised by the dialectics of unequal relationships, where one partner has been a disappointed recipient, a seeker and yet a giver too, strapped in a need to give and receive at the same time. 

In this story we find them located in the wilderness of a deserted sea shore, ploughing through the mystery and pathos of an uninhabited seaside, an imagery which came to me from one of my holiday trips and the beach-side restaurant quite some distance away from the main resort.    

What draws you to entering writing contests?

I admit I enter international writing competitions frequently, deterred only by high entry fees, sometimes costing me 2000 INR for a single entry!

I love entering contests primarily because there is scarcely a more effective way of judging the worth of my writing and ascertaining if my writing can be counted anywhere within the perimeters of being of international standard. While it is always a good idea to compare my progress in terms of my own growth, my earlier writings with my present writings, it is also relevant to see where my writings stand vis-a-vis the writing community.

The setting of deadlines imposes a pressure in a positive way, pushing me to stay focused and engaged with my writing, which otherwise stands threatened very often by the mundaneness of my professional preoccupation.

Moreover, a contest entry is a heartening way to connect to the writing community. As we all go about submitting, encouraging each other, wishing luck to one another, sharing our disappointments and joys over the longlist and the shortlist, it makes me feel emotionally connected and gratified.   

Can you share some of your favourite writing influences with us?

I am a lover of classics in all its forms—music, films, books, although I am drawn equally strongly to contemporary and post-modern forms of art as well. So, say, for example, Gone With The Wind is as much an influence as Milan Kundera whose works I devoured as a precocious teenager. I have been a particularly visually driven reader, imagining and sometimes enacting entire scenes and mouthing dialogues secretly after reading books.

Jane Austen, Guy de Maupassant, Daphne du Maurier, W Somerset Maugham, D H Lawrence as authors have moved me (I have visualised each scene vividly in my mind and been intensely scrutinising of the film versions of their books). Hence I generally ‘see’ every scene that I write.

Where can we find out more about you and your writing?

Unfortunately my author website is yet to be launched, my limited technical skills causing me to go excruciatingly slowly on it. As a poor substitute, for some time to come, we have to make do with my social media accounts on all of which I am quite active and all my publications or competition listings are posted. On Twitter my handle is @ShrutidhoraPM, on Instagram @shrutidhorap, on Facebook @Shrutidhora P Mohor. 


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Flash In Five

This month our Flash In Five comes from micro and flash fiction writer James Montgomery

Boys In Boxes (2023) (click title to read)

Idea: Satisfyingly, the idea for this flash started with the very final line: ‘our real lives are waiting, new and ours and unboxed’. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with that line for quite a while, but I knew there was something there, particularly in the use of the word ‘unboxed’. It intrigued me. Originally, I’d thought of doing some kind of story about dolls (?!) but – even before putting fingers to keyboard – I knew it lacked any kind of emotional resonance, at least for me. I hadn’t found the heart of the story. So, I left it alone for a while. A lot of my flashes start in this way; a phrase or collection of words that come to me when I’m doing anything but writing, which keeps me curious.

Development: One evening, I came across an article about those who had died from AIDS in New York in the late 1980s. Unclaimed bodies were sent to Hart Island to be buried in anonymity in a mass grave. The stigma and lifestyle associated with AIDS during this time meant many who died were estranged from their families. Furthermore, private burials were difficult to arrange, as many funeral directors refused to handle AIDS corpses or charged much higher fees. As a gay man, this broke me. Also, I couldn’t imagine how challenging it must have been coming to terms with your sexuality against this backdrop – although, having grown up in the 90s, I certainly experienced its aftereffects. The fact that so many victims were buried in mass graves, without even a coffin – or ‘box’… You can see how my brain started to join the dots together.

Editing: The decision to use first-person plural was fairly instant, as well as the title. I also quickly knew I wanted to use boxes as a repeating motif, to capture pivotal moments during the lives of these boys as they grow up and approach adulthood. I struggled with the first line to begin with, wanting to make the point that so many of these men were buried without even the dignity of a coffin, but it was a challenge to quickly orientate the reader and do all the things good flash should, plus include this kind of detail for the reader without any kind of context. There were also a couple of instances where I was trying to shoehorn the ‘box’ element in a tad too much. In an earlier form, that final sentence began, ‘We free our favourite cassette from its box’, but someone in my writing group pointed out that I needed to trust the reader more; they would recognise this motif even without it being explicitly stated. Also, it meant that the final ‘unboxed’ felt more earned when it arrived. My friend Sherry Morris provided excellent, thoughtful feedback, and my writing group Flash Corral helped further refine it.

Looking back, there were two editing tips that really helped me, which I can recommend. First of all – and we’ve all heard this one repeatedly – but I read it out loud again and again and again, which helped get the rhythm just right. Secondly, and this is a little more unusual, but I became obsessed with a certain pop song around the time when I was writing this story. I would have the song playing on repeat in the background while I worked on it. I’m not going to reveal which song it was, but the track has a yearnful quality to it, which absolutely complemented the tone of this piece. It also helped me find the voice and feel of this story when coming back to working on it. This may be a technique other writers find useful when editing?

Submitting: I’d submitted to the quarterly Reflex Fiction competition a couple of times and never had any joy. Then Reflex announced its winter 2022 round would be the final one, and I knew I needed to have this story ready to submit. Over time, I’ve learned that having a hard and fast deadline is the best motivator for getting anything finished.

Reflections: I feel there’s so much you can learn from just drafting a single story. With this one, I feel like I learned a lot about the power of a motif, the impact sound and rhythm can have, and how infusing sentences with double-meaning can do so much heavy-lifting. I’m still pleased with lines like, ‘as everyday as pouring the last remains of dust from a cereal box’, and what that implies in the context of the story, and these boys smoking a cigarette with ‘Tommy or Rico or Scott’, breathing in ‘how it smoulders – the hit, the rush…’ These kinds of dual layers make a story so much richer. It’s a special story for me and, as it stands, it’s probably the flash I’m most proud of.


James Montgomery lives in Stafford, England. He writes flash fiction and micro fiction. To date, his stories have appeared in Reflex Fiction,Gone Lawn, Maudlin House and elsewhere. He is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. In 2021, he won the Best Micro Fiction Prize at the Retreat West Awards for ‘The Only Way I Can Make Sense of the Word ‘Recovery’ is to Smash it into Pieces’. He is a member of the Betas & Bludgers and Flash Corral writing groups.

Outside of writing, James works full-time for a leading and award-winning B2B marketing consultancy, directing energy, technology and engineering brands on their content marketing strategies. He has a CIM Diploma in Professional Marketing from the Oxford College of Marketing, an MA degree in Journalism from Staffordshire University, and a First Class BA degree in English Literature from Lancaster University.


Meet The Writer – Debbi Voisey

Today on our blog we have a Q & A with writer Debbi Voisey, who is a contributor to our final competition anthology, Swan Song and a member of the Retreat West team!

Can you tell us a little about your story in the Swan Song anthology?

I am fond of stories that are narrowed down to one location and that play out in real time, and I liked the idea of a disparate group of people being in this hospital waiting room, slowly revealing themselves and different, often surprising, ways they got to be there. Circumstances in life are rarely as they seem, and this story throws up some shocks and, I hope, challenges perception.

What draws you to entering writing contests?

The money! No, seriously, I do enjoy the buzz around contests, and it’s a great way of honing your skills and improving. Nothing like a deadline to get the creative wheels turning.

Can you share some of your favourite writing influences with us?

My tastes and loves are not classical like a lot of writers. The novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” by Stephen King was a major influence on me as a writer. That story stayed with me long after I read it and the ending was sublime. I have always admired and envied Stephen King’s talent for creating fathoms-deep characters you care about and that you have to know what happens to at all costs.

Where can we find out more about you and your writing?

I have a website at http://debbivoisey.co.uk where you can find details of all my work, my creative writing workshops, and mentoring. I also tweet a little bit @DublinWriter


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Meet The Writer – Finnian Burnett

Today on our blog we have a Q & A with writer Finnian Burnett, who is a contributor to our final competition anthology, Swan Song

Can you tell us a little about your story in the Swan Song anthology?

I actually wrote this story in a Retreat West workshop. It sort of fell out in five minutes and I loved it but I felt it needed some work. I took it to Matt Kendrick’s Writing Beyond the Lightbulb class and he gave me some excellent feedback. I loved the final version and I knew I wanted to send it somewhere I care about. Since it started with RW, it made sense to send it there first.

What draws you to entering writing contests?

I like to do a very few contests during a year – mainly ones that publish longlists and shortlists in anthologies. There’s such a thrill in celebrating with other people, sharing the joy and sometimes commiseration that comes with contest announcements.

Can you share some of your favourite writing influences with us?

I thrive in writing workshops. Something about writing in a group spurs my creativity and some of my best stories have come while listening to the click of other people’s keyboards. Beyond that, I read a ton of short fiction. Two of my favorite short story writers are Neil Gaiman and N.K. Jemison. Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress is probably the greatest example of masterful POV in the first three stories in that collection.

Where can we find out more about you and your writing?

http://finnburnett.com