Flash Fiction Festival 2024

I'm back from the weekend's Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol. I'd recommend anyone interested in Flash to go next year. Indeed, I think some poets and story writers would benefit from it too. I like Bristol - while wandering around I saw this sculpture.

It was my 3rd time. After the 1st one I thought that everyone was better than me, able to produce finished works in 10 minutes at the workshops. After the 2nd one I thought I wasn't so bad after all. Now I've gone back to accepting that most of the other writers have produced better work than I ever will. My advantage is that my pieces might be more radically various - a likely disadvantage were I trying to put a collection together. People talked about the importance of having layers. That's where I start. It's the other aspects I need to work on.

When readers were introduced, many had competition achievements. I've never entered a Flash competition though many exist nowadays, not least the Bridport. Maybe I should work on that too.

I think the workshop session I'll find most useful long-term is Stephanie Carty's "The Writer Self in Flash Fiction", which was about how to analyse one's Flash to learn about oneself. Things to look at include word frequencies; number of loner protagonists; moods that never appear in stories; traits in stories that aren't replicated in one's life. Needless to say, it's not an uncharted topic for me, and the narrators have been known to psycho-analyse the plots they're in. My pieces are often over-crafted (contrived?) but that just means there's another level to burrow through before getting to the interesting stuff.

I came back with

• "Ed's wife and other creatures" - Venessa Gebbie
• "The lobsters run free" (Bath Flash Fiction V2)
• "Things left and found by the side of the road" (Bath Flash Fiction V3)
• "Flash Fiction Festival two"
• "Clearly defined clouds" - Jude Higgins