Hello.
I'm Tim Stevenson. I am a writer.
I've been writing for about fifteen years and, until recently, I have been very successful in keeping it to myself. Not, I hesitate to add, through choice.
That all changed a couple of years ago. Saturday, the 21st of April, 2012 to be exact.
My wife, who intuitively understood how to get her husband out of his creative funk, booked two places on the New Writing South's Flash-Fiction workshop, run by Vanessa Gebbie (Bridport Prize Winner and author of "The Coward's Tale" and "Words From A Glass Bubble") and Tania Hershman (Bridport Prize Judge and author of "My Mother Was An Upright Piano" and "The White Road").
It was a revelation. I had recently completed a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at the University of Winchester and I had what I could only refer to as "post-dissertaion blues". I hadn't written anything for months. I was still going to my writers circle - the inestimable Hyde Group - and I was still contributing the occasional piece, but I hadn't written anything new.
Then I played Word Cricket.
Vanessa started us off. "Here's the first line of a story," she said. "I'm going to give you another word or phrase every minute or so, and all you have to do is get the new words into the story. Ready?"
The first line was: "There was something unusual about the sky that day"
And then, about a minute apart were: "Petri dish", "kettle", "pavement", "acid", "pre-Raphaelite", "inhibit the flow", "saxophone" and "oxygen".
This is what came out.
Strange Brew.
There was something unusual about the sky that day, it was low and dark
and the birds had fled towards the east, taking their songs and the clatter of
their black wings with them.
There was no wind. The clouds, spooned into a petri dish, were trapped
in some strange experiment to be observed and studied. They were dead things.
The kettle boiled over on the hob as I stared from the window, a lone
whistler punctuating the silence, the only sound.
Rain fell, gently at first, eating its way into the pavement, its acid
singeing the grass and turning spring to autumn as the leaves browned and fell,
shimmering russets and golds; a pre-Raphaelite ruin.
The rain scoured the gutters, the drains clogged, the leaves inhibit the
flow, water curls in flat saxophone shapes past abandoned cars, spilled fruit,
the broken, mutant skeletons of shopping carts and the sadness of ownerless
shoes.
This was the way the world was ending, regressing, withdrawing from our
contemporary cleverness into a darker past, travelling back in time until the
conveniences of the ages were swept away to be replaced with the essentials of
shelter and oxygen.
We, the population, stunned by the death of the sky, unable to venture
out into the world, stand like statues in our kitchens, listening to our
kettles, the acid rain.
And we are afraid to raise our cups of tea to
our delicate, quivering lips.
-oOo-
Remember, I hadn't written anything for months, and here was new writing, my first ever flash-fiction. It certainly wasn't a masterpiece, or anything I have ever shared with anyone until now, but it was one very important thing. It was a start.
I didn't know what flash-fiction was before that day. Flash has many names, nano-fiction, micro-fiction, very very short stories. Some I have seen were as short as a single word, some as long as a thousand, but the rule (if there is such a thing) is under 500 words.
Some flash-fiction competitions lower the bar to 350, 250, 200, 150 or 100 words, and National Flash-Fiction Day was one of them. A 100 word story competition with no genre, no pre-set title, no entry fee. It sounded like a challenge.
And I won "Highly Commended" for a story called "Alterations" that was published in the National Flash-Fiction Day Anthology "Jawbreakers".
You can imagine how surprised I was, but I will talk more about that next time.
____________________________
Here are some links to the events, organisations and people I mentioned.
www.nationalflashfictionday.co.uk
www.newwritingsouth.com
Vanessa Gebbie's books on Amazon
Tania Hershman's books on Amazon
My website www.timjstevenson.com
Follow me on Twitter @tallfiction
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