Over the past 18 months if you have seen me read you may have noticed I have slowly being introducing flash fiction slowly more and more into my live sets.
Where this came from is down to my wife Amanda really as when we went into lockdown in April 2020 we decided to set up a online writing workshop to keep ourselves going over that crazy period.
Over the early days of this I wrote a quite bit of poetry and then started branching out into sonnets, tankas and haikus some it has to be said were more successful than others but it gave me chance to use them as a springboard into trying something else.
My first attempt happened in August 2020 by the look of things and it was aborted horror story called the room. It was okay I guess as I remember grasping the mood of the piece I wanted to explore but I got stuck on an ending so I left it open ended and put it away thinking it was fun doing it and that would be it.
Of course this wasn't the case as at another workshop around a month and a half I ended up writing another piece, this time a cheerful Christmas piece called unexpected Christmas present which shocked more than a few people with the use of the f word and one very crude sexual reference to father Christmas but also made a few people laugh.
Into 2021 I began to brush up my taste for short fiction and flash fiction with a few true life short stories / flash fiction and by the time we were able to return to the live arena with the night me and Amanda corun with our friend Steve 'speak easy' and not long after that won 3rd prize for a major horror story competition for a prose piece 'winter and only winter' , I had managed now to take my work full circle with my flash fiction adding a odd element to my work which is perfect fit for my often more serious technical image based poetry.
Unlike my poetry which are always mapped onto folders of possible books, if I ever do with my flash fiction it will be sometime off I can admit as it took years and years before I felt was the case with my poetry and has rebooted my love of performed spoken word.
In the meantime, it's proved a real surprise getting third prize in competitions I would never would have dreamed entering a few years ago, showed people I don't just liking in one style and as I proved in a recent writing workshop Amanda and me were at I can surprise myself with flash fiction completing a piece in 15 to 20 minutes in a style the writer off me 4 years ago wouldn't have dreamed attempting.
It's a important thing for all writers to bear in mind. I had really being a poet for many, many years ago and since meeting my wife, Amanda
No comments:
Post a Comment