The Online ACW Flash Fiction Group
Led By Allison Symes and Annmarie Miles
Annmarie Miles and Allison Symes are delighted there is now an online ACW Flash Fiction group meeting once a month on a Wednesday evening between 7 and 9 pm.
The group shares market and competition news and writing exercises are set. The idea of the latter is to write your exercises up so these can be shared with the group for the next meeting. Ideally, you’ll go on to submit those stories to markets and competitions.
If you want to know more about flash fiction, or have been writing it for a while and want to bounce ideas off other flash fiction writers, this is the ideal group for you. We meet on Zoom and Annmarie and I hope that more will come to join us. For those who cannot make a meeting, never fear. Writing exercises and other useful information will be shared on the ACW Flash Fiction group Facebook page a day or two after the meeting.
Even if flash is not your main form of creative writing, many of the techniques used for it can be transferred easily enough to other formats. For example, flash fiction teaches you a lot about picking your words with care and aiming to have the maximum impact for the minimum amount of words. I’ve found that incredibly helpful for my blogging work.
We’d be glad to hear from all levels of experience with flash and if you have ideas for markets and competitions, do come along and tell us!
Flash fiction is any story up to 1000 words maximum. You don’t have to write to that count every time. Allison has written stories six words long right up to 1000 and almost anything and everything in between. The only rule to follow here is never go over 1000 words.
And the growing popularity of flash, thanks to people reading far more on screen these days than they’ve ever done, means it is a useful form of writing to get to know.
Initially writing exercises will be set to a 300 words maximum as that is often the word count requirement for competitions (and there are even more which ask for anything under sub-500 so this is ideal practice for these too).
Bear in mind also some markets offer competitions but don’t necessarily label them as flash, even though their word count requirement is definitely in flash territory. Writing Magazine does this with their 750 word story competition just to name one example. So learning more about flash may well help you increase the number of markets and competitions you can try with your writing. What is there not to like about that?!
Hope to see you there next time. Meantime do join us on our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/497229028159925 where we’ll post details about the next meeting. (Zoom codes are sent out to people by email).
