Ashleigh Adams

NFFR: What do you like and dislike about writing to a theme?

Adams: My professional background is in advertising, and there’s a well-known saying in the industry: “Give me the freedom of a tight brief.” I find that philosophy to be overwhelmingly true. The constraints of a theme or prompt force me to think more creatively, problem solve, stretch my limits, and look at things from a different angle. It (usually) leads me to come up with a story that’s more interesting or more surprising than what I may have on my own.

I’ve also learned my writing thrives when I have a sense of focus—left to my own devices I have a tendency to get lost in the sea of half-baked ideas swirling around in my head. Prompts are kind of like a life preserver, something I can grab on to that helps lead me out of the storm.

NFFR: How do you tend to start your stories—character, plot, image or phrase? Something else?

Adams: When it comes to flash, especially under 500, I tend to be a mood writer. I find it’s not only satisfying in terms of an emotional release, but it also allows me to explore those emotions more objectively. There’s a level of removal when you are viewing your own feelings funneled through a fictional character that often teaches me something about myself. It’s one of my favorite things about writing flash.

But beyond that, I usually have a phrase in my head before I sit down to draft. Sometimes it’s the opener, sometimes it’s a piece of dialogue, sometimes it’s the ending line. But that line almost always makes it into my final draft. I’m not one who’s too precious about killing my darlings, so if there’s a valid reason to cut it I will, but more often than not it ends up serving as the anchor that guides the piece in some form or fashion.

NFFR: Any advice for writing during anxious times? What keeps you writing?

Adams: I’ve been a writer in some form or fashion my whole life, and I don’t think that will ever change. But I do think as creative humans, we go through phases. Powering through, and just getting things on the page can absolutely be fulfilling, and sometimes that’s the answer. But I also truly believe in rest and recharge. If your cup is feeling empty, find something that fuels your creative soul. Read everything you can get your hands on. Spend time with people you love. Writing will always be there waiting for you when you’re ready to come back to it.

Mitchell Gauvin

NFFR: How do you tend to start your stories—character, plot, an image, a phrase? Something else?

Gauvin: It nearly always starts with a phrase. A single sentence that isn’t poetical or dramatic. It’s those phrases that are mundane in their construction but which shift things around ever so slightly, the verb at the end, the subject missing, the adjective mismatched with its noun. Or sometimes it’s a phrase that contains enough momentum for an entire story to emerge. I remember reading Sean Michael’s Us Conductors and obsessing over its opening sentence: “I was born Leon Termen before I was Dr Theremin, and before I was Leon, I was Lev Sergeyvich.” It’s so simple in its construction, so basic in its use of alliteration, and yet it contains within it the entire content of the novel that subsequently follows. It has an inertia that can’t be resisted.

NFFR: Any advice for writing during anxious times? What keeps you writing?

Gauvin: I hesitate to generalize that every form of creative writing is therapeutic because I ultimately don’t think writing can be reduced to a pathology. But there’s surely something to the idea that creative expression in all its forms is the channeling or conversion of anxious thoughts, be it about timely matters or the inevitability of death. Writing is not really escape in that regard but a concerted (sometimes painful) engagement with an entropic world. Writing is engagement with the things and people that anxiety yearns for you to turn away from. I’m the last person to give advice about writing, but to write during anxious times is, paraphrasing Didion, to tell the stories we need in order to live. Didion understood this better than most, hence why “The White Album” both is and isn’t about the anxious times that surrounded her. Don’t think about addressing the world that’s in front of you, don’t succumb to the pressure of writing about what’s “relevant,” as if that were even possible to define. Write what you need in order to live.

SA Greene

NFFR: How do you tend to start your stories—character, plot, an image, a phrase? Something else? What was the inspiration for “The Tenth Testicle”?

Greene: My stories usually come from prompts by other people. I try to write off the top of my head in the first instance, and then trust the rest of my head, or perhaps my gut, to guide the story towards its heart. (That’s a lot of body parts, isn’t it?) Inspiration for “The Tenth Testicle” came from the theme. I was going through all the things that are associated with the number 10 when the word ‘testicle’ came into my head, probably because of the alliteration. I loved “The Tenth Testicle” as a title but didn’t know any circumstances under which a tenth testicle would be a thing. Then, as I watched the evening news, I had an idea…

NFFR: Any advice for writing during anxious times? What keeps you writing?

Greene: My answer to both questions is that writing is a form of resistance. It might not feel like what you’re writing is important in the face of all that’s happening in the world, but always remember there’s a reason fascists burn and ban books. Words are powerful. Even stories that aren’t overtly political can be a powerful force for good by fostering empathy, fairness, compassion, the celebration of differences, and so on.

NFFR: Are numbers important to you? Why and how?

Greene: Numbers are important to me, by which I mean that I spend a lot of time trying to avoid them. I don’t keep a calendar or wear a watch. I find numbers tyrannical and inflexible. If it wasn’t for numbers, I wouldn’t realise how old I am. If I were forced to take a number with me to a desert island, it would be number 10. I’m not just saying this because it’s NFFR’s 10th anniversary. Number 10 is by far the easiest number to multiply with, except for number 1, obviously, but number 1 has always struck me as somewhat narcissistic, and is also associated with doing a wee.

Neil James

NFFR: What do you like and dislike about writing to a theme?  Where did the inspiration for your NFFR story come from?

James: I work better when given a theme—it imposes a sense of order on my scattergun thoughts. Some stories naturally evolve from real life events, people I’ve met or conversations (these are the easy ones to write), but the ones that are pure fiction often come from calls for themed stories.

“Lights out at Ten” is a little bit of both. The origin of the story is a documentary I watched some time ago about long-term mental health patients. While some were fully institutionalised, there were others who talked reflectively about their old lives and seemed to be holding on to a sense of self despite the restrictions of their circumstances. I thought that might be an interesting headspace to be in for a narrator, so the story built around that idea.

NFFR: Are numbers important to you in your work or generally? Why/how? (We have numbers on the mind, this being our 10th anniversary).

James: In terms of writing, I give each story I write ten ‘lives’, which translates as the number of rejections it’s allowed to get before I either re-write it or send it to the dreaded ‘Rejects’ folder to die quietly! Some stories are accepted early, which is always a nice feeling. Others keep bouncing their way back to me like children that won’t leave home.

Even the best stories can pick up a few rejections based on editors’ personal tastes, but in my experience, if the same story is rejected ten times by suitable journals/sites, there’s usually a problem of some kind that needs fixing. This can be anything from a subtle tweak to a complete rebuild.

When I’m not writing, I’m often watching cricket (sometimes, during slow passages of play, I’ll do both!) Cricket is the ultimate sport for number enthusiasts, at least in the UK—I imagine baseball is the US equivalent. Batting averages, bowling averages, strike rates, economy rates—you can lose yourself for hours in game statistics. You should be careful not to arrive at purely number-based conclusions though. As the comedian and cricket statistician Andy Zaltzman says, “Statistics are like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Shove your hand far enough up them, and you can get them to say whatever you want.”

Rebecca Klassen

NFFR: Where did the inspiration for your NFFR story come from?

Klassen: I remembered the advice given to parents when their babies are weaning and spitting out stewed turnips that they need to try a food ten times before they can decide if they like it or not. It always seemed an odd idea to me, as tastebuds change over time rather than with tries, but I liked the idea of using it as a framework for a story.

NFFR: Any advice for writing during anxious times? What keeps you writing?

Klassen: Disclosure: I don’t write every day. Sometimes I might not write for a couple of weeks if life feels overwhelming and writing is part of why I’m feeling that way. It’s hard not to put pressure on myself, particularly after a lot of rejections. But I remind myself that I love writing and I will do it again soon. It’s pointless forcing anything.

NFFR: Are numbers important to you? Why/how?

Klassen: Despite my difficulty with numbers, I find them comforting. I’ve always struggled to hold them in my head when doing any kind of arithmetic. My first son was born a little early and had some weight gain to catch up on. Recently, I found a notepad I’d used to log the times I’d fed him and how much he’d had. The numbers would just float away if I didn’t write them down immediately, and I wouldn’t know when to feed him again or how much. At the time it seemed quite regimented, but looking back, I can see how necessary and reassuring it all was.

Kathryn Kulpa

NFFR: Where did the inspiration for your NFFR story come from?

Kulpa: The inspiration for my story in NFFR came from flash writer Meg Pokrass, whose writing prompts and encouragement have been so helpful over the years. The events she’s organized, like the Flashathons (all-day writing marathons) and Flash Gyms, have been a rich source of story starts for me, because they don’t allow you time to ruminate and second-guess (“Should I really write this? What if it’s stupid? What if people don’t like it?”). You’re just focused on doing the work and completing the ‘assignment’—and it could be something simple, like using a few words or telling the story behind a picture—and somehow, that gives you the freedom to just keep going. This story started with a prompt from Meg of a woman standing next to a road sign saying “Shell, 1 Mile,” but the “S” had fallen off, so it looked like it was pointing the way to hell. I love accidental wordplay like that, and there happened to be a heat wave when I wrote the first draft, so there you are. It went through quite a few different versions. As you know, in the US there have been attempts to censor everything, including the weather, and I was looking at the website for the NOAA, one of the federal agencies under attack, and came across a list of meteorological terms, and that gave me the shape for the final story.

NFFR: Are numbers important to you? Why/how?

Kulpa: I’m normally the opposite of a numbers person—suffered in school with math anxiety and dyscalculia, and my SAT scores were like two ends of a seesaw, if the verbal side got off mid-ride—so numbers are fraught for me, but at the same time, in writing, I like working with multiples, writing stories that are triptychs or otherwise divided into sets, short sections. So maybe that’s my brain trying to reconcile the thing I love, words, with the thing I dread, numbers.

Elana Lavine

NFFR: Where did the inspiration for your NFFR story come from?

Lavine: As a teen, I worked several summers as a day camp counsellor. It was an exhausting job, shepherding groups of children through long, hot afternoons. In such close proximity, there was no way to maintain any kind of personal space. They loved to ask blunt, humiliating questions, and couldn’t fathom why I’d ever be embarrassed to discuss my skin or romantic life (or lack thereof).

When NFFR prompted us to write about 10, I thought again of those ten-year olds. Many of them were unbelievably confident and unselfconscious, and camp was such an incredible space for them to run wild. Although I was in charge of them, I was also somewhat afraid of them.

NFFR: How do you tend to start your stories—character, plot, an image, a phrase? Something else?

Lavine: For flash fiction, there’s a messy, resonant moment that usually comes to mind as inspiration. With such a tight limit on word count, I know that that the tension has to be created from the first sentence, sustained through the slice of story, and ended with an ambiguity that isn’t too frustrating for the reader. It feels like playing a few chords, or an arpeggio, not a whole song.

I’ve finished manuscripts for three full-length novels, and those have generally been built around a plot idea. I often begin with a first line, but it rarely stays as drafted.

Andrew Martin

NFFR: Where did the inspiration for your NFFR story come from?

Martin: A few months ago my wife and I were putting our daughter to bed and she pointed to her closet and told us there were ghosts in there. Though she’d definitely seen ghosts in Halloween books and old Disney cartoons, she’d never—as far as we knew—encountered the specific trope of ghosts hiding in closets before. So where’d she get that idea? Did one of us suggest it to her, without realizing it? One of her grandparents? Did she come up with it herself?

When you’re a new parent, you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to decode your toddler’s statements, trying to get in their head, see the world the way they see it. How does a two-and-a-half-year-old perceive the world around them? What’s their understanding of places, names, people? How do they understand loss? By the time she’s old enough to articulate such complex thoughts, her baby brain logic will be lost. With this story, I wanted to try my best to cast this fleeting moment in plaster.

NFFR: How do you tend to start your stories – character, plot, an image, a phrase? Something else?

Martin: Always a phrase. It usually winds up being the first line. After my daughter raised the possibility of ghosts being in her closet, the phrase “Who told you there could be ghosts in your closet?” rattled around in my head in a way that I knew I couldn’t let go of it.

I sometimes wish I could start my stories with a character or a plot. I imagine writers who do that have a lot less unfinished drafts on their hard drive than me. But the only stories I ever find traction with are the ones that start with a first line like this one. A phrase that captures a slightly off kilter point of view, a vaguely surreal premise, a conjuring of questions.

NFFR: Are numbers important to you? Why or how?

Martin: I think about numbers all the time! Particularly in regard to age. I’m 33 now; the light in my head that tells me I won’t be around forever only clicked on recently. I’m always doing the math to figure out where my parents were at my age, how long I have until I’ll be as old as they are now. And having a baby daughter, you count the months going up and up, until they stop being counted as months at all and start being counted as years. And then that number only goes up too!

Gregory Meece

NFFR: What do you like and dislike about writing to a theme?

Meece: Although themes are often seen as creative constraints, I’ve found they can spark unexpected inspiration. I’ve written several mystery short stories for themed anthologies—ranging from Mysteries Most Humorous to Larceny & Last Chances.

Meece: But for the “Tell-Tale Heart” theme of Love Letters to Poe: Tales Torn from the Heart, I might never have thought about writing a Poe pastiche. But once inspired, my imagination took off, leading to “The Ticking Tomb”—and I had so much fun writing it.

I also enjoy the challenge of writing to themes that demand extra research. We tend not to tackle unfamiliar subjects unless we’re nudged to. Submitting a story to Crimes in Antiquity, for example, pushed me outside my comfort zone in a way I wouldn’t have pursued on my own. After checking out several library books about pyramids and mummies: voilà, “The Saqqara Secret” was born.

The downside is that theme-based writing sometimes limits where I can submit unprompted pieces, unless it’s one of those lucky alignments—where an already written story happens to match a publisher’s new theme.

Writers’ muses come in many forms—personal experiences, dreams, other artists’ work, history, etc.  One of the easiest is a publisher’s call for submissions on a theme.

NFFR: Could you introduce us to one of your mentors? What are a few things you learned from them?

Meece: Though it was fifty years ago, I owe my journey into creative writing to my high school English teacher, Mrs. Nona Smolko.

By senior year, I had already completed the required English courses and a few electives, including creative writing. I told Mrs. Smolko I wished I could take her class again—I had enjoyed it that much. In response, she challenged me to pursue an independent study project: write a novel. The assignment was to produce ten pages a week and meet with her during lunch to discuss my progress.

That experience taught me three lasting lessons.

First, writing ten pages a week is no easy task. Some days, the words refuse to come—but you still sit in front of the typewriter (remember—this was fifty years ago) and push through.

Second, maintaining continuity in a long-form story brings its own challenges, especially under a weekly deadline.

Most importantly, Mrs. Smolko’s willingness to give up her lunch hour to support my writing gave me a confidence I might never have found on my own.

Even today, when rejection letters arrive, I persevere—because that’s what she would have wanted.

Sumitra Singam

NFFR: Could you introduce us to one of your mentors? What are a few things you learned from them?

Singam: I have so many wonderful mentors and friends in the flash community. It is hard to single one person out, and I hope everyone else I consider a mentor knows how much I appreciate them! I do want to say a big thank you to Jo Gatford. She probably doesn’t think of herself as my mentor, but she has occupied that space in my writing journey. She has taught me so much about what it means to be a neurodiverse creative—she has such innovative and realistic ways of managing overwhelm when it comes to writing, and has helped me rekindle the spark many a time. She has also supported me in some tough publishing situations, and is just a very kind and solid person. She is an amazing flash writer herself, and I have learned so much from reading her work. She has a brilliant substack that you should all subscribe to—The Joy of Fixion and she offers editing and mentoring services via her website. (PS: also, her karaoke skills are legendary)

NFFR: Are numbers important to you? If so, how and why?

Singam: I thought I wouldn’t answer this question initially, but really, it is the question that explains who I am best unfortunately. I have a very strange brain that associates everything back to numbers. Numbers are immensely soothing to me as a person who grew up with a bewildering sensory, emotional and interpersonal world. Numbers never trip you up, they never do anything unexpected, and so for a while were my most reliable internal attachment figures. I remember a (problematic) primary school teacher who would give us 200 sums a day for homework. I was frightened of her, but the sums felt like a vast expanse I could escape into. I count all sorts of things constantly—steps, actions, words, things I have to do, time. I play with those numbers in my head, reducing them to their lowest factor, working out if they are primes, or what other numbers they might be associated with. It’s like tidying things away, making things neat and squared off. Some way of coping with overwhelm. Numbers have been my friends for a long time.

Vijayalakshmi Sridhar

NFFR: Where did the inspiration for your NFFR story come from?

Sridhar: The incident is from the aftermath of my father-in-law’s death. Though the rituals were performed for thirteen days, the tenth day was very emotional. That was when we said a final good-bye to the departed soul. That night my mother-in-law was made to sleep alone; only my husband could enter the room. The ritual stayed with me and I wanted to write about it.

NFFR: Could you introduce us to one of your mentors? What are a few things you learned from them?

Sridhar: Sudha Balagopal. Sudha knows how to say anything in a few, effective words. Her stories unpack emotions in a simple way but the narration is very visual. Her writing always instils a lot of hope in me.

NFFR: How do you tend to start your stories—character, plot, an image, a phrase? Something else?

Sridhar: It can be any one of the above. But I take my time to nail both the title and opening to my stories. For me both are crucial to the flow.

NFFR: Any advice for writing during anxious times? What keeps you writing?

Sridhar: Writing keeps me centered. I wish it does the same to everyone.