Irish Writers Centre: Playing the Pauses in Flash Fiction – Employing the Unsaid with Marie Gethins
A distilled prose form, flash fiction relies on suggestion—layered meaning off the page. Implication is a core strength of excellent flash, but it can be a challenge to gauge.
Stylistic techniques drawn from visual presentation, music, poetry, screenwriting, and verbal templates demonstrate multiple approaches to utilise the pause for deeper significance.
Participants will read and discuss examples drawn from a variety of flash fiction styles, learning how to incorporate practices that can enrich their own work. Short bursts of writing time will generate initial drafts, with students having the option to submit full drafts for comprehensive individual critique.
Marie Gethins’ flash fiction has featured in NFFD Anthologies, Flash, Jellyfish Review, Banshee, Fictive Dream, Mslexia, Litro, NANO, FlashBack Fiction, Wales Arts Review, Synaesthesia, The Incubator, The Nottingham Review, Spelk, Ellipsis Zine, Words with JAM, Paper Swans, 101 Words, and others. She won or placed in Words-on-Water, Dromineer, Allingham, Dorset, TSS, Flash500, The New Writer, and Prick of the Spindle. Selected for 2020 BIFFY50, 2021 Best Microfictions, a British Screenwriters Award, Pushcart and Best Small Fictions nominee, she critiques for the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize and is an editor of the Irish flash ezine Splonk.
Dates: 9 January - 13 February 2023, 6.30 pm - 8.30 pm
Location: Online
Cost: €165 (€150 Members)
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