Tag Archives: Meg Pokrass

Pokrass Prize 2024

Winners’ stories posted now!

Meg Pokrass

One of our flash fiction festival founders, acclaimed writer and teacher,Meg Pokrass set a writing challenge for all festival participants and also judged the winners.
Results were announced to great excitment at the Flash Fiction Festival, 2024, 12-14th July, where the happy winners picked up their prizes. Thank you to all the festival partipcants who entered this year. A lot of you!

Meg’s general comments are copied below and her comments on the individual stories are with the stories (linked below)

Meg Comments: This time, pcking only one winner and a few honourable mentions from so many masterful stories felt like being asked to choose between seeing the Northern Lights and a full solar eclipse (both of which I missed this year, but that’s beside the point!). It was exciting and daunting, this job— given the high quality of writing from what are clearly some of the strongest flash writers in the world. Photographer Louella Lester’s startling house photo, with its contrasting shades and implied creepiness, brought out the most perfectly haunted narratives one could have hoped for.

Huge congratulations to the first prize winner, Suzanne Greene, from the UK who wrote the story ‘Something LIke A Promise.’
and three runners-up:
Susan Wigmore who wrote the story ‘LORCA THOUGHT THE DEAD IN SPAIN ARE MORE ALIVE THAN ANYWHERE ELSE; HE DIDN’T KNOW MY SISTER;’
Anika Carpenter who wrote the story : ‘The Best Friend I Ever Had’;
and
Philippa Bowe who wrote the story ‘The House that Harold Built’.

Prizes were £50 for the first prize winner, plus two Ad Hoc Fiction published books, three entries to Bath Flash Fiction Award, publication on this website and also in Flash Fiction Festival Vol 7, out at the end of this year. Two runners up receive a book, 3 BFFA entries and publication.

Here’s the prompt that inspired the winners and the many other excellent stories, which we hope will go on to find good homes.

Write a story about a family who may have lived in this house (photograph by Louella Lester) at one time (or still lives there now). See if you can include shades in the story of light and dark. Try to use one or more of the following prompt words:
glasses, greyish, trick, lamplight, dank, firefly

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Meg Pokrass on Writing Prompts

Writer, tutor, editor and Festival Curator, Meg Pokrass, is well known for her highly inventive prompts which she generously shares on Facebook and also offers in her popular online workshops. Some of the unusual prompt images she’s posted on her site are reproduced here. As well as co-running a workshop on the novella-in-flash at the Festival with Jude Higgins and participating in a panel chaired by Michael Loveday on the novella-in-flash with Bath Flash Fiction novella winners, Charmaine Wilkerson, Ellie Walsh and Johanna Robinson, Meg is running a prompt workshop on the Sunday. And if you haven’t read Meg’s work, Alligators at Night, her latest book of flash fictions, is available in a paperback from the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop and in ebook format on Kindle or Nook. And do read Meg’s ten writing tips at the end of the post, to think more about your flash. There’s some great prompts included within this list.

  • Jude: You are well known for your highly inventive prompts. Just the other day on your Twitter feed you suggested this as writing prompt of the day “write about a seemingly boring, predictable life-moment, but use the phrase “cold hands” at least once and use the word “backwards” three times in your first draft.” Clearly, you have a reason for the repetition idea. Can you tell us more?
    Meg: By repeating a phrase when writing a first draft, a writer will often find a rhythm, or heartbeat. And I find that using a repeated phrase helps the writer dig for interesting material right out of the gate. All of this allows for an exciting sense of creative freedom. I like to think of repetition like this as an engine for the way to find the story that wants to be told.However, with this particular prompt, the one you mention here, I threw in the idea of repetition with an off-kilter word, “backwards”, as a way to add some immediate sense of conflict. If you’re using the word “backwards” 3 times, something about the situation is probably not as simple as it seems.
  • Jude: Do you always use prompts to spark your own writing?
    Most of us, consciously or not, use prompts or “sparks” to get ourselves going. A prompt can be something as simple as an overheard snippet of conversation, a shopping list, a worry…
  • Jude: Which, in your opinion, is the most successful story you have written from a prompt?

Meg reading at last year’s festival

    Meg: ‘I Married This’, soon to be reprinted by Craft Magazine, is an example of a story written to a prompt. I wrote my entire first collection, Damn Sure Right, to various prompts I made up and assigned myself.
  • Jude: I love the lists of usually about ten random words you sometimes give on FaceBook to incorporate into a story. I have been writing to such lists for the last few weeks now with some success. Any thoughts on why this prompt can result in a good story?
    Meg: That’s great Jude! So glad you’re experimenting with that. Using random words truly does something mysterious to the creative brain. It stretches the writer’s openness to what might happen while writing the first draft. By forcing oneself to make sense of cut-ups or completely random words (it hardly matters which ones) we find ourselves in places we didn’t previously have access to. All of a sudden, wild new possibilities open up.

  • Jude: You run frequent and popular online courses which include all sorts of prompts. Can you tell us a bit more about them and what happens? We know that writers have been very successful in placing stories that have started in the groups.
    Meg: Recent success stories first! Thank you Jude. 3 student stories from my online workshop from 2018 were selected for Best Small Fictions! And 85 (or more) publications which resulted from stories which started in my classes in magazines like Smokelong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, Wigleaf, Cincinatti Review, Atticus Review. These are the best flash magazines in the world. I’m so proud of my students, and of what has been happening. With my online courses there is no pressure with signing up. I have an open-door policy, which is what I do think sets mine apart. If a student wants to take one of my courses, I will make room for them even if I have to create a few different groups in order to accommodate everyone. I give myself enough time to do this. My classes are supportive, affordable and I always encourage risk taking. Most of my students are return participants. I couldn’t be happier about how things have been going.

    • Jude: Can you give us a preview of your hour long prompt workshop at the festival?

      Meg: It will be work generative and fun. I’m going to bring in my strangest and most popular prompts. I’ll be giving out a new prompt every 10 minutes.
      Jude: And we’d love a prompt to get people in the mood for when they come to the Flash Fiction Festival
      Meg: I’ll ask the participants to launch into a quickly written story beginning with an obscure character observation such as how a character greets their cat.
      To give potential workshop students a bit more to think about, here are some of my favourite flash writing tips:

    1.Unusual Details: Make characters out of obscure traits, for example, how do they greet their cat? What is their favourite film… and why?

    2.Create Conflict: Bother your characters, provide a good deal of trouble. Don’t let them get there too easily. Make sure something in their POV shifts by the end of the story.

    3.Childhood Nickname: Make up a nickname that your main character had as a child. Don’t tell the reader what it is, but keep it in mind while writing your story. This may sound strange, but our childhood embarrassments often shadow adulthood.

    4.Sexy Elf Logic: If there’s an elf in your story, go ahead and make them sexy, but give him some issues. I mean, if you are a sexy elf, you’re going to come with some psychological baggage. No matter how fantastical a character is, make them real.

    5.Woe Is Me: Readers don’t like characters who sit around feeling hurt by the world and wallowing in it. Instead, they care about characters who, despite all of the difficulty life has thrown them, are finding ways to thrive.

    6.Crisis/Advantage: When something very hard has happened in your life, use it. Let something similar happen to your character. Disguise it. Dismantle it. Here we can finally make use of the stuff that hurts. This will help your fiction.

    7.Sex in Flash: A character’s unique relationship to sex is far more interesting than writing about lusty characters having sex all over the place. If there is sex in a story, don’t hit us over the head with it.

    8.Trust the Reader: The quickest way to lose a reader’s trust is to tell them what you mean. After you’re done writing your story, go through and get rid of any places where you are trying to explain what is happening in the story. Instead, let the reader see what’s happening by your very specific use of unusual detail and a banquet full of sensory information. Anton Chekhov said it this way: “Don’t tell me that the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

    9.Follow the Love: Follow the trail of messy love wherever it takes your characters, even if the love is invisible to the eye, and especially if it makes no sense.

    10.Cultivate a Sense of the Ridiculous: Everything that really matters to your character is also somewhat ridiculous when looked at from a different perspective. Don’t take yourself (or your characters) too seriously when writing fiction. Make the stakes high, but let a ray of ironic humour shine through.

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Flash Fiction Festival 2018

We were thrilled with the success of the Flash Fiction Festival, this year entirely funded by Bath Flash Fiction Award, and directed by Jude Higgins with the help of a great festival team.The festival took place at Trinity College, Bristol 20th-22nd July. Everything was brilliant, including the weather. The full programme of events began with readings on Friday evening and continued with workshop, talks, book launches and general fun with very popular impromptu festival karaoke organised by Helen Rye and Christopher Allen.

    Participants and workshop leaders travelled from many different parts of the world to come to the festival. Here’s Roberta Beary, who came from Ireland, with our festival curator, Meg Pokrass.

Read in Full

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