Flash Fiction Results - 16th March, 2015

On 16^th March, our judge, Alexandra Benedict, who writes under the name of A K Benedict, gave her feedback and verdict on our Flash Fiction entries. A possible record of 24 entries of exactly 250 words had been submitted, and Alexandra commented on the quality and interesting range of approaches taken: the humorous, the scary, the touching and the lyrical. Her one piece of advice was that in every story, she felt at least one sentence digressed and distracted the reader from the main thrust of the narrative, and that we should trust our instincts to go with the flow of the story. In first place was Sally-Ann Clark's 'In Perspective', which was praised for its structure and lyricism. Diana Locke came second with 'Missing Baggage', Marcia Woolf third with 'Devotion' and Roz Balp fourth with 'The Green Door'.

In the question and answer session which followed, Alexandra talked of the value of what she had learned from the creative writing courses she had attended at the University of Sussex, of finding an agent and the auction for her first novel. She told us an intriguing tale of the inspiration for this novel, The Beauty of Murder, with its time-travelling serial murderer, in a strange experience while an undergraduate at Cambridge.