Enter our June/July Flash Fiction Challenge for a literary assessment or a voucher

Posted June 4, 2019

All About Writing’s latest writing challenge offers the winner a literary assessment on 5000 words of writing worth R 2750 / £ 150 or a voucher to the same value to use on one of our courses or programmes.

This time around, we’re seeking post-apocalyptic romantic flash fiction. Think teenagers making out in ruins, couples separated by shattered continents, robot-and-human couples… get creative and have fun!

Write no more than 250 words. Paste your entry into the body of an email and send to pam@allaboutwritingcourses.com by midnight on 31 July

Writing tips:

When showing emotion, or difficult human interactions, restraint works far better than over-writing.
Readers are clever. If you explain too much or give us too much detail of intense emotion, we will be less able to experience that emotion for ourselves.
Everything in your narrative is there for a reason and readers recognise this. Mention a touch, we realise it’s significant. It shows us the protagonist has noticed it. If you mention another, it means he’s intensely aware of it, and we feel that tension along with him.
The trick is to make your reader experience emotion, rather than simply be told of it. The way to do that is to restrain yourself. Show us less, we’ll feel it more.

free to enter, win a writing course, writing challenge, writing competition, writing contest

Jo-Anne Richards

Jo-Anne Richards is an internationally published novelist with a PhD in Creative Writing from Wits University. Her first novel, The Innocence of Roast Chicken, was originally published by Headline Review in the UK, and has recently been rereleased as one of the prestigious Picador Africa Classics collection. She ran the Honours programme in Journalism & Media Studies at Wits University for fifteen years.