Summer Flash Memoir Competition
Take part in my Summer Flash Memoir Competition for a chance to win a proof copy of INTO BEING (published in October), book bundles, and to have your flash memoir published in my newsletter
I am on holiday this week and feeling relaxed and generous. Or maybe it’s just that writing is in the air. This is what happens when I stop teaching and marking - my creativity suddenly opens up. I really want to share the love, so I’ve decided to do a summer flash memoir competition, and a winner and two runners up will win book bundles, and have their pieces of flash published in my newsletter. The winner will win a proof copy of my forthcoming book, INTO BEING: the radical craft of memoir and its power to transform (published by MUP, 7th October), and a copy of my memoir, Sins of My Father (which was nonfiction book of the year, 2022, awarded by The Guardian and The Spectator). Two runners up will win book bundles of proof copies of memoir and fiction I have been sent and have read - and blurbed. Some of which might have my annotations in them! This competition is for people in the UK only, because it involves posting books!
The theme, in the mood of my forthcoming book, is transformation. But not just any transformation. I want you to capture a moment in your life (it must be life writing / memoir, not fiction) when you had a profound sense that something had to change. It could be an action - the change itself - or it might simply be the point of realisation. Perhaps something else happened, completely unrelated, and you realised things could not continue in the same vein, and the only way forward was to follow this new path.
Or, it might be that you don’t follow the path. That a path opens up to you and you consider it - but you decide to stay with the status quo, but somehow that promise of change is processed in a different way - maybe you are able to channel it into gardening or trecking, for instance, or loving your children with more attention, or nurturing your own creativity in some way.
I don’t want this to be rigidly prescriptive - I just want you to capture a moment in your life when you saw the opportunity, whether you took it or not. And if you did take it - how did you know everything would turn out alright? Did the decision involve risk, or did you experience a quiet knowing?
I want your entry to be maximum 1,000 words long. This is challenging. But it also means it can simply be a vignette. It might pivot around one experience. But it must be compelling. The writing must be a good combination of interior and action, with sensory detail, and drama - characterisation and dialogue (it doesn’t have to have dialogue, but think creative nonfiction, rather than exposition). And if you can, write it like a story, with a beginning, middle and end - although if you want to subvert traditional story structure that is also absolutely fine. I don’t need chronology - I simply need a sense of story; that the piece has integrity to stand on its own.
And you have a month to do it! The deadline is 28th July. The winner will be decided by the end of August, and the winning piece and two runners up will be published in one of my September newsletters (date to be confirmed).
I posted about a memoir that I read and loved this past week called, A Book of Untruths, by Miranda Doyle, which is structured around many lies, from mini white lies and untruths, to major betrayal - and each lie varies between about 400 and a 1,000 words long. This structure is both straightforward and challenging - but writing like this is a brilliant exercise is brevity and precision, and also in trusting the reader to read between the lines. You do not need to include everything!
This also reminds me of Richard Beard’s new project which I wrote about on the weekend - The Universal Turing Machine - recently launched, and which consists of 1,000 word entries of an entire life set behind chessboard squares - check it out if you haven’t already. It’s fascinating. It’s going to turn into a collaborative project in September, when you can build your own version - so think of this competition as good practice for you taking part in that, too.
To take part in my memoir flash competition, you need to be a paid subscriber. I will include details of how you can take part below the paywall here. But for the next week I am offering a 15% discount on a year’s subscription, so grab it quick!