Karen Jones is a flash and short fiction writer from Glasgow, Scotland. Her flashes have been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize, and her story “Small Mercies” is included in Best Small Fictions 2019. She has won first prize in the Cambridge Flash Prize, Flash 500 and Reflex Fiction and second prize in Fractured Lit’s Micro Fiction Competition. Her work has been Highly Commended or shortlisted for To Hull and Back, Bath Flash Fiction and Bath Short Story Award and many others. Her novella-in-flash When It’s Not Called Making Love is published by Ad Hoc Fiction and her ekphrastic novella-in-flash, Burn it All Down by Arroyo Seco Press She is an editor for National Flash Fiction Day anthology.

• We are delighted that you can join us as a member of the BSSA team. You have been a regular entrant to BSSA and have been shortlisted five times and published in our anthologies. How did you become interested in writing short stories?

I’m delighted to be joining you all, though I will miss entering the competition – it’s always been my favourite. When I first started writing, I jumped straight in to try and write a novel, with no experience or education in the field of writing. That didn’t go too well, as you can probably imagine. I joined a writing site, and most people there were writing short stories, so I read lots, discovered I really loved the form, and started to write my own stories. I also discovered flash on that site and have never really got out of the short form habit. I really do love the challenge of writing short stories and flashes.

• Do you have a favourite short story writer? And what do you like about their work.

I love Alice Munro and her ability to make ordinary people and ordinary situations fascinating and, through her gaze, anything but ordinary. That’s a real gift. I read Flannery O’Connor for the first time last year and there’s a wonderful darkness to her work – unlikeable characters, horrible situations, satire – I raced through her collections, totally engrossed. I think unflinching is probably the best wat to describe her work. At the moment, they’re probably my favourites.

• You also write flash fiction — stories of 1000 words or under— and have been very successful in that form too, winning major prizes and being published in nany journals and anthologies. Do you find your focus is different when write very short fiction?

Yes, I’m very aware when I start a flash that the subject matter has to lend itself to the form – that I can’t tackle something that requires a lot of description or too much detail. Switching from flash to short story often feels like a luxury – all those words to play with.

• You’ve had novellas-in-flash published (longer works comprised of flash fiction chapters) The characters in When It’s Not Called Making Love and Burn it All Down have characters with very distinct voices and I think that is a hall mark of your writing, along with your writing about the experience of women and girls and a wonderful use of language. Can you tell us more about the novellas and what inspired them?

With When It’s Not Called Making Love, I had written the title flash and knew there was something in the character that I could expand – aspects of her life mirror my own and other women my age, so I wanted to explore that further. It is a coming-of-age story, but it also looks at how girls are perceived and how they allow themselves to be pigeonholed as a certain kind of girl and how difficult it can be to break out of those boxes people have put them in. It’s set in Scotland at the time I was a child/teenager, so I didn’t have to do much in the way of research. I often think I might go back to Bernadette’s story and follow her in her next stage of life.

Burn It All Down had a very different trajectory. I was participating in a Kathy Fish class, and she used a painting by Andrea Kowch, ‘In the Distance’, as a prompt and I became completely obsessed with the artist’s work, writing story after story based on her paintings. I realised that the stories could definitely work as a n-i-f, could see the story arc forming, so I went for it and wrote it all out in ten days. I didn’t do much in the way of editing with that one – everything just felt right.

Writing from visual prompts is one of my favourite ways of sparking ideas, for both flashes and shorts.

• You are also anthology editor for National FlashFiction Day Anthology and you were an editor for New Flash Fiction Review for several years. You wrote an article on submitting for competitions and magazines which is published in New Flash Fiction Review.. Can you give us your top do’s and don’tI from this article?

READ THE GUIDELINES, as I shout frequently in that article. It seems so obvious, but it’s amazing how many folk put their personal details on anonymous submissions, or go way over the wordcount, or send poetry to prose competitions. It’s such a waste of their time and money, and so easily avoidable.

Don’t bore the reader, especially in the all important first paragraph and first page. You have to grab the reader’s attention and make them want to read on. If you don’t do that, why should they bother?

• And a final tip for writing short story of 2200 words and under for our Award?

I like to take a first draft and chop it in half, then do that again, until I’m left with something flash length. That lets me see what the crux of the story is, then I can rebuild, expanding on the important parts and cutting anything unnecessary. I do this with flash as well – it’s sort of like creating a jigsaw with your story and it really works for me.