Who really are the winners behind our Flash Fiction Competition, who emerged among thousands of writers to take away the grand prize? One of our hardest competitions of the year, we asked our community of teenagers to craft a pocket of a story in under 100 words. Now, we've had the chance to learn more about their process and passions in a post-competition interview.
P.S. Check out Guest Judge Taylor Byas' commentary on the winning pieces here!
Read the winning piece here!
Our Flash Fiction Competition tasked you with writing an entire story in under 100 words. What advice do you have for other writers who attempt this challenge?
I think the temptation with flash fiction is to treat the word limit as something you have to fight, when really, it can do a lot of the writing for you. You don’t need to explain everything. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. My biggest advice would be to trust your reader enough to leave things unsaid.
Rather than trying to compress an entire beginning, middle, and end into 100 words, I’d focus on one moment where something shifts: a character notices something, understands something, or sees someone differently. Then build outward from there through small details. A gesture or an oddly specific image can carry a history you simply don’t have the space to explain.
I’d also cut anything that tells the reader something they could have figured out themselves. I found that the process of removing words often made the story stronger, because it forced me to decide what actually mattered. With flash fiction, what you leave out becomes almost as important as what you put in. You only write 100 words, but ideally, the reader leaves imagining everything around them.
Guest Judge Taylor Byas describes your winning piece as a “sharp portrait of the cost of that understanding.” Tell us a little more about the themes behind your micro-story.
I wanted to explore the strange, sometimes painful moment when growing up means finally understanding your parents as people, rather than just as your parents. As a little girl, the narrator doesn’t question her closeness with her father. Being a “daddy’s girl” is uncomplicated; she loves being the centre of his attention, and when they laugh at her mother together, she doesn’t yet have the capacity to understand why that might hurt.
Years later, she understands her mother only because she has become her. “They only see each other” is that realisation: she is now the one standing outside a closeness she once occupied. And I think that is the cost of understanding. She gains empathy for her mother, but in doing so, loses the innocence of her own childhood perspective.
What mattered to me, though, was that this realisation doesn’t cancel out her love for her father. She still polishes the silver pen. The memory remains precious even after she understands its cruelty from another angle. I wanted those feelings to coexist, because I think growing up often means realising that our happiest memories can also contain versions of the people we love that we simply weren’t old enough to see.
Read the runner-up piece here!
What inspired the idea for this piece?
This piece is heavily inspired by the harsh cruelties of animal testing. It is written from the perspective of a once-loved domestic family dog who is now subject to a cold, unethical laboratory setting. Initially, the bleak setting is depicted entirely devoid of warmth before revealing the unnamed protagonist. The lack of a name shows how the environment strips away the dog’s identity, reducing them to a mere object. The dog has been conditioned to suppress their natural instinct for joy. However, the scratch on the ear introduces a moment of hope, breaking through the mechanical and dehumanizing nature of the lab. Animal testing is a cruel, immoral practice, and my piece is a short window from the perspective of a victim.
Have you written flash fiction before? What can flash fiction do that longer fiction can’t?
This was my first time writing a flash fiction piece. At first while writing it, the 100-word max felt like a limitation to my writing however I soon realized rather than limiting my creativity it bolstered it. Flash fiction allows for differentiating and varying interpretations. It grants more creative freedom by enabling one’s imagination to run wild. Instead of explicitly stating everything, it invites the audience to fill in the gaps using their own interpretation.