novella – The Novella-in-Flash

Interview with Deborah Tomkins – Aerth, a Genre-Based Novella-in-Flash

This month, novella-in-flash.com features an interview with the writer Deborah Tomkins. Deborah’s novella-in-flash Aerth was published by Weatherglass Books in January this year. It has already sold out of the first print run and has been reprinted.

Michael: Welcome to this blog series, Deborah. It’s been so exciting to see how your novella has been well received in early reviews, including in broadsheet newspapers such as The Guardian and The Telegraph, as well as by book reviewers on Youtube and Instagram. Especially as it’s one of those rare things – a genre-based novella-in-flash (with speculative, and science-fiction, and climate fiction elements). I am very much hoping your success inspires more flash fiction writers to try writing genre-based novellas.

I think the tale of this book’s journey to publication is worth re-telling to readers, as it strikes me – from the outside – as an inspiring story of never-give-up determination.

You’ve talked about how a version of this book was first longlisted in 2019 in the Bath Flash Fiction Award Novella-in-Flash competition. And you kept working on it for several years before submitting it to the Weatherglass competition. Could you talk a bit about that journey? Were there any particularly difficult moments along the way? And also what lessons you might be taking from the process, for your future writing projects?

Deborah: Thank you so much, Michael, and thank you for inviting me onto the blog series too.

It was quite a journey. It ended up being about 5 years, from first seeing if I could write a novella-in-flash (and flash fiction itself was still very new to me back in 2018, when I began this story) to finally sending it in August 2023 to Weatherglass Books for their Inaugural Novella Competition, which was judged by Ali Smith. That last year or so I didn’t do much to it, actually; it just sat in my computer and I occasionally sent it off to a publisher or a competition.

There were lots of difficult moments! Novellas are quite difficult, and a novella in flash is not only difficult but also very slippery, in the sense that these tiny ideas that you have may take the story in any number of directions – and they did. It’s not easy choosing what to keep and what to throw away (although I think no writing is ever wasted – you’re always learning what works and what doesn’t), or working out what direction is the most fruitful one for the story, or what will be most surprising to a reader. And as a writer I found I was too close to see that clearly, so the long process was very helpful – leaving it for several months and going back to it with fresh eyes.

I kept thinking about it, though, and even when I thought it was “finished”, I would go back to it and play around with it some more, particularly when it hadn’t been accepted somewhere. The story – and Magnus, my protagonist – wouldn’t leave me. I kept feeling that it was a deeper and stranger story than I had been allowing it to be.

I’ve also realised that I’m not a fast writer. I need to spend a lot of time with a story, to see what it might be saying or where it may want to go.

Michael: It’s really interesting that you noticed an urge to make the story deeper and stranger. My hunch is that for so many novella-in-flash manuscripts “deeper and stranger” would be a very productive instinct to follow! And personally rewarding and fun for the writer during the process, too.

I want to ask you next about the genre-based elements of this novella-in-flash. If we think about Aerth’s qualities as a piece of “climate fiction” first of all: you’ve been involved in writing about the environment for some time – for example via Bristol Climate Writers, and also in other contexts. I’m wondering what questions (about climate, or environment, or ecology) you particularly wanted to explore as you wrote it? And I’m also interested, with this piece of climate fiction, in how you saw the roles of the novella’s three different story-worlds (not only the twin planets of Aerth and Urth, but also Mars, which features too), which each have such different qualities as settings?

Deborah: In many ways this book came together accidentally, in that I didn’t have a plan at the start. It was very much not plotted! I wrote small pieces – or fragments of pieces – as they occurred to me, and as I was thinking about Magnus and his life. The very first piece was one I wrote in a workshop at the Flash Fiction Festival in 2018, and comes about a third of the way through the book.

But, like most of us, I have my preoccupations – in my case, climate, ecology, and ethics – and these began to show more clearly as I explored Magnus and his world. After a while it became so obvious that I was writing about climate that I simply went with it. Magnus’s own planet Aerth is heading towards an ice age, and I thought it would be interesting to explore how a modern technologically advanced society coped with the challenges of this. Our own planet Earth should right now be cooling down, coming to the end of the current interglacial period, rather than heating up. And, counter-intuitively, in the future because of the rapid heating of our planet, the vast ocean currents in the Atlantic that keep Europe temperate may just switch off, in which case we will become as cold as northern Canada. This has been known for a long time, but is only now reaching the media. The reader can decide which scenario is playing out here.

Aerth is also pristine. It’s unpolluted, deeply forested, and there is an abundance of wildlife – as there was on our own planet only a couple of centuries ago – due to the small population and their resolve to “Do No Harm”. What would it be like to live on a planet teeming with life?

Urth – Earth’s “dark twin” on the other side of the Sun – is entirely opposite. On this planet anything goes – ethics are optional, the planet is heating very fast, it’s polluted and aggressive, and there is little wildlife left. Magnus becomes trapped there and has to navigate a society he is ill-equipped to deal with, as his home planet is deeply ethical, kind and respectful. Here I was exploring a kind of future that we want to avoid.

Mars was a kind of airlock! As a child Magnus always wanted to travel there, and he manages this – but the lure of exploring Urth pulls him on. For me, Mars was a very brief interlude in which I considered the difficulty of “terraforming” a dead planet – although in this case Mars is not entirely dead as it has a thin atmosphere. There has been a lot of talk about colonising other planets in recent years, in part to rescue humanity from destruction, but I honestly think it would be far better to look after the one we have.

All the flashes were written out of order, and I spent a long time working out how to order them. My editor and I sometimes had different ideas!

Michael: Fascinating! I really like how you describe this novella-in-flash coming together “accidentally”, as you accumulated the fragments. I think readers will draw inspiration from the fact that you were patient in exploring the main character (and his story-world) from different angles until the novella started to take clearer shape. Could we also talk about the book as a piece of “speculative fiction” or “science-fiction”? I noticed that Luke Kennard in The Telegraph described the book as “more allegory than hard sci-fi” yet concluded: “an intelligent sci-fi thriller and a thought-provoking parable”. Were there scientific aspects that you had to research, in order to deliver a convincing fiction? Were you consciously thinking of it as allegory or parable? Or did you see it as a piece of “speculative” writing? Which non-realist elements did you most enjoy experimenting with and dreaming up?

Deborah: I would very much agree that it’s not hard science fiction! However publishers have to give readers an idea about a book’s genre, and “science fiction” is close enough. I used to describe it as speculative. But really it’s neither of those things, nor is it fantasy. I recently came across the term slipstream, and I think it may be that, completely unwittingly! Aerth doesn’t sit squarely in any genre category, really, and I think flash fiction can be fairly literary, in its use of language and form, the not-always-obvious ideas, and so on.

As I’ve been an environmental campaigner for many years, I know a fair amount about climate science and environmental issues (although I’m not a scientist). So it wasn’t too difficult for me to subtly weave that kind of information into the story, as I think about it a lot in my day-to-day life.

I did have a lot of fun messing with physics! The whole conceit of two planets on opposite sides of the Sun is an ancient idea, first invented by the Greeks. I love the idea – but sadly it’s not true. We would have spotted another such planet long ago, because of gravitational pull and light bending around objects in space. I believe one of the space probes had a look-see a few years ago – and Urth is definitely not there (neither is Aerth). My protagonist Magnus also experiences strange phenomena which are pretty unlikely… shimmering doors and doppelgängers, for example. I really enjoyed playing with these ideas, which veer into fantasy, I suppose.

I didn’t consciously think of this story as allegory or parable, although I’m delighted with Luke Kennard’s assessment. I think many writers write for themselves first of all, and I was exploring different ways of living. What would it be like, to live in a society where the most important law is to “First, do no harm”? And where did that law come from? And then to explore the opposite, where the imperative not to harm never crosses people’s minds. I was able to play with these ideas over several years as the book very slowly came together.

Michael: Great to hear this about your process, Deborah. I think it’s inspiring that your book was about “exploring different ways of living”. There’s lots to take from that. And good for more people to know about “slipstream”. Thank you for participating in this blogpost series!

Deborah & Michael: To finish, we’d like to leave you with a writing prompt that we’ve created together:

Invitation: Write a flash fiction from the point of view of another species (or non-human perspective), observing one of your novella’s main characters.

What is the human main character doing? (Think about what’s physically observable from the non-human perspective).
What does the other perspective understand (or not) about the human’s behaviour?
How do they feel about what’s happening?
Are they able to react, or interact with the human main character? If so, how?
Does the main character notice being observed, or is it happening without their knowledge?
Finally, what insight, question, or truth about humanity might the story move towards?

Food for thought #1 – by Craig Raine

Food for thought #2 – by Helen Moore

Food for thought #3 – by Caleb Parkin

Deborah Tomkins Biography – Deborah writes long and short fiction, often about human relationships with the natural world. Her short fiction has been published online and in print. Her novella-in-flash Aerth (Weatherglass Books, January 2025) won the Inaugural Weatherglass Novella Prize, judged by Ali Smith. Her forthcoming novel The Wilder Path (Aurora Metro Books, May 2025) won the Virginia Prize for Fiction in 2024. In 2017 she founded the local writers’ network Bristol Climate Writers.

Website: deborahtomkinswriter.com
Bluesky: @tomkinsdeb.bsky.social

Other flash fiction by Deborah Tomkins: www.deborahtomkinswriter.com/stories/

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Interview with Karen Jones – Ekphrastic Novella-in-Flash…

This month, novella-in-flash.com features an interview with the writer Karen Jones. Karen’s novella-in-flash Burn It All Down was published by Arroyo Seco Press in April this year.

Michael: Welcome to this blog series, Karen. I’m so pleased to feature you and your recent novella-in-flash here. The book has a very unusual idea at its core, and I’m eager for more readers to find out about it – and to learn from how you managed to write it! It’s such an unusual book because it seems to have derived entirely from the oeuvre of a single artist – Andrea Kowch. You’ve imagined a whole story-world based on your interpretations of the artist’s recurring preoccupations and visual motifs: an ekphrastic novella-in-flash.

This is the very first time I’ve encountered a novella-in-flash based entirely on someone else’s artistic oeuvre. And these are not real-life or realistic images, they are very much in another mode. So I think it’s an extraordinary thing to have made a unified novella from the images, and you have delivered the concept so brilliantly.

I understand that the seeds for the project began with the wonderful Kathy Fish, one of the flash fiction community’s best-known writers and tutors, who introduced you to the artist’s work in a writing workshop. Can you tell us a bit more about how you moved from this first step into thinking: maybe I can write a whole book inspired by this artist’s images?

Karen: Hi Michael – thanks for inviting me to the blog. Yes, that’s right, I first saw Andrea Kowch’s work in a Kathy Fish flash class. The painting Kathy used was called In the Distance and I loved everything about it, but especially the woman in the kitchen, who, to me, looked frustrated and desperate to escape. I wrote what ended up being the title story for the N-i-F from that painting and then sought out more of Kowch’s art. Every painting I looked at sparked a story and I used two of them Chosen and The Cape as inspiration for another two flashes in that same Kathy Fish course. Kathy and the other participants loved the flashes I’d written, and their reaction gave me confidence. I became a bit obsessed with Kowch’s art after that and the more I saw the more I wrote, always centred on that original character, which convinced me I could attempt a N-i-F based on the characters – and animals – in those weird and wonderful paintings.

Michael: What was it that interested you specifically about going further with these particular characters?

Karen: One of the things I love about Andrea Kowch’s work is how full the paintings are – every time you look, you see something you missed the first time. For example, in the painting No Turning Back, I didn’t notice on a first glance that the tree in the distance is blowing at an angle almost identical to the way the woman’s hair is blowing. And in fact, I didn’t even notice her hat blowing the first time, because I was so engrossed in the woman and the tethers around her wrists and what that could mean. From a writing point of view, that meant I could home in on one aspect of a painting for one story and another for the next, so sometimes one painting could trigger several stories.

But it was the women in her paintings that really made me feel there was a bigger, connected story there. They all have wild, untameable hair, which made me think they could be related. In the second story I wrote, I decided they were sisters, and once I had that family connection, a N-i-F felt like a possibility.

There are rarely men in the paintings, and when there are, they’re in the background, so these women, living in this ramshackle house on the edge of the sea (the house can be seen in The Cape), the house often filled with animals and insects, fascinated me. How were they surviving, where were their parents/other family? Why did they have this affinity with animals? I often write surreal stories about odd people – people on the edges of society – and these women and how they are presented in the artwork lent themselves to that perfectly.

I’d never tried to tackle that in N-i-F form, so I knew it would be a challenge, but I loved every moment of teasing out their story. I didn’t plan – didn’t know at the start how the story would end – so I just let it unfold naturally with each story I wrote. I brought in other characters, though not many, to resolve the questions I had about the sisters, and I wrote quickly, not allowing myself to stop and edit.

Michael: It sounds like the visual material raised active questions for you about the potential story context (e.g. where are these characters’ parents? Why aren’t they ever present in these images?), and as you gradually imagined specific answers (“What if they…?”) to these questions, this sparked clarifications of the situation the sisters are in, and it led to new stories, or to additional texture in the existing stories? Perhaps this is a good model for all kinds of story generation for an extended piece of fiction, even when not working with images: asking questions of your characters, and especially scrutinising the gaps: the things you don’t know about them. And then following the specific answers like a trail, even imagining new scenes based on what you’re discovering…

Karen: Yes, definitely. All the questions and ‘what-ifs’ are, for me, hugely important. With this story in particular, because the paintings are so full of detail and so strange, I ended up with several answers to each question. Some of the answers proved to be dead ends and I didn’t feel I could sustain a whole novella-in-flash if I followed certain threads, for example, before I made them sisters I had them in my head as friends, but I felt I needed them to live together, to be in that house and in those fields together always to really capture their lives. At one point I even thought of setting the N-i-F in Scotland, but I got caught up in the kinds of animals and insects that surround the woman, many of which wouldn’t be found in Scotland, so I had to abandon that idea. But once I’d identified the threads and ideas that allowed for further character development, for the possibility of several endings, I narrowed it down to the version that interested me most – the one I thought (hoped) I could bring to a satisfying conclusion. But having those other possibilities served as a safety net, that I could go back and take a different route if I had to.

I was very aware that someone else looking at the paintings could see an entirely different story, but I had to put that out of my mind and go with what felt right for me. I was particularly drawn to the paintings that involved fire in some way, whether to the forefront or in the distance, and it was those paintings that ultimately led me to how the story would end. I write very quickly once I get a story in my head, so having decided who the characters were and which specific paintings I wanted to work with, I wrote it and submitted it in about ten days. I know that flies in the face of the advice about leaving a story for several weeks before going back to edit, but sometimes I just know when something is right and that I could do more harm than good if I tinker with it endlessly. I find that to be particularly true with ekphrastic writing – if an image grabs me and sparks a story, I prefer to let the first draft stand, other than checking for typos etc.

The title story, ‘Burn It All Down’, won second prize in Fractured Lit’s micro competition in 2022. It was the first story I wrote from the artist’s work, so it was a huge boost to have it win a prize and made me more confident that I was onto something with these characters and that the woman in that painting (In the Distance) who I named Beth, would be my main character. It was the same with my first N-i-F, When It’s not Called Making Love – only one flash had been previously published. I know some publishers allow and want a percentage of previously published stories but I was lucky in that it turned out not to be an issue for me. I am working, very slowly, on another couple of N-i-Fs and one of them has come from several previously published stories, so I’ll have to check guidelines when it’s ready.

I know lots of authors who’ve started a N-i-F by looking at a whole bunch of previously published stuff and finding any commonalities, whether in theme or character, to give them a base to start from, but my brain doesn’t seem to work that way – I work better when I’m doing almost the whole project from scratch. I think I’d struggle to make links between stories seem natural if I tried it the other way – like everything would seem shoehorned in and hanging together tenuously. I’m full of admiration for writers who can make previously published stories appear seamless as a longer work.

Michael: Yes, I remember Ingrid Jendrzejewski talking about that to Ad Hoc Fiction in the context of her “found” novella-in-flash Things I Dream About When I’m Not Sleeping (published within the anthology How to Make a Window Snake (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2017)). It sounded like a fascinating process of discovery and curation for her.

So, having spoken about your superb ekphrastic book here (which I hope readers of this blog will now seek out!), shall we leave readers with an ekphrastic writing prompt they can experiment with?

One resource I’ve previously found helpful in preparing for ekphrastic writing is Martyn Crucefix’s categorisation of ekphrastic writing strategies. Although his summary is intended to be about poems, it can often work for flash fiction too. And of course there’s the wonderful, inexhaustible resource of The Ekphrastic Review founded by Lorette C. Luzajic, and ekphrastic writing workshops by Anika Carpenter.

Karen, is there a picture or resource or a particular artist you’d like to share with readers, such that they could be inspired to try a piece of ekphrastic writing, and see where it leads them?

Karen: I’ve always loved these Magritte paintings ‘The Lovers’. Following on from what Michael and I have said about the questions a piece of art can throw up (all the ‘what ifs’), try working with the two images below:

(1) list some questions you have about the situations in the pictures and then
(2) try coming up with some possible answers to these questions.

Choose a couple of your questions/answers and write one or two draft flashes. This might bring more questions, which is a great way to start working on a series of flashes or even a N-i-F. And then you might continue the sequence by seeking out other Magritte paintings.

Karen Jones Biography – 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 was 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/shortlisted for To Hull and Back, Bath Flash Fiction, Bath Short Story Award and many others. Her first novella-in-flash When It’s Not Called Making Love is published by Ad Hoc Fiction, and her second, Burn It All Down, is published by Arroyo Seco Press. She is an editor for National Flash Fiction Day anthology.

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Memoir-in-Flash and “AutoFiction”

Some novellas-in-flash involve storylines (and story-worlds) that are clearly fictional – for example some of the books mentioned in this recent list of speculative/sci-fi novellas.

Other writers draw entirely upon real life experiences for their NIFs, even to the point of calling their book a “memoir-in-flash”.

Below are some examples of recent novellas-in-flash that depend heavily on lived experiences. Where the book has been presented specifically as memoir, this is noted in the list; where the NIF has been presented as “autofiction”, or fiction derived directly from autobiographical experiences, this is also noted.

There are bound to be many NIFs I’ve neglected that could appear in this list! Especially as it’s not easy to tell which ones are re-presenting autobiographical experiences as if they were “fiction” – unless an author lets readers know.

Are there other NIFs that should be added to the list below?

With your help, let’s put together a comprehensive survey of this genre here. Please comment with your suggestions (title, author, publisher, year – for ease of locating!) below… I’ll be especially grateful to hear from authors about their own books!

Memoirs-in-Flash or “Autofiction”:

• The Lover (1984) by Marguerite Duras (a novella as a stream of fragmented memories, drawing on the author’s real life experiences)

• The Two Kinds of Decay (2008) by Sarah Manguso (memoir that reads like a “memoir-in-flash”, though not described as such upon publication)

• With a Zero At Its Heart (2014) by Charles Lambert (a novella composed of miscellaneous microfictions, all about one person – based on the author’s real life experiences)

• Ongoingness: the End of a Diary (2015) by Sarah Manguso (a memoir in fragmented diary form)

• Finding a Way (2019) by Diane Simmons (originally described as a short-short story collection, but equally considered as a novella-in-flash, and drawing upon real life, as described by the author)

• An Inheritance (2020) by Diane Simmons (a novella-in-flash drawing upon family history)

• The Naming of Bones (2021) by Jan Kaneen (described as a memoir-in-flash when published)

• Take Two (2023) by Caroline Thonger and Vivian Thonger (an experimental memoir-in-short-chapters, including letter extracts, drawings of objects, playscripts, poems, and illuminated micro-stories).

• A Tricky Dance (2024) by Diane Simmons (a novella-in-flash drawing upon real life experiences)

• Fingling the Snargle (2024) by Sarah Mosedale (a memoir-in-flash)

Please add your suggestions below!

This email is part of a regular blogpost series containing writing prompts, novella-in-flash book reviews, workshop/mentoring offers, and other announcements related to all things novella-in-flash.

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