In 2012, writer and writing tutor Nancy Stohlman conceived the idea to run a series of daily prompts during November for those who wanted write a flash fiction a day instead of writing a novel during November for NaNoWriMo. Six years on, and a huge number of writers throughout the world take up her challenge each November. Read more about how she started this in my interview with her from last year.  Want to write a novella-in-flash for our third Novella-in-flash Award? We think with the motivating prompts Nancy supplies, November is an ideal month to create a flash fiction novella draft. Thirty stories and you’ll have a complete draft manuscript at the end of the month. Don’t know where to begin? The prompts themselves may give you initial ideas, and they can also push forward a vague idea you already have and take it in different directions.  You can also sign up to a Face Book group to receive daily prompts from Meg Pokrass throughout the month.

Our third annual Award, this year judged by Michael Loveday closes in mid January for novellas-in-flash between 6000 and 18,000 words. There are cash prizes, publication in a collection and five free copies of the book. If you complete your draft in November during FlashNano, there is time to perfect it in December and the beginning of January ready to enter the Award. In our interview with him, Michael, whose own novella-in-flash, Three Men On The Edge was published by V.Press earlier this year, explains more about the novella-in-flash form and what he is looking for.

The winners from the 2018 Award and those from the 2017 Award have also written about how they went about writing their novellas. So for more tips, read Charmaine Wilkerson’s account of her process in writing How to Make A Window Snake, which won first prize in the 2017 Bath Novella in Flash Award, and then went on to win the Novella-in-Flash category of the Saboteur Award in May this year. Runners up, Joanna Campbell and Ingrid Jendrzwjewski also give  fascinating and very instructive accounts of the process they went through.

These novellas are all very different, as are those written by this year’s winners, in the collection, In The Debris Field the title being the title of the winning novella by Luke Whisnant. Luke,  Jack Remiel Cottrell and Victoria Melekian. all say more about how they wrote their novellas in my interviews with them. And it is interesting to read the interviews with all six authors whose novellas we’ve published, to understand the scope and range of the form. Each novella is a  stunning read and you can buy both collections from the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop.