"The Subtle Art of Short Fiction," ed. Isabelle Kenyon

About The Subtle Art of Short Fiction, ed. Isabelle Kenyon
The Subtle Art of Short Fiction explores the power of short fiction in today’s fragmented world. Renowned authors and critics offer advanced techniques for crafting nuanced, impactful stories.

Learn to master short story structure, subtext, micro-tension, and sensory minimalism. Ideal for experienced writers seeking to refine their skills in this sophisticated art form, or those who love short fiction, and want to learn about the craft behind it.

The book includes essays and writing exercises by Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Daisy Johnson, Matt Wesolowski, Sascha Akhtar, David Hartley, Mahsuda Snaith, Jonathan Taylor, Sarah Schofield, SJ Bradley and Farhana Shaikh, and has an introduction by Dr Paul March-Russell.

You can read more about The Subtle Art of Short Fiction on the publisher's website here. 

About the editor
Isabelle Kenyon is the Managing Director of Manchester publishing house Fly on the Wall Press, and was named a Leader of the Year by the Bookseller in 2025. Founded in 2018, she has led Fly on the Wall Press from Small Press of the Year finalist status at the British Book Awards 2021-23 to their win in the North, in 2024. She is the MA Module Leader for "Publishing in the 21st Century" at Arts University Bournemouth, and the author of psychological thriller The Dark Within Them and poetry collections including Growing Pains (Indigo Dreams).​ She previously coordinated the Northern Fiction Alliance and runs PR campaigns for writers and publishers under Kenyon Author Services. 

From The Subtle Art of Short Fiction

From The Art of Anticipation and Revelation

by Daisy Johnson

I have noticed something recently about children. It is the waiting that they love. My sons sit at the kitchen table watching me, spoons floating half way to their open mouths, eyes wide. I am doing something silly, making a noise or pretending to hide or doing a funny walk. Each time when I stop they call for me to do it again, again, again. I pretend not to, I cannot possibly, no, I am very busy, but they know I am lying. It is this moment of withholding that they find most joyous. The best short stories, for me, carve out most perfectly that delicious space of anticipation.

In Miranda July’s short story "The Metal Bowl," the protagonist describes herself acting in a porn video when she was younger. "I wasn’t directed so much as given a series of props to make my way through, like an obstacle course. A turquoise Teddy bear, a pillow, an empty beer bottle, a metal bowl. Not everything was clear to me (the bowl), but I was too nervous to speak." From this moment we move through the story with a growing question. What was the metal bowl for? The question is an elastic tension which connects us to the protagonist.

In Shirley Jackon’s "The Lottery," the very title of the story is a question which we go in asking: what is The Lottery? The people of a small village begin to gather in the square: "Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example." As with the mysterious metal bowl, we wonder, what are these stones for? Unlike July’s story it is clear that the characters know more than us, that the trembling, questioning tension belongs only to the reader ... 

Rosanna McGlone (ed.), "The Process of Poetry"

 

About The Process of Poetry: From First Draft to Final Poem, ed. Rosanna McGlone

The Process of Poetry is a unique collection of interviews with contemporary poets at the height of their craft. How does a subconscious thought become an award-winning poem? Journalist Rosanna McGlone speaks to some of the country's leading poets to find out. Don Paterson, Sean O'Brien, Gillian Clarke, Pascale Petit, Hannah Lowe, Regi Claire, Joelle Taylor, Victoria Kennefick and others explore the development of a single poem from rough notes to a final version to provide invaluable insights for writers and poetry enthusiasts alike.

You can read more about The Process of Poetry on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read about the editor and from the Preface to the book. 

Rosanna McGlone is a journalist, writer and poetry tutor. She has written more than a 100 features for both national, and international, publications including: The Guardian, The Independent, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Weekend Australian and Salon.com. Rosanna has lived in Australia and El Salvador. Her first radio play, based on the massacre at El Mozote, was shortlisted for the BBC’s Alfred Bradley Bursary Award. Her work has been supported by, amongst others, Arts Council England, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Hull Truck Theatre, Vault Festival, Green Curtain Theatre and The Old Vic New Voices Programme. Writing residencies include Capricorn Hill, NSW, Australia and The Hosking Houses Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

From The Process of Poetry

From the Preface, by Rosanna McGlone

No poet publishes a first draft, at least, not until now. Invariably, what you see are carefully honed words, nurtured into being, but what goes on before those words reach the printed page? From my own experience as a poetry tutor for many years, it is clear that most writers have little awareness of the skill and stamina involved in crafting a poem. This was the motivation behind what you are about to read. The Process of Poetry offers an opportunity to explore early drafts by fifteen of the nation’s leading poets and to hear the reasoning behind their development.

These poets have been the recipients of numerous awards including the T. S. Eliot Prize, The Forward Prize for Poetry, The Costa Book of The Year, The Eric Gregory Award, The Creative Scotland Award, The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, Foyle Young Poet of the Year and The Wilfred Owen Award. 

One has been the Scottish Makar and one has been The National Poet for Wales. Several poets have work on school syllabi. Moreover, their expertise extends beyond poetry and includes editing, publishing, judging, translating, lecturing, and overseeing spoken word events. 

How was the project undertaken? I approached a number of poets whose work I admired, poets who come from highly diverse backgrounds and represent us all. I was aware from the start that they would need a willingness to make themselves vulnerable in order to share their expertise. 

Initially, each contributor sent several poems, from which one was selected which best exemplified their craft. Some poets offered very early drafts, or even journal notes, whilst others provided later versions still in need of improvement. The aim was to showcase a wide range of writing styles and redrafting techniques.

A series of interviews was conducted, enabling each poet to discuss the development of their work, some of which is based on traumatic events. Whilst a few writers have given a broad overview of their working methods, others have chosen to focus on the minutiae. Some have analysed single words, others a change to title, subject or form. It is these interviews which form the basis of this book. 

The aim of this project is not to identify and scrutinise every single alteration in each poem. The book raises a number of questions. Where does a poem originate? How do you decide on a title? When do you choose the form for your poem? What are the best approaches to editing your work? When would additional input help? How do you know when a poem is finally finished? What should you consider when assembling a collection? What is a publisher seeking? 

Contributors have offered their guidance on the skills that a working poet requires, entering competitions, translating and writing for performance. Whilst often their advice concurs, I love that it is, occasionally, contradictory. I trust that, as a reader, you will respond to the variation that is presented and take away with you what is most helpful. 

My hope is that this book will preserve the unique insights and materials of living poets for the next generation. Better still, that the value of this undertaking will be recognised and that there will be an opportunity to expand it more widely in the future ...

Amy E. Weldon, "Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology"

 

Amy E. Weldon is Professor of English at Luther College, USA. She is the author of The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save the World (2018), The Writer’s Eye: Observation and Inspiration for Creative Writers (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Eldorado, Iowa: A Novel (2019). Her website is here.

About Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, by Amy E. Weldon

After the publication of The Writer’s Eye, I’m thrilled to be returning with Bloomsbury to a conversation about the next level of the fiction-writing process, starting with the place many of our craft questions really start – in our minds. What do we know, or not? Feel uncertain about, or not? In my own and my students’ and friends’ experience, readjusting our internal sense of our projects can unlock difficulties that “craft instruction” alone can't quite do, because our mental approach to the project shapes the words we bring to the page.

The concept of psychic distance is a great example. Essentially, it means “the degree to which you are pretending to be your character, seeing through her eyes to render reality as she understands it, including what she sees and hears around her, while still giving readers the information we need to be able to understand your story.” Students tell me often that understanding psychic distance is one of their most important breakthroughs as advanced writers, since establishing your psychic distance – your relationship to your character and the depth of your immersion in her reality – determines how your point-of-view apparatus and your sentences work. If your psychic distance is too far, readers can feel stranded at an unchanging distance from characters, and the story can feel impersonal because we can’t quite get into anyone’s head. (Sentences can get boring, too, because, eager to close that distance, you may start telling readers what we need to know from your point of view, not a character’s). Too short, and readers feel trapped within the character’s sensibility, with insufficient information about the world beyond her head. But if you can establish and move through a range of psychic distance that works for you (like a film director moving from a long or medium shot to a close-up), you can build a convincing world around your character and signal to readers that this character is the fully developed person we’re meant to be following as she moves through that world.

You can read more about Advanced Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology on the publisher's website here. Below is an excerpt from the book, in which I describe how dialogue and psychic distance can interact.

From Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology

Surprisingly, dialogue can be a psychic-distance block too. Dialogue can feel intimate and fun when you’re writing it, because you can “hear” it from inside the story’s world – you’re the writer. But readers are already external to the story’s world – we’re not you, remember?  And overusing dialogue can distance us even further, because dialogue is external to a character; spoken into the world beyond their heads and limited by what would be believable in that situation, it’s therefore limited in what it can tell us about a character’s interior life (unlike italicized “voiceover” thoughts, for example, or sensory detail about what a character’s noticing around her). And without access to that interior life, the psychic distance between the reader and the character grows .... Overreliance on dialogue may also signal that you don’t know enough about your fictional world yet to animate it through action, sensory detail, and other, non-dialogue modes of characterization. What you don’t know, readers can’t know. 

This is why dialogue, especially if it isn’t ballasted with actions and sensory detail, can feel so much like disembodied voices in space. Plus, long stretches of dialogue can give the feeling that the writer is impressed with the characters’ cleverness and wants readers to be as well. (We feel shoved into sitcom studio-audience chairs, watching the characters on stage, invited to applaud at conversations that go on just a little too long). “I want my readers to view this character as X” – without imagining that character as X to write the character being X in reality as they understand it – can be a recipe for psychic-distance weirdness.

Take a look at your paragraphs and your major scenes: where does dialogue appear, and for how long? In many student stories, paragraphs begin with lines of dialogue, then move to exposition kind of grudgingly, then get back to dialogue as quickly as they can. Some also revert to dialogue (or long speeches by characters) to reveal important plot or backstory information. For a first notes-to-self draft, this is OK. In revision, try something else. (Unless you’re James Baldwin writing “Sonny’s Blues”). If your paragraphs fall into a dialogue-then-exposition pattern, reverse that order. If using dialogue, keep it short and interwoven with external and internal detail. If writing a longer scene (like an argument), keep your stakes high (and obvious to the reader), keep the external world present (someone’s gripping that paperweight, ready to throw it), and be sure the characters’ words could believably emerge from an actual, non-televised human’s mouth in that situation. (Remember: high emotion often makes people less, not more, articulate). All these things will help keep your psychic distance on track.

Writing the Small Sublime

 By Tracey Foster

         Black ticks on bright blue
         swifts flung across the sky
         like boomerangs.

The need to write concise poetry began as an exercise during the MA Creative Writing course, as a way of training myself to rein in a tendency to overplay descriptions and imagery. I fully enjoyed the process and learnt how to hone meanings and condense a poem into simple constructs. Haiku has always been an area of poetry that fascinated me, the art of writing tiny stories in very few words. Simple sentences that work across a few lines, rhythm and rhyme packed into the small sublime.

The form of the Haiku was developed from a much older tradition in Japan of writing Renga poems that were a hundred stanzas long. Haiku appeared in the sixteenth century and became the much shorter relative, packing a story into a more condensed version, usually constructed over three lines in a 5,7,5 syllabic format. The writer focuses on nature and sets the season with key words like 'snow.’ This is called ‘kigo.’ The most famous examples of this are sakura (cherry blossoms) for spring,  fuji (wisteria) for summer, tsuki (moon) for fall, and samushi (cold) for winter. The first two lines set up the situation and the final line is often in contrast, sending the reader down a different lane. This is called ‘Kireji,’ a jump in narrative that gives the poem its raison d'être, the key message to the reader, often dark in tone or converse. This appealed to me as my writing often had an eerie undercurrent; and my feelings about the state of our native wildlife and a plea to help nature are things I am keen to tackle in my poetry.

          Scrap of grass littered
          with yellow pee-the-beds.
          Weeds to feed the bees.

The most renowned writer of Haiku is Matsuo Bashō, who explored Zen teachings and played with the format. He said: 'Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one - when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural - if the object and you are separate - then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.' A good example of his work is:

         Breaking the silence
         Of an ancient pond,
         A frog jumped into water -
         A deep resonance. 

These works influenced many poets over the centuries, most notably the American poet Ezra Pound, who said, 'The image itself is speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.' He was inspired to rewrite his poem ‘In a Station of the Metro,’ from a thirty-line poem, down to just two lines (or three, if you count the title):

          The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
          Petals on a wet, black bough.

My research into this field of writing led me to discover other forms of compact poetry. A single Haiku written continuously on one line is called a Monoku. Tanka is a longer form using 5,7,5,7,7. The first three lines are called  kami-no-ku ('upper phrase') and the last two the shimo-no-ku ('lower phrase'). Senryu is a much shorter version, using 3,5,3 syllables, and restricts the writer even more. This can often lead to incomplete sentences, leaving the reader to mentally fill in the gaps.

           Evening star
           blue linen sky,
           drawing pin.

My creative process begins with a walk in the countryside in all weathers, as I did in lockdown whilst writing my submissions for the course in 2020. I always take a phone and jot down key phrases that come to mind, often just a sentence that will later develop into a poem. Most of my poems start from  an observation from the world outside. A Haiku is a very short poem,  but I still like to employ key constructs in my work. Alliteration, rhyme and metre are some of the devices I have employed. But I'm careful not to overdo it: the reader should be able to just fall into the imagery. I use my feelings to convey emotions, sight, sound, touch and smell and try to make the reader aware of them, but as if experiencing them from afar. 

          A murder of crows
          flies skyward as one black cloud,
          dropping snails like hail.

During April and National Poetry Month in 2023, I set myself the challenge to write a Haiku every day. This had two purposes: helping me to keep up my Creative Writing and to fit around my other life as a secondary school teacher. The challenge was easy to accomplish but harder to find an audience for. My previous poetry had been accepted for several online publications, but Haiku seems to be a niche for which it is harder to find relevant publishing outlets. There is a good Twitter community of writers who share work and encouragement and some online publications that will accept submissions. However, sharing your work online via social media will mean it won’t be accepted for publication elsewhere. The best advice I can give you is to keep trying and keep it simple. Good luck!

Here are some very useful websites to help you:

https://thegreatmargin.org/haiku/
https://haikujournal.org/what-is-haiku/
https://thehaikufoundation.org/new-to-haiku-how-to-edit-your-haiku/
https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/
https://www.modernhaiku.org/submissions.html

About the author
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by CommaPress, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature and the Arts Council. Her latest poem is due to be published in the Literary Review 23. Tracey is on Twitter @traceyfoster77

Tom Conaghan (ed.), "Reverse Engineering"

By Tom Conaghan, publisher of Scratch Books

About Reverse Engineering

It’s easy to get obsessive about short stories. Done well they’re near perfect, done badly they’re a little insulting. Maybe, in such a contained space, the stakes are just naturally higher. 

I’ve been the fiction editor at Bandit Fiction for a few years now. I also judge submissions at US magazine The Story, and for The Word Factory’s Apprenticeship Award. In all these organisations, we were declining a great deal more writing than we accepted. All the time, I was reading incredible stories in The New Yorker, Granta, The White Review, Electric Literature and others. What was it that these successful writers doing that so many others weren’t? 

The question prompted me to start a series of interviews at The Word Factory, asking amazing authors how did you write that? Their answers were eye-opening in many ways: Chris Power rewrote his ending to ‘The Crossing’ fifty times; Mahreen Sohail’s first draft she calls draft zero; present-day Jon McGregor would like to teach his younger self that what he thought was ambiguity was just prevarication.

But, above all this, what came through was how various their craft was. Bringing together their principles did not point towards a single perfect story; as I wrote in the introduction to the book (available to read in 3am Magazine), there is no single state of short storydom – it is a perennial Newfoundland. 

As a consequence, I found that talking to brilliant authors didn’t show me how to write a great story, but – like a great short story – it did help me formulate better questions. And, ultimately, the one thing I did understand about the short story is that its endless permutations mean that, for me, it will stay an obsession.

You can see more details about Reverse Engineering on the publisher's website here. You can receive a 15% discount when you buy Reverse Engineering online with the special discount code: Leicester15