Award winning writer & short story glutton.
Longlisted for the Quiet Man Dave Flash Fiction Prize, Oct 2020 https://www.mmu.ac.uk/qmdprize/finalists-and-winners/ It was Eckstein’s idea, the duck. Who’d miss it? Sure, when it was alive it had golden feathers and a long, sad call. I certainly had nothing against it. But dead it was meat, chestnut-sweet and pink on the plate. Eckstein said all …
Flash Fiction BY SEAN LUSK – 23 JUNE 2020 They have gone, after all. And their advice was never right. They slurped their tea and liked to sleep with the windows wide open, even in January. They started crosswords but could never finish them without your help. Also, they began sentences without finishing them but would get …
A new short story by Sean Lusk I have not asked you why you set fire to yourself. You made a cruel smell. It was not just the petrol, the whiff of barbecued flesh, though that was bad enough. This town is not a war zone, or not quite, though the world is changing in …
Four short story writers who put place at the heart of their stories This week, as we continue the elusive pursuit of the ‘magic recipe’ for short stories, we look at four short story writers whose sense of place transports the reader so firmly into the story’s setting that the setting becomes, in …
Character: I’ve put a question mark after the title this week, since I wouldn’t want anyone to believe that I think there’s actually such a thing as a ‘magic recipe’ for writing a short story. It’s a mighty subtle form, and no list of ingredients and mixing instructions will guarantee success. But looking at how …
Voice The next few posts will be about great short stories and what makes them so good. There is, naturally enough, no single magic recipe. But it seems to me that there are three main types of recipe, or perhaps three distinct types of ‘short story cookbook’, each as different in style as, say, Delia …
It depends on the group, unsurprisingly. A writing group which meets regularly merely to listen, praise and reassure might be good for your ego but won’t do much for your writing. On the other hand, a group of writers overly-focused on one particular type of writing, or purely on avenues to publication might give you …
This is a book that reminds you that the ordinary is extraordinary, that small lives are the same size as any other life and that tragedy and comedy are very close relatives. The End of Vandalism is a novel about ordinary people doing ordinary things – what marks it out is not its …
This strange, wonderful and ultimately frustrating book from 2018 Man Booker International Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk has got me thinking about the importance of form. First published in 2007 in Polish, and only translated into English last year (and beautifully translated at that, by Jennifer Croft) the book is filled with memorable lines …
‘Write what you know’ is one of the most repeated and most tedious pieces of writing advice, though you’ll find plenty of good writers and teachers of writing who recommend the opposite and say ‘write what you don’t know’. I don’t think that’s quite right, either. The very best fiction, and especially the best short …