Spineless Wonders

An independent Sydney-based publisher of short Australian stories from single stories to novellas as well as single-author collections and anthologies. Spineless Wonders hosts The Carmel Bird Award for short fiction and The joanne burns Microlit Award for microfiction and prose poems.

Author Q&A with Susan McCreery for Thurs. 8pm AEST - please leave your Qs here

We'll be chatting with the author of Loopholes, Susan McCreery, here on Thursday night. Loopholes is a collection of microfiction - many less than half a page in length - so it will be great chance to hone in on this short short form. Plus Loopholes has just been nominated for The Most Underrated Book Award which will be announced next week at The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne. So this will also be a good chance to chat with an emerging author about her writing journey and how she feels about the attention her book is receiving. I'm leaving a couple of questions below to kick off the evening's discussion. Feel free to leave your questions below too.

  • Created
← Currently viewing a single comment. Back to the whole discussion.

Since you also write short stories, how do you decide that a microfiction is "done"? How do you resist the temptation to add a little more information? When you revise, do you pare away as much as possible?

Hi Marian – lovely to meet you. I do pare away and pare away until I get to the core! In many ways cutting away extraneous matter is the easy bit – the words that don't do much work. Deciding on which details to keep can be tricky. I read aloud a lot. This helps. Leave it, come back to it with fresh eyes/ears. Sometimes it's just the word choice that I change. 'Scared' can be better than 'frightened' for e.g. Rhythmically.

I'll have to go back and read them all out loud. Personal favourite is "Safekeeping', btw. A great emotional impact.

Reply arrow green
  • Anonymous