The National Flash Fiction Day competition is open! Details are on the NFFD website. Flash Frontier Editor Rachel Smith talked this month with the 2025 NFFD judges about their experience as poets and storytellers, including a few tips for writing small fictions.
Rachel Smith: Kia ora kōrua, Brannavan and Vana. It’s wonderful to have you both as judges for this year’s celebration of short short fiction, New Zealand Flash Fiction Day.
On books and form
RS: Let’s start off by talking a little about your own writing and publications over the years.
Vana, The Grief Almanac: A Sequel (Seraph Press, 2019) is a poetry collection of hybrid forms – poetry, memoir, letter and essay. Can you tell us how the form for this collection came together and speak on your experience of writing across genres within one collection?
Brannavan, your latest novel, The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat (Lawrence & Gibson, 2024) is described as a ‘sidelong glare at the rise of wannabe South Asian demagogues in Western democracies, and imagines a version fit for Aotearoa.’ Similarly, Sprigs (Lawrence & Gibson, 2022) takes a sidelong glare at youth and rugby culture in Aotearoa. Do you begin your novels with an idea of the larger theme in mind, and subsequent plot, or do these develop during the writing process?
Vana: Thank you so much for this question. Much has been written on loss of language during times of extreme and relentless grief. That’s how it was for me. I couldn’t find the single form because the space was formless, amorphous and shifting. I grabbed what I could to enter the space, hold it and be held by it. I didn’t feel a master, was trapped in a lyric present in some moments, in a narrative attempt to sense or story-make in another. And always the letter-writing, the attempt to find and speak to. So, in the case of The Grief Almanac there was no other way I don’t think. I wrote into the hybrid space in my earlier book too, but for different reasons (or maybe the same reasons). My family DNA is migrant, adoptee, refugee. And I think that’s part of why I haven’t yet been able to smooth out the forms in my writing; I haven’t settled. Or maybe I just love them all too much.
Brannavan: My novels always start with an idea of the larger theme in mind – generally it starts with a question. With Sprigs for example, it was “how do survivors find their voice in a system that seeks to suppress their voice?” With Kartik Popat, the question was “why do some immigrants get seduced by the far right to work against their own communities”. My narrative, characterisation, etc, all flow from trying to answer that question. However, I spend a lot of time planning, so I won’t start writing until I have mapped out my narrative trajectory, my ending, and my character(s)’s voices.
On language
RS: You both bring understanding and knowledge of language outside of English to your work – Brannavan with your early years in Sri Lanka, and Vana, with the inclusion of Greek in your published work. Can you tell us how, or if, languages impacts your writing, both in the forms you choose to write in and the way you see and feel language on the page?
Vana: I can’t get away from language in my writing and in general. I’m obsessed by the ways language makes us and is made by us at every beat, in every breath. My own languages (whether English or Greek, lines or sentences, syntactical weirdnesses and waves) bend me to their will I feel! The poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky has talked about the ‘many different Englishes’ that are all in collision. And for me this feels true. I find myself wrestling with voice, interference, strangenesss, and resistance to homogeneity, a lot.
Brannavan: For me, form is always driven by content, rather than the other way around. Language to me is pretty functional as a result – it depends on what I’m trying to answer or work through thematically. Kartik’s voice, for example, was driven by getting to know him as a character, someone who is vain, desperate to be liked, wants to be seen as smart, pushing back against the idea of “you speak English very well for a foreigner”. Language is never something that stands alone or something that is separate from the content. That’s not to say I don’t have a love of language or enjoy writing or reading a beautiful sentence (although I’m absolutely not a poet), but my focus is on figuring out how should I express my ideas.
On process and creating space
RS: With very full working lives, Brannavan as a lawyer and Vana as a senior university lecturer, how does your day-job inform your writing? Do you find inspiration from your daily work? And what are your writing habits – how do you set aside time for your own creative practice?
Vana: I spend a gargantuan amount of time reading, editing, re-re-reading and talking about texts with my students. It’s the very best part of the job. They are amazing language makers and benders with new and magical approaches who inspire me so much. The challenge is finding time to make something with all the inspiration! The way I make peace with this is by broadening what ‘creative practice’ means. I also think of it as aimless walking, daydreaming, collecting found objects, arranging found objects, long-looking and remembering to breathe. I’ve done very little writing the last three years, since starting at UC, but I have small piles of index cards waiting to form webs on my floor. Luckily, I think writing needs thinking needs time.
Brannavan: It definitely helps. One of the things about being a lawyer is that you’re constantly playing with tone, you’re writing for different audiences, and you need to be understandable and precise. That’s super helpful training. I’m also very used to writing to deadlines, and pushing through so-called writer’s block (clients won’t accept that as an excuse!), so the day-to-day realities of being a lawyer helps. Plus, I’m surrounded by people and having to interact with a wide cross-section of the public, and that helps with voice and being part of the world. I set aside time to write, and treat it as one of the files I have on the go. One tactic I used for Kartik Popat is that I would save a piece of non-urgent work to do in the evening, which would force me to open my laptop.
On reading
RS: What are your reading habits – do you read multiple books across genres at once or tend to focus on a particular form, and one book, at one time? And what’s on top of your ‘to-read’ pile at the moment?
Vana: No surprises, I spend most of my reading time during term reading my student’s work (and get heavily invested in it)! But over summer I began my Annie Ernaux festival, which is still continuing, and I caught up on a few of the year’s books, especially by NZ authors. Unless I have a festival going, (see above), I like to have a book of fiction or non-fiction going at the same time as a book of poetry, which I’ll pore over. I’ll note down lines and sentences from each in a mad mixed-up list. At the moment, I’m finishing a Greek edition of Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story and starting Teju Cole’s Blind Spot of prose poems, fragments, walk narratives or essays.
Brannavan: I read as widely as I can when I’m between books, and I don’t stick to one form or genre or anything like that. When I’m working through the planning stages, I tend to read books with similar subject matter, or that would help with research (but again, not tied to form or genre). If I’m working in genre, then I would tend to stick to a type of genre – for my book Slow Down, You’re Here, which is a horror novel, I read a lot of horror, as a result. When I’m writing, I tend to read to help solve problems I encounter when I write, or might help distract.
Currently top of my to-read pile is Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan, Duncan Sarkies’ Star Gazers (I’m on a panel with Duncan for Auckland Writers Festival), Entitlement by Rumaan Alam (I’m interviewing Rumaan at Auckland Writers’ Festival) and Claire Baylis’ Dice (I’m hosting a Ngaio Marsh session at the Karori Library).
On small fiction
RS: What do you look for in an excellent piece of flash fiction? What draws you in, keeps you reading, and then keeps the piece of writing with you?
Vana: An unexpected opening draws me in; I love shifts, and writing that plays and is a little punk. I look for moments that feel attended to, honoured, and acutely observed. I listen for voices I’ve not heard before. Flash fiction that has stayed with me has pulled me in close, closer than is comfortable, and refused to let me look away even for a second.
Brannavan: Clarity of thought and narrative is the key for me. Aside from that, I’m pretty much open to anything, so it’s making sure that you can answer the “why?” question to everything that’s on the page. That’s easier said than done though!
RS: What are your top three tips for the craft of writing, particularly for short short fiction?
Vana: Something that helps me, in terms of tightening voice and tone, in short, short fiction, is to address a specific reader – someone I know in most cases – and to change the POV to 2nd person. (The POV can go back to 1st or 3rd after the exercise). Another: turn a paragraph of sentences into a lined poem ending each line at a power word, a noun maybe, or word with strong visual resonance. This helps reveal language ambition, colour, texture, rhythm. And another: read aloud, then remove all the punctuation and read aloud again. Repunctuate, re-paragraph. This helps reveal muddy first draft writing and refocuses narrative drive and flow.
And a fourth? A biggie! feel empathy towards your characters, despite or because of their flaws. Wonder about them, be curious, but resist knowing them too fully.
Brannavan: As above, making sure you can answer why you did x, y, or z in your story. That applies irrespective of length. Secondly, ensure that no word is wasted, because you don’t have space to do so. Third, is making sure you have fun on the page. A sense of personality in the story itself goes a long way.
Brannavan Gnanalingam is a novelist and lawyer based in Wellington. He has written eight novels, including Sprigs and Sodden Downstream (both shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Foundation Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards) and A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse (longlisted for the same award). He is also a regular columnist for the Sunday Star-Times and won a Qantas Media Award (as it was then known) in 2009 as a reviewer with the Lumière Reader. His latest novel is The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat.
Vana Manasiádis | Βάνα Μανασιάδη is a poet, editor and translator, and the author of four books including Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima and The Grief Almanac: A Sequel. She has been a Michael King and Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence and is now Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha Canterbury University. From July she will be in Crete to work on her next book, another experiment in hybridity and autofiction, and to welcome the Greek translation of The Grief Almanac in a very small bookshop.