In 2024 SmokeLong hosted our second SmokeLong Workshop Prize competition. Our workshop participants reported almost 300 publications to us before November 1, 2024. In 2025, we’ll be featuring one writer each week from The SmokeLong Workshop Prize long list. It’s an excellent series of interviews, each grappling with questions about workshopping, giving and receiving feedback, and the publication process. If you are a previous or current SmokeLong workshop participant and you have ultimately published something you began in a SmokeLong workshop, remember to enter The SmokeLong Workshop Prize competition. This free-to-enter competition is on our Submittable page.
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An Interview with Fiona McKay – “You Almost Never Walk Anywhere With Your Father Now” published in FlashFlood 2024
What do you remember about the workshop where you wrote this story? What was the prompt or writing task that led to the story?
Some months have four Mondays, some have five. In SLQ Fitness, there are usually four writing tasks per month, and if there’s a fifth Monday, it can be anything – an editing week, a quick write, or in the case of this story, a spin-the-wheel prompt courtesy of Christopher Allen. Sometimes, the constraint – take this character, take that setting, use this point of view – has the effect of shaking loose a story I didn’t know was in my brain or wanted to be told. The prompts for this story were – An empty street at night – a father and his son (who has a secret) – second person POV. Starting with second person POV, I thought it might suit a breathless paragraph of around 300 words. The title was originally the first line of the story – someone in my workshop group suggested using it as the title, and others agreed. I thought this was a great suggestion and worked well for the story, so I went with that. Feedback here (and from others subsequently) felt the ending came a little too quickly, so in revision, taking into account the constraints of the breathless paragraph style, I worked on word choices which would set up an expectation of the ending, rather than adding exposition.
Peer-review feedback is always full of surprises. In general, what kind of feedback do you find helpful? What kind of feedback do you find less helpful?
We recently had Editing Month in the SLQ workshop, and I loved how we focused in the first two weeks on the story on the page and then the ‘aboutness’ of the story. When I give feedback, these are things I tend to focus on. It is really useful, as a writer, to get into the mind of the reader and see what they see on the page. Sometimes that is different to what I think I have put on the page, so part of the editing process is always making sure I’m getting across the ‘what’ of the story. The second thing I look for is the ‘what is this story really about?’ – the layers of meaning behind the words, the story in the white space – and feedback about this is important: does the reader see this ‘invisible’ story as well as the story on the page?
I often get a question as to whether I need my first or last paragraph, and it’s something I look at in revision too, because we all like to set our stories, but it’s easy to add too much exposition at the beginning. At the end, I have to make sure I don’t go past showing the ending, and tell it as well. Both of these issues are really about trusting the reader to pick up your clues, so feedback reminders are good here.
And finally in terms of what’s helpful – reminders to use vivid, unique detail and also sensory detail.
In terms of what’s less helpful – when I give feedback, I try to frame it by asking questions to draw out the different options within the narrative, and I hope this is helpful to others. I like this method of gentle exploration, and prefer it to more prescriptive suggestions (change this, delete that, tell a different story).
To how many places did you send this story? Can you tell us a little about its journey to publication?
Some of my favourite stories have a long, meandering journey in my submissions spreadsheet with up to ten submissions before finding their forever home – and some are still wandering. This story had a fairly short journey. I sent it to one competition – Bath Flash – where I thought it was the stronger of two stories I sent. I was disappointed not to see it on the list (and forgot to look for my other story, which had, in typical fashion, made its way onto the longlist) but I love having 300-word stories that I like, as there are lots of places for them. I then sent it to Flash Flood – you can send three stories, and writers often send two and hold one chance in case neither of the two make it. This time, I just sent the one story and was delighted with an acceptance! The Flash Flood submission week is very high-adrenaline with readers sending acceptances and rejections in real time and writers posting the highs and lows on social media. It is a wonderful rush when you’re accepted, and it can also seem very overwhelming if you don’t get that acceptance. It’s a very high-octane, magnified look at the submitting life! (And then National Flash Flood Day itself is an intense rush of flash fiction, with a new story appearing every five minutes for 24 hours!)
What is your advice to someone considering taking part in a peer-review workshop?
Go for it! Not only does receiving feedback improve your writing, but giving feedback improves your writing too! The very act of reading someone else’s work carefully, critically (not in the negative sense), and formulating your thoughts to assess their story under the headings I mentioned above (story on the page, story off the page, language choices, etc) – refines your critical faculties so that you are then better able to do all this for your own work.
On a practical level, how to give feedback is something that has to be learned too. SmokeLong feedback has a video on ‘How to Workshop with SmokeLong’ (it’s in the Welcome section, when you join the workshop) and this is a great place to start. Read the feedback others are giving too – not only is it great for the writer to get different points of view, but we all learn things by reading the feedback others give.
My one feedback trick – I read all the stories on one day: I let them sit in my head overnight and come back the following day to give my feedback. It’s really useful to let your subconscious do part of the work for you.
Anyway, you know what you need to do – join the SmokeLong Fitness workshop! (It’s not a cult, I promise – although it may be an addiction!)
Read “You Almost Never Walk Anywhere With Your Father Now” published in FlashFlood 2024.
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Fiona McKay is the author of the Novella-in-Flash The Top Road, AdHoc Fiction (2023), and the Flash Fiction collection Drawn and Quartered, Alien Buddha Press (2023). She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow in 2023. Her Flash Fiction is in Bath Flash, Lost Balloon, Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Ghost Parachute, trampset and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland with her husband and daughter. She is on X (formerly Twitter) @fionaemckayryan and Bluesky @fionamckay.bsky.social.
