The Writing Battle Winter 2023 Flash Fiction contest is underway.

We had four days to write a 1,000-word story based on three random prompts.

Writing Battle is always a lot of fun, and I’m super happy to jump into the freezing water for a swim!

Unfortunately, I can’t really say much about my prompts, what I wrote, yadda yadda, because of the contest’s terms, BUT, I will update this page after peer reviews are over in March.

Talk soon!

Well, it’s Friday, March 8, 2024, and as the Brits say, I’m feeling pretty chuffed.

First-round peer results have me moving into the finals, the top 64 stories. Yay! A big thank you to everyone who voted for Bonsai!

I look at Writing Battle as an opportunity to showcase forms that wouldn’t otherwise be published in more traditional outlets. I feel WB is a place to take risks and go big—to do something others won’t—to really grab the imagination. My cards were great:

Honestly, though, I didn’t want False Utopia because I felt everyone would want it, and there’d be too much competition; I wanted Buddy Cop and wanted to write about anthropomorphic turtle police officers :).

I desperately wanted to avoid the tropeyness of the genre — I loathed reading/writing a rehash of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Or The Truman Show. Or The Matrix.

Yet, I, too, settled on an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind trope. I couldn’t wrap my brain around anything other than these stories when writing, but I was blown away at the diversity of stories submitted to WB. Hats off. It’s amazing what people came up with.

Bonsai is written in a braided narrative.

I have four interrelated moments in time, and I switch between them, alternating between each braid as the reader moves through the story.

I also wanted to write a story mostly conveyed through sharp, crystallized images surrounded by movement. The story has pulses, and I try to keep the rhythm and ratchet up the tension.

Every paragraph includes a second line space. I intentionally wanted the reader to pause to consider the last image.

I try to intertwine the images in this piece to ferment meaning.

I refer to “chi” (energy) and describe a scene where the protagonist moves undeterred through a crowd of gawking men; a limb of a tree equals her limb; a drink reminds us of a sunrise, as does the Tai Chi form, as does a circle made by a robotic arm … there is always a dawn, a new day; a robotic arm moves like a snake — it slithers and recoils; the trimming of the bonsai tree reflects the act of self-care after experiencing trauma; the Tai Chi is the movement, trying to get the reader to see Mei’s hard work in overcoming her trauma; balance, perfection, harmony — Taoist principles connecting us to the setting, China; the symbology of shaping the bonsai as we might nurture ourselves.

A major theme in this story underlines the strength of women.

Women are powerful; women are not victims; women share the labor of grief; women everywhere work hard to overcome the shit they’re constantly handed.

I am a CIS-gendered male and have never experienced a sexual assault — let alone being accosted on the street — and I can’t possibly know the trauma. However, I wonder if women who have faced assault dream of “pruning” it out of their minds. From there, the horror of the False Utopia is to consider who we are to become if we were to dissect our trauma from our lives. Are we different people? Does trauma shape who we are? Is trauma needed to shape our lives, or can we remove it — pluck it — from our minds and still be the same person? What if all of society did the same?

I’ve written about Cats and Oranges before, and this piece is an exceptionally orangy-cat.

It’s designed to appeal to a female reader (most of Writing Battle’s participants are women, as are the contest winners throughout its history), so I chose a subject matter that might immediately resonate with women. I also wanted to include a puzzle within the lines, begging the reader: if you went back and re-read the piece, can you see connections between words and concepts? It’s a big, fluffy cat that (I’d hoped) anyone would want to empathize with and have in their lap.

But it’s a cat stuffed full of oranges — the art of writing. I wanted this piece to appear airy, brief (like a bonsai), and arrive at exactly 1,000 words. I wanted the braided narrative to appeal to the writer-audience as a technique. I wanted to write a story comprised mostly of images, showing more than telling, and diminishing the role of dialogue. It tries to bend the art, forcing the reader to slow down, reflect, and move on to the next image. Metaphor, analogy, symbology, and associations. I wrote this like a script for a comic book, describing more what I saw and felt than developing a traditional story.

As the picture suggests, I thought this piece was an experiment that’d burn up in the upper atmosphere — that it’d be outright rejected, and I’d score under three points. Instead, I was astounded to see it win all its battles in the first three rounds.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the final results on Sunday! Fingers crossed!

It’s Sunday, March 10, 2024, and the results are in! Bonsai made it to the top 16 out of 390 stories before being eliminated from the competition.

Still, it was a good run for a stab-in-the-dark, wacky-form story. It did much better than I had expected. Oh well — I’m already signed up for the next battle!