What Are the Microflix Writers Awards?

I am delighted to say that my micro-fiction ‘In the Mall’ has been selected as an entry in the Microflix Writers Awards. Halleluja. I’ll find out in August if my story is chosen by filmmakers for adaptation to a short film for the 2019 Microflix Awards. My microlit on the theme of SOUND is available to view on the Microflix SOUND extracts page on the website of Australian short story publisher, Spineless Wonders.

Spineless Wonders 2019 Microflix Writers Awards

The Microflix Awards offered each year aim to reward and value the roles of both the author and the filmmaker in the adaptation process. For this reason we offer both the Microflix Film Awards and the Microflix Author Awards.

The Microflix Writers Awards consists of a $500 cash prize for Best Writing as well as range of prizes such as discounts on writers’ centre memberships and other resources for writers as well as book packages for Highly Recommended and Recommended Writers.

Our panel of jurists will select winners of the Microflix Writers Awards from the pool of finalist films screened at the Microflix Festival.

 

The theme for 2019 is SOUND.

This year, Microflix invites authors to submit microlit texts on the theme of SOUND for adaptation by filmmakers. The texts submitted will be reviewed by microlit specialist and Spineless Wonders’ editor Associate Professor Cassandra Atherton. Submissions will be accepted until 30 April and those selected by Cassandra will be included in the 2019 SOUND Texts section on this website.

Exploring the theme of SOUND

We are looking for prose pieces suitable for film adaptation which riff on the theme of sound. You may wish to reflect on the soundtracks of your life – be that songs and music or sounds from the built environment or the natural world. Your submission may reflect on the absence of sound or it may take us into a world without music. Your approach may be playful, witty, political, philosophical or all of the above.

 

My fingers are crossed.

 

Ground Your Writing in Place

Here is an important writing tip:  ground your writing in a sense of place, whether landscape or cityscape.

How often have you heard someone say of a book they loved:  ‘I felt like I was there.’

 

 

Even if you relocate the poodle tied to a fake-cane chair, the sound of a game of tennis, the table of older men after their regular Sunday match at the café overlooking the tennis courts at Cooper Park that you drank a lemongrass and ginger tea at in Sydney into a café in a story in another state and time, the story will have originality and believability.  ‘But that café was in Sydney, I can’t transport it to Adelaide.’  But you can.  You can have flexibility with specific detail.  The mind is able to transport details, but using actual places that you experienced will give your writing authenticity and truthfulness.  It grounds your work in place, giving life and vitality to your writing, rather than a whole lot of exposition that floats in the air.

 If you don’t create evocative settings, your characters seem to have their conversations in vacuums or in some beige nowhere-in-particular. –  Jerome Stern

Creation of the physical world is as important to your story as action and dialogue.  If your readers can be made to see the hand-knitted socks or the row of vitamins on the kitchen benchtop, the scene becomes alive.  Readers pay attention.  Touch, sound, taste, and smell make readers feel as if their own feet are warm under the cold sheets.

‘Place situates the story in your reader’s mind.  Fiction that seems to happen in no particular place often seems not to take place at all.’ –  Jerome Stern

 

Header Image:  Creative Commons