Author Interview: Amanda Ackroyd – part II

I am sure all you readers have already read and appreciated Amanda’s first short story, and I am thrilled to publish a short-short story of hers, accompanied by a fittingly short-short podcast interview. As always, you can listen to the entire interview, to this segment, download either to your mp3 player, read the transcript and of course, read the story! So, without further ado, after this short-short intro, here are the interview and story:

• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview
• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview-part-II-3-mins

Ilaria: So let’s talk about the other short piece. Because that one, you sent it to me without telling me anything about it, and so I don’t know what it was for. But I understand that it too came from something that had a limit of words, right? It was only 250 words. Is that possible?
Amanda: Yeah, that was just a 250-word story.
Ilaria: Was that part of a competition also?
Amanda: No, that was actually written purely as sort of a discipline piece, taking a sort of an idea and then having to create a story in a complete round in a very tight – within a very tight discipline. So it was purely for my own pleasure. And also it was kind of a lesson in disciplined writing.
Ilaria: What made you decide that you needed to do this experiment in discipline?
Amanda: Well, some of it was – I don’t know if you remember, going back to our school days, but we had an absolutely fantastic English teacher called David Day, who would occasionally make us do précis work. And it took me a while to actually get the hang of doing that, where you would pare and pare and pare something down, without losing the sense of it, into something concise and clear, but still, you know, something that possessed a sort of a creative edge. And I think in terms of my other writing, which is purely something that I absolutely enjoy doing, in terms of just practicing writing, I think it’s very interesting for me to do that. And it’s something that I do practice, is the taking of an idea and boiling it down into something which is sort of sharp and spare. And that’s the reason I do it, really. It teaches me. I learn when I do it. And I quite like the process of going back, back, back and seeing where it was wrong and where I can make it better, but without becoming overly wordy. That’s why I do it.

250-Word Story Number Two

She flashes him the Monroe smile balcony to balcony across long drop and metallic city air. In her twenties he guesses, white teeth, neat nose and giggly eyes, with a chuckle like Betty Boop. She works in the centre as a warden for the old folks.
He beams back and gives her his air force salute, pulling himself tall, feeling his waistband slip a little as he drags in and up.
At night, lying awake, he wonders how her body might feel sliding across the satin sheets which, some days, slink weightily on her retractable line and thinks about running his hand up the unfeasible curve at the back of her waist, her nipples hard and bright as red liquorice torpedoes, her breath warm and puttery like a pony.
By day, he is drawn toward the window, ashamed and pained by this obsessive and desperate checking. He has filled pots with geraniums allowing for prolonged bouts of watering and compulsive dead heading, his mind and eyes never fully on the job.
Does he stand a chance? She looks over often enough and there is definitely invitation in her backward glance as she turns to go inside and once, three years ago she had, at the centre, held his hand, nuzzled her lips against his cheek and whispered, “Happy birthday” as she revealed the cake into which she had, with skilled fingers and faultless symmetry, inserted through the smooth fondant and deep into the yielding sponge, his eighty five candles.

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Tagged as: Fiction, Short story