We at Kill Your Darlings love short fiction, so we’re pretty thrilled to present three masters of the form.

Tomorrow’s Short Story Masterclass at the Emerging Writers Festival includes a range of workshops, presentations and panels with writers and editors. But for those of you who can’t make it (or are considering going) here you’ll find a taste of the sort of advice and expertise on offer. So go forth and write more short stories! Finish those you’ve started! We’d love to read them.

Elizabeth Flux is a freelance writer and editor-in-chief of Writers Bloc. She is about to start a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship to work on a series of essays and is the winner of the 2017 Feminartsy Fiction Prize.

Melanie Cheng is a writer of fiction and non-fiction from Melbourne. Her debut collection Australia Day will be officially released in July.

Laura Elizabeth Woollett is a Perth-born, Melbourne-based author. Her first novel The Wood of Suicides was published in 2014. Her short story collection The Love of a Bad Man is out now.

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Meaghan Dew (KYD): Hi and welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings podcast. I’m Meaghan Dew and today we’re featuring the Emerging Writers’ Festival Short Story Masterclass. So if you need something to listen to between events or you couldn’t make it down to Melbourne for the festival, here’s a good chance to benefit from the combined wisdom of Elizabeth Flux, Laura Elizabeth Woollett and Melanie Cheng. We’ll start with Liz, telling us about her experience editing short fiction. 

Elizabeth Flux: So I was previously the editor of Voiceworks magazine for two years so we worked with writers under the age of twenty-five who wrote fiction, nonfiction and poetry and worked with them for about one or two weeks to get them to the point of publication. So most of my fiction editing experience is from that, as well as swapping work with friends, talking about that and also working on my own fiction pieces, so…mixed bag.

KYD: Is there something particular that you look for when you’re reading a piece for the first time?

EF: So the main thing is to read it all the way through, because a piece can seem great at the beginning and then really fall off at the end, or vice versa – it can seem like it has no potential at the beginning and then suddenly come through with something amazing that’s worth pursuing. So reading something all the way through, finding what is at the heart of it and then drawing that out and then working on it.

KYD: You must come across a lot of pieces while you’re reading that have potential but perhaps might need a little bit more work than a publication can dedicate to it. Where do you draw that line, and does it change depending on what sort of work you’re doing? 

EF: Yeah, so it depends on the publication you’re working for. If you’re doing something that has, like, quick turnarounds, within a week, that factors in – so first thing is time. Most pieces are salvageable in some ways– it’s very rare