mrsdarcy_largeI have a writing colleague who has a theory that all this flash fiction stuff is distracting writers from producing more substantial work. I can see his point – I think – but I’d like to point out that there is a flipside to this. Let me explain.

I’ve always had a problem with writing long stories. I’m not entirely sure what the problem is: whether it’s a short attention span, commitment phobia or simple laziness. But it essentially boils down to the fact that I’m comfortable in a number of fairly well-defined word-count ranges: 140 characters (for tweets), around 250 words (microfiction), 800 words (flash), 1200 words (two-act short) or 2400 words (three-act short). Almost everything I have ever written fits into one of those slots.

This has meant that I’ve never managed to write anything remotely full-length without grinding to a halt a couple of thousand words in. But a couple of years or so ago I had an idea – one that I thought really had legs – and I really, really wanted to write it. So I put together a prologue of around 900 words (within that flash ballpark) and I thought it set the story up nicely. But that still left the problem of what to do about the novel itself – and once more I was stuck.

The answer came to me when I was watching a DVD of the excellent BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House”. The revelation of this production (scripted by the great Andrew Davies) was to treat the story essentially as a soap opera, with rapid cutting between several interlinked storylines. And I realised that I could make use of this approach myself, by structuring my book as a sequence of short, snappy, flash-length self-contained episodes – say five to a chapter. This also tied in nicely to some advice I’d been given by another writer friend of mine, Kate Allen, that you should always try to set up at least five plot strands in the opening chapter of a novel.

And that unlocked the problem: I now saw the book as a series of flashes, interleaving with each other along a broad story arc. So I began writing, and it fairly zipped along. It looked good. I was happy. Unfortunately, however, at this point an entirely different problem asserted itself, a problem that may become obvious when I reveal the title of my book – “Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens” – and explain the high concept behind it – essentially a sequel to “Pride and Prejudice” with added extra-terrestrials. My big idea suddenly looked as if it was being overtaken. By zombies.

Now if I had finished the complete book a year or so ago, I would have been laughing all the way to the bank. But I hadn’t, and it was clear that by the time the book was anywhere near finished it would still look as if it was another wannabe Austen mash-up that was arriving particularly late to the party. So I stopped writing and turned my attention back to writing short stories, flashes and even the occasional poem.

But good ideas don’t go away, and I still desperately wanted to get my story read. And one day towards the end of last year Dickens came to my rescue again. I suddenly remembered that he used to serialise his novels first before they were published. Could I do the same? I already had a blog that was gathering a decent-sized readership, and I had a reasonable following as @jonpinnock on Twitter. I reckoned that I might just have a big enough internet footprint to get critical mass if I set up “Mrs Darcy …” on its own web site, running one of the flash-length episodes twice a week.

So I bought http://www.mrsdarcyvsthealiens.com and registered the Twitter account @RealMrsDarcy. @MrsDarcy had been grabbed already and in any case I think that @RealMrsDarcy has more of a celeb feel to it. I also felt it needed an attention-grabbing picture to go with it, so I tried my hand at a bit of vaguely steampunk artwork. I showed this to my colleagues in my local writers’ group and one of them, Dave Weaver, immediately came back, without prompting, with the vastly improved version that you can see here.

Thus it was that on December 19th, 2009, I published the prologue to “Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens”, thus launching the project onto an unsuspecting world. Unbelievably, I didn’t realise until just before I did this how significant the date was: December 19th is Jane Austen’s birthday. If ever I believed in fate …

I have no idea how successful this venture is going to be, but for the moment it scarcely matters. The important thing is that it’s out there and that people are reading it and (apparently) enjoying it. The next challenge is to increase the size of that readership – which is, of course, largely what this post is all about. So the best way to finish is of course to give you a link to “Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens”: hope you enjoy it!

Jonathan Pinnock was born in Bedfordshire, and – despite having so far visited over forty other countries – has failed to relocate any further away than the next-door and equally unexceptional county of Hertfordshire. He is married with two children, several cats and a 1961 Ami Continental jukebox. His work has won several prizes, shortlistings and longlistings, and he has been published in such diverse publications as Litro, Every Day Fiction and Necrotic Tissue. His unimaginatively-titled yet moderately interesting website may be found at www.jonathanpinnock.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at @jonpinnock.