Nobody understood this could be a thing, until they saw jumpers at a certain height, five hundred eleven feet, tumble upward. Unlike fallers, upfurlers didn’t make spectators jerk their shoulders in revulsion or crunch up faces to stave off crying.Seeing upfurlers made the emergency responders slack-jawed the way a miracle can. Like if you woke up and had the 20-inch curling fingernails: it made no sense, but you’d seen pictures and here they were. Philippe Petit kind of lay down in the air up there once, but this?There was one woman in a skirt suit, hounds-tooth-checked, who spun like a saucer without rising or falling. Her hair swished behind her, swish, swish, like a sickle. They call her Frisbee now, but her name is Andrea Masterson Giacobazzi, and whatever magic, whatever science, whatever god held her spinning like a barefoot plate, dispersed when the first tower fell, creating voids. Floor…

I’d like to share some ideas on beginnings that occurred to me after a recent run through the slush pile.

REM wrote a great song called Begin the Begin on their album, Life’s Rich Pageant. It started: Birdie in the hand for life’s rich demand.

A rich, demanding opening is extremely critical to flash fiction. I don’t think you can overestimate the importance of the first few sentences or the opening paragraph. After reading a dozen of these in a row, they can accumulate similar issues. Stories with strong openers rise to the top. It’s a striking difference. Trumpets have been known to sound.

Here are two things that seem to go wrong with many starts:

• Lack of urgency
• Lack of clarity

These qualities are often inherent or implied. You can’t always just insert urgency here, but many stories without it act as if you can simply insert reader…

Do you want to learn about writing?

You’re in the right place.

This is a free writing course for complete beginners, or those who have written a bit but want to go back to the start – because they know they need to get better.

Now is exactly the right time for you to give writing a go. Your usual excuses – mostly likely – no longer apply. You’re indoors. You have a bit more time than you normally do. Perhaps a lot more time. In this course, I will try and help you put that time to the best use.

In 10 Lessons, I will take you through the basics of writing short stories – just as if you were sitting among the other beginning writers in the Creative Writing workshop I run at Birkbeck College, London.

I’ve been teaching at Birkbeck over 10 years. Over that time,