At the behest of a friend, I served as the fiction judge for this year’s South Warwickshire Literary Festival. I thought it would be fun, and it was. I read 136 flash-fiction stories — defined in the competition guidelines as 800 words or fewer— and I enjoyed them all. The challenging literary form of flash fiction can produce breathtaking little gems.

But which story was The Best? I winnowed them down to 51, then 18, then 5, and created a sort of spreadsheet to pick the winner based on criteria such as pacing, sensory details, dialogue, character arc, depth of conflict, motivation, emotional urgency, strength of voice, and storytelling technique. The tally was close, but a winner emerged.

In my Judge’s Report (you can read it here, halfway down the page), I discuss what matters to me the most when I write and when I read.

Decades ago, I encountered the speech by William Faulkner accepting the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, and he spoke of “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. … the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

Of the 136 stories I read, the overwhelming majority dealt with those verities and truths. William Faulkner, you can rest in peace. (Your typewriter, shown in the photo, is still revered.) As proven by a little contest held in a corner of a shire in England, good writing endures.