If It Ain't Baroque - An Interview with David Gaffney

David Gaffney's More Sawn-Off Tales, released this month by Salt Publishing, is a series of surreal, often macabre and occasionally wistful stories, all clocking in at exactly 150 words. Within its pages, Gaffney discusses what you can learn from tossing a breakable object towards your girlfriend, the disturbing effect techno music can have on a herd of alpacas, and how you can really get to know someone by breaking into their flat and x-raying their belongings. Mr Gaffney also performs in Les Malheureux, alongside Sarah-Clare Conlon. Their live appearances feature many of the stories included here, recited by Ms Conlan over an end-of-the-pier organ accompaniment. You can read my review of the book here; below, David talks to us about the appeal of flash fiction, Rachmaninov and appearing on Britain's Got Talent.

What draws you to flash fiction as a form?

I like the fact that you can create something small enough to walk all around and have a proper look at, see how all the components work together. You can take it apart and put it back together it again fairly easily and you can change it completely see what it looks like if you build it upside down, inside out. For me writing micro-prose is like experimenting on generation after generation of fruit flies, endlessly searching for advantageous, or even just fascinating, mutations.

Do you think that enthusiasm for flash fiction is growing at the moment? And if so, why?

If a loud hooter blasted out in the city centre every time a book of flash fiction was sold, it wouldn’t be all that annoying. Fiction readers generally still prefer to be immersed in the alternative world of a novel for several weeks that to be jerked in and out of weird flash fiction universes every 3 minutes.

Flash fiction is quite suited to performance - do you do anything different when writing for the page instead of stage?

I really don’t wrote with the aim of performing, but when I do perform my text pieces I do change the odd word and delete the odd sentence. You can say things with inflection and nuance when you read aloud; a word which looks banal on the page can be freighted with heavy meaning by the dropping of an eyebrow or the lifting a shoulder. Not that I'm any good at that, I just say some words louder than others and lift my arm in the air every now and again.

Your characters show a tendency to over-analyse. Is that something you see in your own life?

I over analyse about 32% of my time, the other 68% I analyse, but not in an obsessive way, just in a normal way. Such as if I am at the bus stop and the next bus that comes along is an Evans bus and I have a Magic bus pass, then should I get on and pay? If I do, it might turn out that a famous literary agent gets an Evans bus every day - maybe he has an Evans weekly pass – and I could leave one of my manuscripts on the seat next to him. For the sake of £1.60 I might have missed that opportunity. Everything that happens, happens for a reason I guess. To some of my characters the world appears to have been set up solely for them and is full of meanings and lures and traps and messages that only they can understand, Isn’t this normal, though?

How do you decide which of the short stories to perform with your band, Les Malheureux?

Actually we tend to go for ones we have visuals for, which is important for Le Malheureux. They have to be short and they need to be easily understood when delivered over a Casio groove.

Can you tell us anything about your experiences auditioning for Britain's Got Talent?

We thought there would be performing gerbils and talking vacuum cleaners but then we realised we were at the pre-auditions. Yes, I know, it's hard to imagine acts that are so bad they don’t even get to the auditions, but come and see us, because we are one of them. At the pre-auditions you just go into a private room with one researcher.  The researcher who saw us is now having Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and is making good progress. Apparently she will soon be speaking again.

Which current authors do you most enjoy reading?

I'm reading Jane Yeh, a poet, at the moment and I like Magnus Mills a lot, and a Canadian poet called Helen Guri.

Do you listen to anything while you write?

I can only listen to instrumental music when I write - so some electronica and some classical stuff – Rachmaninov's vespers is a favourite (a load of monks chanting)  as is an album I have called Baroque guitar. If it ain't baroque, I always say...