Keenan Sands, LISP 2025 Flash Fiction Finalist, 'Zen and the Art of Appliance Maintenance'

Can you please tell us about you and your daily life?

I'm never entirely sure how to talk about myself, nor do I make it easy for myself. To me, it means to compress one's entire existence into a handful of tidy paragraphs: you begin editing your own life, deciding which parts are relevant, which parts are merely decoration, and which parts make you sound like a person worth paying attention to. It's a kind of tug-of-war. Ultimately, I want to be sincere, but at the same time I want to be impressive, or at least persuasive in the sense that I am, in fact, living a life, and that by the end of this I will have proven that I am, by some definition, unique.

I think what I struggle with most is the feeling that writing about myself is akin to describing a fictional character loosely based on me, written by someone who isn’t convinced I’m all that compelling. Still, I suppose the polite thing is to try.

So, some stark and unembellished facts, important or otherwise:

·      Born in London, January 1998.

·      Raised in a single-parent household.

·      Still in London; I simultaneously feel trapped and entirely at home here.

·      I wake up around 7:15am.

·      Some mornings start with a mocha.

·      Until recently, I worked as a Production Coordinator for a film VFX company. I am now looking for a change in industries—ideally into publishing.

·      A recent small thing that made me unreasonably annoyed: being in a crowd.

·      Lastly, one day I hope to write something that doesn’t make me nervous and uneasy to talk about.

When and how did you get into writing?

There was never a singular moment or event that suddenly made me a writer. The process was more gradual than that, a slow learning of how to write freely and honestly.

The first real attempt at writing came during sixth form, when I took Film A-level. That was the first time I'd written a complete narrative of significant length and quality—or at least, quality by the standards of the time. From there, I wrote screenplays on and off, never with much discipline, but enough to keep the muscle working.

When I started university, I expanded beyond screenplays, writing essays and meditations on art and media, and enjoyed keeping up the practice.. But it wasn't until the past year that I started writing seriously, and more importantly, that I began writing literary fiction and flash fiction. Flash fiction, in particular, feels like the form I've been trying to find all along because there's something about it that feels so easy to write in a style that's between a public service announcement and a breakdown scribbled on an air sickness bag.

My first published piece of writing, "Obituaries" will be published by Flash Fiction Magazine on January 18th, 2026.

How often do you write? Do you have a writing routine? And what inspires you to write?

I try to write for at least an hour every day, three hours on weekends. There's no set routine I follow; I simply work on one project at a time, whether that's an essay, a screenplay, a collection of flash fiction, or longer literary projects.

Currently, I'm writing a collection of poems, an essay, and a collection of folkloric tales, all for my girlfriend. The folkloric tales have become something I didn't expect them to be—larger and stranger than I ever intended. They're quiet, melancholic tales about selkies and smog-filled fishing towns, foxes collecting fallen stars, the last heron searching for colours to paint a new world to inhabit, and a cartographer helping an owl coax winter from autumn.

I wouldn't say I have a current inspiration for the act of writing itself; I write now because I love writing in all its disciplines. But I know that the works of Charlie Kaufman, Stanley Donwood, Kafka, and Albert Camus were integral in forming my desire to write, and I hope to produce something to that standard one day.

How does it feel to have your work recognised?

As silly as it is to say, it makes me really proud of myself. It's definitely one of the biggest highlights of my year. I think every now and then in life, you need to be able to do or accomplish something that genuinely surprises yourself. And the best thing is that it pushes me to write more, expand on more ideas, and to keep challenging myself. Because despite all the doubt that comes with putting work into the world, there's something rather affirming in knowing it connected. The work leaves your hands and becomes something more than you intended.

What's the best and most challenging part of writing?

The best thing is seeing something come to life that didn't exist before, whether that be a narrative, a character, or an image that was nothing until you wrote it into being. Most often, whatever I write ends up sitting on my computer, and so the end result for me isn't tangible in the same way that a potter can hold their finished vase. But there's still evidence of creation, something that now extends beyond you, that exists independently in the world. A stranger reads what you've made and finds themselves in it, or finds something you didn't know you'd put there. Even when you doubt whether it's any good, even when you're convinced it's failed, there's still the undeniable fact that it exists now. It didn't before, and now it does, and that matters in ways you can't always measure or really understand.

The most challenging thing is the second-guessing. There'll be days where I'll be struck by an idea of such beauty, an idea I tell myself will be personal, sincere, and honest but also relatable and touching to everyone. I'll rush out a few pages; they're messy, but in the rush and excitement of the moment, it's easily forgiven. I can always go back and clean it up, and by the end of the day I'll look back at what I've written with such pride. Then the next day arrives. And as I return to my work, I'm both horrified and ashamed. I can now only see its flaws, its clichéd, banal writing. The obvious and tired tropes stick out like a sore thumb, and what's worse: it's not even my writing; it's a poor imitation of some greater writer I'm influenced by. It’s then abandoned and left forgotten; all its possibilities, no matter how small and insignificant, are second-guessed into failure. That, for me anyway, is the majority of my experiences with writing.

How did you develop the idea for your LISP-selected story? Is there a story behind your story? And, how long have you been working on it?

The idea came from my own commonplace book. I’d never heard of such a thing until I read Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood’s commonplace book, Fear Stalks the Land. After reading it, I wanted to create something of the sort. So I committed to opening a small notebook every evening, no matter what, and forcing myself to write at least a page. It didn't have to be coherent—just random little ideas and thoughts that surfaced in those five minutes. What I found was that as I wrote, some loose narrative, feeling, or idea would begin to emerge. It was freestyle writing in the truest sense: whatever word or phrase popped into my mind got jotted down without any editorial judgment.

After filling the notepad, I sat down with months of this scribbled nonsense and sifted through it. Most of it was unusable or downright bad, but I tried to find concrete ideas, themes, or characters, that were really more like silhouettes than anything. I noted down everything I figured could be developed into a story, large or small. One such was this. It was rough, really rough, but in a good way. Truthfully, I don't know if I prefer the more polished, coherent version or those initial raw and strange strands of thought that perhaps feel more me. Regardless, I tried to distil what was happening beneath the surface and find a way to make it more digestible and narrative-driven without losing its core. The process didn't take long; I think a few days to expand the idea, a few more to work through two additional drafts. I stopped at the third draft, the point where it felt publishable enough. Ultimately, regardless of which version I prefer, this is what is now in the world, and what I am judged on.

Could you please give us a few tips on writing?

1.     Write honestly, and for yourself.

2.     Whatever you first write will be bad; it can't help but be. Don't let that put you off. Push through.

3.     Write whenever you can, however little. Something is always better than nothing.

4.     Consume constantly. Watch films, read books, play games, engage with stories in any form. You’ll begin to recognise what resonates with you.

5.     Don't wait until you know what you're trying to say. Often the best writing comes from following a feeling or image you don't fully understand yet. Trust the uncertainty and hope that the meaning will reveal itself in the process.

6.     Strip everything back until you reach bone. Remove every clever turn of phrase and every flourish that makes you feel like a writer. What’s left, the raw and uncomfortable, and plain, is usually closer to the truth than everything you removed.

7.     Lastly, I believe that we should work towards writing that makes us kinder, braver, and more capable of love.

What's the best thing and the most challenging thing about competitions?

Validation. That's the best thing, though I feel immediately compelled to undercut this with self-aware disclaimers about ego and the arbitrariness of competitions. But there it is. Someone—several someones, in fact—looked at what I'd made and decided it had value. It’s reassuring to hear that something you made was worth noticing. Does LISP's recognition make my work objectively better? No. Do I care about this rational truth? Also no. I will accept the validation gratefully, guilt and all, because while I desperately want to say that I write 'solely for myself', I also know that external approval provides a dopamine hit that feels good. It’s reassuring to have external voices saying you've done something right. Or at least, something worth noticing.

But the desire for validation is also the most challenging thing about competitions. The moment you think about submitting, your mindset shifts, whether you want it to or not. Suddenly writing becomes about binary winning and losing rather than simply making something and putting it out there. I always think the correct mindset about submitting is to see if any of your writing connects with someone, and if it does, all the better. But it's easy to fall into the mindset of winning, or at the very least, wanting to be recognised. And that wanting corrupts the purity of the work. You start writing with one eye on what might succeed, what might catch a judge's attention, rather than what's honest or necessary. It instead becomes something to be measured, judged, validated, or rejected.

Lastly, do you recommend the writers submit to LISP?

Yes, absolutely. In nearly every instance, the easiest and safest choice for a writer is not to submit, because putting yourself and your work into the world requires vulnerability. It is comforting to keep it close, unseen and unjudged, but it also denies others the chance of recognising their own struggles reflected in you and your art. Because maybe your work won't be wildly successful, but maybe someone does read it, someone lost and alone, and they are touched by it, and they feel heard, understood, and valued. And so, by depriving the world of your work, you will have also deprived others of the solace of recognising themselves and their struggles within you and your art, and the world is a little lonelier for it. So submit, because whatever you have to offer will be enough for someone else.