Flash Fiction Chronicles

I had just finished a flash and read it. It seemed familiar. Then it hit me. It has the same format as many of my other stories. Going through my work I discovered I had a set outline I would use for my work. The story goes like this: 300 or so words of exposition or character description, then a character will have a 100 word speech that will be related to the theme of the story and finally about 50 or so words to finish out the tale.

I told my wife my discovery and she looked dumbfounded that it took me this long to realize it.

Those of us who write flash are easy targets of repetition. Our output are 500 or 1000 word stories, so we tend to write a lot of these little suckers. You can’t blame yourself for falling into a form that has worked before. We have a good idea, an interesting character, a cool final line, so how do you cobble it all together, with the set format. Be careful. This will lead to the characters and the situations becoming set as well.

Sometimes this set format is the perfect vehicle, but most of the times its just expediency. For me, I will use the format on the first draft, but try to shake it up on additional drafts. One of my most popular stories on Every Day Fiction is “Wing Mending.” It started out as a much longer piece that followed the pattern of many=20 of my stories. I just left it in the notebook for a year and then worked on it. I cut out everything but the last paragraph and slightly expanded it and that became the work that you can read on Every Day Fiction.

I suppose the most important thing you can do is write in the easiest and fastest method and then be critical when the draft is done. Ask yourself, is this like everything else I have done? If the answer is yes, then figure out how to change it, or alter it or just leave it in the notebook. Also, read your older work, be aware of what you have done, find the patterns in your own stories. Don’t be annoyed when you find patterns, just don’t get stuck in the rut, write yourself out of it.

Dave McPherson lives in Worcester, Ma. He is a co-editor of Ballard Street Poetry Journal. He has been published in several on line and print publication for his flash fiction, if we must call it anything. He is a former slam poet and has performed across New England.

For the last few years I’ve been teaching a class in writing the micro fiction story at the UCLA Extension.  I had wanted to teach a flash fiction class but someone was already running one. I was very attracted to these short forms for many of the reasons that contributors to Flash FictionChronicles have put forward:  With such a small piece of literary real estate, what can you say?  What can you do?  What are the limits and boundaries of storytelling? 

In the late Jerome Stern’s Micro Fiction anthology, I found my model and the class:  250 word stories (exclusive of title) and not a word more. In my classes, I’ve come across some of the best writing I’ve ever encountered. 

But why does it work?

My conclusion is structure. Micro fiction stories don’t need any.  Let me restate.  Near the beginning, I introduce Janet Burroway’s notion of the conventional contemporary short story structured as an inverted check mark which I draw on the board.  Then I erase the conflict and the resolution portions, and leave only the crisis moment.  That’s all the structure you need.  Or I draw the check mark again and after erasure leave only conflict.

Or a third time, all that remains is resolution.  I tell the participants to use any of those possibilities as their structural element and they getit, immediately.  With a singular focus on only a portion of that conventional structure, they bring an amazing intensity and attentiveness to language as a result.  They’ve brought me stories every bit as inventive and as strong as the ones featured in the Stern anthology.

There’s one more element needed to make the pieces something other than mere anecdote.  Each writer needs to find a way to set their moment of a story within a continuum.  That is, this has happened before and it will happen again. Given that sense of continuity, the stories resonate at a muchdeeper level.  They assert their “story-ness.”

If you’re stuck for how to approach these brief stories, try the method. I think you’ll surprise yourself.

Ian Randall Wilson is the author of two story collections and the novella, Great Things Are Coming. His work has appeared in many journals including The Gettysburg Review and the North American Review.  His micro fiction stories have appeared in the Vestal Review and have been anthologized.  He is on the fiction faculty at the UCLA Extension where he teaches classes in the short story and the micro fiction story. He is writing a cell phone novel which can be found at: http://mobilenovel.blogspot.com.

 Dialogue is the workhorse of the novel or short story. It provides plot advancement, character development, and action or movement. In other words, it brings the story to life.

 A character blurting out information that advances the plot is far more interesting than a long narrative description.

 Through dialogue we discover character traits about the various people who populate our stories. How a person speaks and acts while talking says a lot more about him or her than mere words.

 And dialogue provides real time action. You are in the room with the characters as they speak. You’re eavesdropping or right in the middle of the conversation. Or the character might be speaking directly to you. 

 In order to know how a character speaks or acts, or even the words he uses, you must get to know your characters…intimately.

 First, make the characters seem real to you as well as to your readers. Let them speak to you and trust them. Most writers will tell you they actually “hear” their characters, and it is that particular “voice” that makes a character unique.

 Write a biography of your main characters, whether it’s a paragraph or a page, describe who they are, where they came from, their background. If you are having difficulty, start with a “stock character” straight from central casting. If you want a villain, pick a character from some old movie, like Edward G. Robinson, and than make him your own creation. You can always find a picture in a magazine that fits the type of person you want in a particular role. Cut the picture out and devise a background for him or her.

 Add character traits (Steve Brewer’s Buddy character in Lonely Street talks with a lisp), physical attributes (Sue Ann Jaffarian’s Odelia Grey is a plus-size paralegal), and limitations (Jeffery Deaver’s quadriplegic cop, Lincoln Rhyme, in The Bone Collector) to make each memorable.

 Even the name you give a character can make a difference. A man called Ivan is probably Russian. A bouncer in a bar would more convincingly be called Buster rather than Orville. Christa Faust named her former X-rated movie star Angel Dare in her novel, Money Shot.

 Avoid creating a cast of characters with a run of names like: Mary, Margaret, Martha, Maggie, Maisie, Millie, Molly, Mona, Myrna, Mildred, and Mergatroid…unless you are doing it for fun. Make a list of each proper name used (cities and streets, too) to make sure you aren’t beginning each name with the same letter, or you might end up with a sentence like this: Sadie and Sue from Sarasota spent Saturdays working at the soda shop on Sycamore Street. 

 Readers will respond emotionally or viscerally to characters who have flaws, so make them vulnerable (Sherlock Holmes’ 7% addiction to cocaine), multifaceted (Riggs in Lethal Weapon), and psychologically different (Norman Bates in Psycho).

 But most importantly, give each character who trods the pages of your story a goal. Without a purpose, why have the character in your story? And the person who has the strongest goal is your villain, the person who wants to stop your protagonist from achieving their goal.

 One more thing about character, make at least one person in your story likeable: someone to identify with and cheer for. And remember, a character too perfect, too clever, too humble, or too pitiful isn’t likeable.

 If you know your characters, you can find their individual voice, even if the character isn’t human. For instance, Bruce Cook (writing as Brant Randall) in his book, Blood Harvest, gives voices to both a dog and a crow, and both are done superbly.

 Dialogue is the illusion of conversation. Eavesdrop on people, from the couple chatting in the grocery line to someone on his or her cell phone. Unless they’re planning the next Brinks robbery, the conversation will probably be ordinary at best, and more likely – boring.

If you know your characters well, you can get inside their skin (write that biography) and discover their words and actions. Dialogue performs a function like a costume, and if written well, it enhances your characters, advances the plot, and gets the reader up close and personal with the people you have created.

Where a character was “born,” went to school, and his neighborhood will dictate his speech pattern, whether it’s a Southern drawl, a French accent, or a gangsta rapper from the ‘hood.’

Good dialogue always adds something to the plot, whether it builds tension, imparts needed information to the other characters (and the reader), or even slows down the pace when you need a breather.

Dialogue also sets the stage by creating mood (a whispered message) or sets the tone (a knock-down drag-out verbal brawl). And dueling dialogue between opposing characters brings the reader right into the action. But note, as the argument gets more heated, the length of the sentences gets shorter.

After you have written your scene, read it aloud or have someone else read it to you, or use one of the many software programs that reads your work back to you. It will make a huge difference. You will hear things you didn’t know you wrote (both good and bad) and you will pick up the redundancies and misused words. And you just might find out how good you are at writing dialogue.

Make a few of your characters sound different by giving them an accent (Did y’all get another dawg?), a speech pattern (like, ya know, a teenager’s, like, special way of, like, speaking), an interesting phrase unique to one person (Who loves ya, baby?), and word choices (Fiddle-de-dee).

Let your dialogue work harder by adding action tags to the usual he said/she said. Which is more interesting: “Go ahead and date my ex-wife,” he shouted. vs. “Go ahead, date my ex-wife,” he said, slamming his fist into the wall. Or have a character twirl her hair (bored), yawn (really bored), or grind a cigarette into someone’s hand (shall we say, piqued?) Even not saying something speaks volumes: “I knew you wouldn’t care if I left you,” he said. She bit her lip.

Just make sure somebody (a character or the reader) learns something new during any conversation. If there is no purpose to the dialogue, rewrite it or dump it.

Let your dialogue work for you. It has a lot to say.

A former private detective and once a reporter for a small weekly newspaper, Gayle Bartos-Pool has one published book, Media Justice, and several short stories in anthologies, LAndmarked for Murder and Little Sisters Volume 1. She is currently the Speakers Bureau Director for Sisters in Crime/Los Angeles, and a member of Mystery Writers of America. Her latest short story appears in the anthology, Dying in a Winter Wonderland, which was voted one of the Top Ten of Softcover Books as selected by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association (IMBA) of 2008.

The piece of art pictured below by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller was commissioned by Modern Art Oxford and the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. 5,000 books glued together as bricks to make a house you can step inside. The smell inside is wonderful, of starch and paper. But I wanted to take it apart and READ.

I recently wrote four pieces of short fiction, to a deadline. I’d pledged to write three pieces within three hours. All four stories were written to prompts provided by a writer’s forum. The prompts were excellent, thought-provoking and meaty. The forum was pledged to write a total of 100 stories within two days and it achieved that target. Each story was posted anonymously and then commented on by the other writers. For each story you posted you had to comment on at least three stories by others. Great discipline, because reading is a vital part of writing and critting hones skills like nothing else.

The process worked very well, smooth and seamless. It was the first time I’d taken part in a challenge at this particular forum, which includes some stellar writers, and I’ll admit I was nervous. But once I’d pledged to take part, I relaxed that part of my brain where I keep a tight lid on the voices that are always bubbling under waiting for me to pay attention to the stories they want to tell. I let three voices rise to the surface and let these three check the prompt lists until they found something that suited. Then I wrote. The fourth voice came direct from the prompt itself which was of course how I was meant to approach the whole exercise.

It was interesting to see how other writers critiqued the stories, not just mine but everyone’s. These are serious writers, many of them award-winning. They had serious comments to make about the stories posted at the forum. What interested me most was a tendency to read the stories not as tales being told to them but as tales they would have told differently. They read, in other words, as writers rather than readers. I went back and checked my own critiques. I did the same. We were nearly all of us reading in this way, seeing a story we would like to tell and nudging the author in that direction. This is not to say that the comments weren’t useful and constructive. They absolutely were. But I made a mental note to put my writer’s hat aside and read as a reader, keeping my own ego out of it. (I mean ego in the true sense rather than as vanity, although god knows I suffered some serious pen-envy reading some of those stories!)

All in all, a great day’s work. I thoroughly enjoyed the writing, the reading and the taking part. I highly recommend the exercise, to writers everyone, especially those seeking to hone flash fiction skills. 

Sarah Hilary is a frequent contributor to Every Day Fiction  (Lolita’s Lynch Mob is an all-time favorite) and on other flash sites around the web.  Check out her blog, Crawl Space, where she lists all her online writing and then check out her other brilliant FLASHES of fiction.  Pick Ugly, was one of the Commended entries to the Leaf Books Nano Fiction Contest 2009, and will be published in their anthology.

I’ve never considered myself much of a flash fiction author, but looking at my catalog of published work, I find a handful of them there, and in most cases my stories are in good company. I’ve always felt that writing good flash was a bit beyond my reach.

Truly talented authors manage to create a perfect blend of plot, detail, and emotion into something that can stay with the reader for hours, days, even years. Luckily, I was ignorant enough to think it was as easy as it looks–lucky for me, not the poor editors who might have read the attempts–because if I had realized how difficult it really is, I don’t think I would have even bothered trying.

A typical contemporary short story of about 2000-3000 words has plenty of breathing room.  Heck, you can even fit a couple of character arcs in there if you really want to. Now here’s the thing that amazes me, a skilled author can do that same thing in 500 words.

How do they do it?

Gosh, I couldn’t tell you for sure; I’m still trying to figure it all out. But I do have some suspicions based on some general observations of successful fiction.

Like any other type of creative endeavor you intend to share with an audience, the first and foremost rule is:

Be engaging.

When you engage the reader deeply enough that they read on, you’ve succeeded as author. If you don’t capture the reader’s attention, then unfortunately you have failed. Sorry, try again. That being said, engaging is a subjective thing, but majority wins. Artistically successful authors don’t pander, but they aren’t spewing out complete gibberish either, right?

The next thing I’ve noticed is flash fiction, like any fiction, must contain conflict. I think scope is important here; flash is often about capturing a brief period of time.

For example:

A picture of your dog: boring
A picture of my dog: boring
A picture of one doggy-bone: boring

A picture of your dog, my dog and one tasty doggy-bone: a flash story.

Without conflict you don’t have a story, without conflict you won’t engage the reader. It seems reasonable to to keep the scope as tight as possible. Of course you’ve got plenty of room to build some implicit meaning with dramatic symbolism; perhaps one of those dogs is a mangy old stray, and the other is frilly pampered pet.

Stated inversely, very few authors could pull off a flash fiction that encompassed the complexities of say, World War II. Then again some might be able to. Maybe you’re one of them; it’s certainly worth a try. To paraphrase Hemingway, big emotion doesn’t necessarily come from a big story. Personally, I’m not going to worry about big until I’ve mastered small.  Simple is beautiful.

After the scope of the conflict is properly sized, I think the most important thing is detail. Flash fiction is not only about capturing the perfect moments, it’s about capturing the imperfect moments as well. Imperfections make it real, imperfections make it engaging . . . does that stray have fleas? I hope so, because fleas are creepy and crawly and gross. And I like that. As a reader, minutia is what puts me in the story, it’s a form of equity the writer builds, it can carry me over the rough spots later on.

Often a good piece of flash has a punchline of sorts. Was there a third dog hiding in the bushes that bounded out and stole the bone while the first two were fighting? Yes? Good, I didn’t see that coming. Truth be told twist endings are actually much more advanced technique than they  first appear. As a lifelong bibliophile I’ve seen it all; it’s hard to surprise me. I suspect a lot of readers feel this way. As a new writer, I’m probably not really clever enough to pull this off yet, but I don’t let that stop me from trying. Practice makes perfect.

Finally, I think word choice is so much more critical in flash. Short stories have a small amount of leeway–tone and theme have a little wiggle room . . . novels even more so, but in a flash story every single word should be meticulously considered. The right word, in the right place can save you a whole sentence elsewhere. But I stress right, avoid using words you wouldn’t use in conversation with a fellow writer.  An esoteric, discommodious, multisyllabic word might leave your reader . . . annoyed. Try to avoid that.

So that’s all I know about flash fiction, and a good bit of what I know about story telling in general.  As you can see, it would easily fit into a thimble with plenty of room  to spare. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing your flash stories.

Bosley Gravel, eclectic hack writer, was born in the Midwest, and came of age in Texas and southern New Mexico.  His fiction focuses on the absurdly tragic, and the tragically absurd. He likes good black coffee, nightmares, Billie Holiday, and that hour just before the sun comes up.  His genre fiction has been podcasted at Well Told Tales, The Dunesteef, and published at Macabre Cadaver, Reflections Edge, Tales from the Moonlit Path and many others.  He also rather shyly admits to a hacking out a few literary short stories which have appeared in Shalla Magazine, The Deepening, The Fabulist, and Every Day Fiction.  He has a gothic horror novella coming out on March 15th 2009, in ebook format produced by Shadowfire Press, and has placed a story in the upcoming Dead Bait Anthology by Severed Press.  Check his site for links to these stories and more, plus reprints released under the Creative Commons License.

Last post, I mentioned how important a tool a writers’ critiquing group can be. Today, I want to talk about another important tool that involves participation by others.

Hearing others read your writing.

My son and I wrote a screenplay — Black Rock — last year. He works for a film production company in Ohio, and so he brought a bunch of actors together to read through the script.

I’m almost three thousand miles away, in Seattle, so I wasn’t able to be there, but he filmed the get-together and promised to send me a DVD once he had it edited.

That was last July; we’ve both were busy and so I figured it would get here when it got here. It showed up in the mail one Tuesday in October. I watched it that night.

Hearing your words read aloud can be enlightening for a fiction writer; for a screenwriter, it is what it is all about. But for any writer it can jerk the mental plugs from your ears. You get to hear someone else’s interpretation of what you intended, you get to hear what flies and what falls flat, and sometimes you get to hear the unexpected.

I sat through that reading, making notes, trying to filter out my own feelings and, when a scene did fall flat, to determine whether it was the fault of what we wrote or the fault of a poor reading. That happens; it’s one of the handicaps of working with unpaid volunteers.

It was during a free-for-all discussion after the reading that the unexpected occurred. The actors were offering their thoughts on character motivation and plot weaknesses, and then one of them said, “Well, it’s all about fathers, isn’t it?”

My son was there with them, on the screen, and I was thousands of miles and months away, watching, but we both said, “What?” at the same time.

“It’s about how fathers influence the actions of their children, particularly when they’re not around,” the actor said. And then he began to tick off points on his fingers.

“Frank and his dead father; Liz and her rich and doting daddy; Bob Shavers and his retarded son. Even the surrogate father relationship between Frank and the newspaper editor. It runs all through the thing.”

What he was talking about was theme, and he was right; we just hadn’t seen it; at least not that particular theme. The theme we identified, and had woven throughout the script, was that a child grows into the adult they will become as a result of a series of situations in which they are put under pressure.

Theme is the universal truth behind a story, and it’s one of the three elements that have to be developed, as a story unfolds, if an author is to succeed. The other two, of course, are character and plot.

Of the three, theme may be the most difficult to examine. In most cases, an author comes to a short story, novel or screenplay with some idea of her characters’ identities and what it is that will happen to them. But one of the quickest ways to kill a good story is to begin it with a theme in mind. Unless you are really, really good, you run the risk of preaching; no one wants to read a sermon or a lecture.

But as a story progresses naturally, theme will show up as a conflict of values or morals. It most likely will be a strong opinion that the author holds that comes out in the mouths of her characters. And it almost always presents itself as a recurring symbol.

When I called my son, after watching the edited DVD, and asked him why he hadn’t told me about the father theme, I could hear his grin.

“I wanted you to see it for yourself,” he said. “Good thing I had the reading, huh?”

Indeed.

K. C. Ball is a retired newspaper reporter and media relations coordinator. She grew up in Ohio, with her nose in a book, and she now lives in Seattle, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound.

Her flash fiction has appeared on-line at Every Day Fiction, Boston Literary Magazine, Fear & Trembling, Residential Aliens, Every Day Weirdness, Flashshot and Moon Drenched Fables, as well as in print in Morpheus Tales, Murky Depths and the 2008 Best of Every Day Fiction anthology. Her longer stories have also appeared in on-line and print magazines.

K. C. is a staff reader for Every Day Fiction and a Finalist in the 1st Quarter 2009 Writers of the Future competition. She blogs about writing at A Moving Line and about whatever may strike her fancy at Now Playing in Seattle.

Flash fiction isn’t anything new. It’s been around since the time of Aesop.  Why it’s becoming more prominent and popular today is because of this nifty digital age in which we now live.

Modern men and women have established severe forms of ADD — they don’t like sitting still for extended periods of time, and looking at long lines of text on a computer screen? Forget it. Twitter just proves this new disorder by giving 140-character updates of just about anything — there is even an online magazine published in the Twitter format, and one author has even begun to serialize his novel using the application. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next year or two a new service is invented, a complete knock-off of Twitter, that displays updates of only 70-characters, because, let’s face it, 140-characters is just TOO MUCH.

Actually, the question I want to present now isn’t what’s too much.

It’s what’s too little.

Nearly everyone is familiar with Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

The legend of where this piece came from varies in detail, but basically Hemingway was challenged to write a story in just six words; he came back the next day with that little ditty, what he supposedly claimed was his best work.

Now do those six words constitute a story?

Some people think so; some don’t.

Some argue that there is no protagonist, no conflict, no beginning, middle, end.

Some argue that you don’t necessarily NEED a protagonist, conflict, a beginning, middle, end to make a story.

What is a story, after all? I’m not going to try to debase it by dissecting its Merriam-Webster definition. Everyone has his or her own skewed opinion of what it means.

Some are hardcore traditionalists who require the beginning, middle, end, protag, conflict, the whole nine yards. To them if any of those pieces are missing, then it’s not a true story.

Others are more lax. They understand inference plays a great part. After all, imagination IS key, but at what point does a writer depend too much upon a reader’s imagination?

Personally, I’ve always believed a writer should try to find a strong middle ground in his or her storytelling — a place where they can meet the reader halfway, just giving enough detail that the reader’s imagination is then able to fill in the rest. Those, I believe, are the best type of stories, because the reader becomes engaged in the process.

Good flash fiction demands this of its readers.  It only gives so much, enough that the reader can fill in the blanks, help finish the painting, and then, at the end, can marvel at its brilliance.

But what about those really, really, really, really, REALLY short stories?  The, you know, six-word stories.  Are they considered flash fiction?  If not, what should we call them?

Me, I want to coin a term, so I’m going to do it here and now: those very, very, very, VERY short stories should be called Hint Fiction. Because that’s all the reader is ever given.  Just a hint.  Not a scene, or a setting, or even a character sketch.  They are given a hint, nothing more, and are asked — nay, forced — to fill in the blanks.  And believe me, there are a lot of blanks.

What is the word limit of Hint Fiction?  Well, if a drabble is 100 words, and a dribble is 50 words, then how about we say Hint Fiction cannot be anything more than 25 words.

One of the biggest hints in Hint Fiction is the title.  It’s like the setup to a joke, and the “story” is the punch line.  Without the one, the other won’t work.

For those of you wrinkling your noses right now, try to relate this to abstract art. Is a painting of three joined panels — one blue, one yellow, one red — art?  You’re probably thinking no, but I guarantee you there are some who would pay thousands for such a piece.

Here’s another question: Is Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night art?

Almost all of you will probably agree that it is.  And why do you think this?  Because ever since your very first art class in school you were told that it was art.  You were told that van Gogh was a genius and that The Starry Night is one of his masterpieces.

Let’s face it, art is subjective.  Either we like it or we don’t.  The same goes with flash fiction and, now that I’ve coined the term, Hint Fiction.  We can argue about Hemingway’s six-word story, or any piece of Hint Fiction, until we’re blue in the face.  In the end we won’t change any minds. We know what we know and we think what we think and nothing is going to change that.

If you haven’t realized it yet, I’m far from being a staunch traditionalist. I like trying new things. I think writers should be encouraged to try new things. It’s not always going to work, of course, but at least you tried, and that’s the important part.

As Samuel Beckett said: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” 

Now go out there and spread the good word about Hint Fiction.

Just remember to tell them who sent you.

 ***Visit Robert’s blog for the Hint Fiction Contest, judged by best-selling author Stewart O’Nan. Prizes include a $25 gift certificate to Amazon and a copy of The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008. Deadline is midnight April 30th. Enter now!***

No time left.  This contest is now closed!

Good luck to all who submitted new “HINTS” at Robert Swartwood’s Blog.

Robert Swartwood lives in Pennsylvania.  His Hint Fiction has appeared in elimae, Lamination Colony, and The Northville Review.

2007 was a rough year for short fiction. Readership of literary magazines was shrinking, even among the traditionally strong genre markets. Readers of science fiction and fantasy flocked to fully immersive video games, and older readers turned to non-fiction either as required reading for their jobs, or simply to get an edge in the marketplace. Readers, like music listeners, had come to believe that there was so much content on the Internet available free of charge, that they shouldn’t have to pay to read good fiction. No one had yet figured out a business model or a format to adapt to this scary new medium.

The picture wasn’t entirely bleak. In one area, people were reading more than ever. Blogging was starting to take off. In 2006, Wired magazine estimated that 57 million Americans were reading blogs, with some 12 million of them writing their own. I – like many budding authors – was writing my own blog, “Without Really Trying,” that had attracted somewhere north of a hundred readers, which really wasn’t bad for an unknown, barely published author. While my blog was destined to fade into obscurity, I’d learned a few very important lessons on blogging in general. The Internet’s most popular blogs like Boing Boing, Engaget and Gizmodo, all had one thing in common – daily content.

So if more people than ever were reading, how come they weren’t reading fiction? At that time, it seemed like short fiction magazines had simply migrated onto the Internet with little thought of the dynamics of the medium. “Issues” were now electronic, but still launched quarterly, so readers would only return to the site every three months, which is a lifetime in Internet time. Small wonder that magazines like Noctem Aeternus, Grendel Song, and Serpentarius sprang up and then disappeared after only one issue. As I am writing this, City Slab, an online horror magazine, has just closed its doors. It was obvious that traditional business models were on lifesupport. What was needed was a magazine that could combine the best of blogging with an old-style short fiction market. In effect, the short fiction magazine was dead. Long live the short fiction magazine.

EDF launched in July of 2007 with one simple mission: get people reading short fiction again. We would feature a new, easily digestible short story every single day. It would be of flash fiction length ( 1000 words or less ) so that it would appeal to the short attention span of the average Internet surfer. Finally, Camille and I made the decision early on to avoid one of the most common pitfalls of the short fiction magazine – though we were both writers, Camille and I would never publish our own work in the magazine. Was our format revolutionary? Though there were magazines like 365 Tomorrows who published new fiction daily, we were the first to draw all of our content from writers’ submissions. And the response has been incredible. We had 200 subscribers before we opened our doors, and growth was exponential. Today, we have nearly 1,500 RSS and e-mail subscribers, averaging over 10,000 unique readers a month.

If you’ve been to the site, you’ll have noticed the clean lines and uncluttered design of a front page that focuses on the day’s story, and that’s all that most readers will ever see. However, if you look behind the scenes, you’ll find a highly specialized engine for processing large volumes of submissions. EDF’s publishing schedule is one of the most aggressive in short fiction, especially for staff members who volunteer what little time they have away from their families and the ever-present day job. We get an average of seven stories a day, of approximately 500 words each, which works out to 105,000 words per month. That’s a rather large novel. We have to personally respond to over 200 story submissions, deal with reader inquiries, and promote the magazine. And that’s in addition to actually editing and publishing a new short story every day. All that simply would not be possible without a huge administrative back-end written by webmaster Steven Smethurst. Stories are automatically filtered, formatted, and e-mailed at the press of a button. Thanks to his work, Camille and I have been able to focus on what really counts – editing good stories.

There have been some ups and downs. In September, slush reader Scott Cosby left us for health reasons, and we lost another reader to the pressures of life. Though we’ve since had great readers like Davina Colpman and Hillary Degani step to the plate, there were some hairy moments there when we thought we might drown under a tide of slush. We were very nearly victims of our own success. Still, despite the work load, in November 2008, we managed to help launch Every Day Poets, our sister magazine headed by Managing Editor Oonah V Joslin with support from Nicholas Ozment and Constance Brewer, and though there have been a few bugs, the launch has been mostly successful. We now have the technology ( if not the manpower ) to launch several magazines if someone were to step forward and volunteer to head them.

In recent years, many more ezines have sprung up. From magazines like Residential Aliens, run on a shoestring by Lyn Perry, to British magazine The Pigmy Giant, it is now evident that all one needs to start a successful ezine is blogging software and a will to give back to the short fiction community. Is this a good thing? I can’t help but go back to the comparison to the music business I made earlier. In our analogy, large short fiction venues take on the role of music labels. They are threatened, but able to survive given a willingness to adapt to the new medium. Authors, on the other hand, especially new authors, are likened to independent musicians. Since the days of Napster, new bands like State of Shock and Fall Out Boy have been able to get their message out through online sources. All of a sudden, these bands are getting fans as far away as Vietnam. Such is the advantage in publishing online.

EDF has offered an opportunity to authors to gain exposure from a large audience. Their short story has become an ad for their writing, the try-before-you-buy free sample that gets readers hooked on their work. We’ve had reports of authors getting eight hundred click-throughs to their web pages on the day their story goes live at EDF.

Though its exponential growth has slowed, EDF continues to gather new readers. People want to be a part of a successful venture, and we are exploring further avenues to attract investment in order to increase our rates. We see growth through partnership with traditional book publishers, and through growing our forums.

This book represents the very best of our first year in operation, and we hope it will eventually become a collectors’ item. You are welcome to read it straight through, or to pick it up, open it to a random story, and let it take you away for a couple of minutes. Such is the power of flash fiction.

Jordan Lapp is the managing editor of Every Day Fiction.  He is a member of both the Codex and Spec 24 writing groups. He recently won first place in the prestigious Writers of the Future contest. In 2007, he decided to combine his love of blogging with his passion for fiction and became a founding member of Every Day Fiction.  He blogs at http://www.jordanlapp.com/withoutreallytrying/. 

As the webmaster for Every Day Fiction, I am in charge of keeping the website up and running, adding new features, and trying to make the whole process as easy as possible for the authors, the slush readers, and Jordan and Camille.

One of the first problems that we had was the validation of email addresses. The problem was that we had no validation. Whatever a user submitted in the email address field would be stored as plain text. This became a huge problem as we started sending out acceptance and rejection emails, only to have them bounce off of invalid email addresses. We had no other way of contacting these authors. Our only hope was that they would contact us looking for a status update on their submitted stories. In our first month, there were thirteen invalid email addresses, and only three of those authors contacted us about the status of their stories. The other ten? Apparently they didn’t care if their stories were accepted or not. We added email validation at the end of the first week and haven’t had a problem since.

Twenty-nine days after we launched the site, we got hit by one of the larger social media sites called Stumble Upon. We went from a meager 200 unique visitors a day to a whopping 7000 unique visitors overnight. We were pretty excited – was this the start of a snowballing effect? Did our little site get discovered that fast? The Stumble Upon spike only lasted about 48 hours, and our average readers per day only increased by about 40 over the normal increase. Plus, it broke a bunch of features that I had added to the site, or “stress-tested” them as Jordan described it. Over the next year we got hit by many different social sites. A normal site visitor’s average read time is about three to five minutes. An average Stumble Upon reader stays on our site for about eight seconds on average, Digg users stay for about 25 seconds, and visitors from Delicious stay for about two to three minutes. We came to the conclusion that yes, these big social sites do bring a lot of traffic all at once, but not many – if any – of the users stay.

About four months after we started this project, I added the star rating system to the stories. We needed a way of getting measurable user feedback on the stories. We decided to keep the system open so that anyone could vote without creating an account, to encourage more people to vote on stories, and we also put in a safeguard to prevent people from voting multiple times from the same computer. The system worked smoothly and is still in its original form today.

Originally, we hosted the site with a cheap, overselling host that I had an account on that I wasn’t using any more. It was already paid for by an older project and seemed like a decent way of saving a few bucks. We were wrong. We wasted countless hours dealing with the host’s problems. Faulty hardware on their servers caused constant downtime, arbitrary restarts and database roll backs, with horrible email-only tech support that took days to respond to any email that I sent them. If I could go back and do one thing differently, it would have been to pay the extra money and get a good host from the start. Lesson learned – don’t cheap out on a web server.

When we first started talking about our concept for a daily online flash fiction magazine, I was expecting it to take about 40 hours to set up, with maybe two to three hours of maintenance every month after that. But after the first month I found myself spending eight hours at work then coming home and spending another five hours working on the site. Jordan and Camille were reading about 300 stories a month and providing personal responses to each and every story. I don’t know how they were able to keep up with the slush, but they did an excellent job. Their average response time was 10-15 days during the first year. My weekly website workload has now dropped to 10 hours a week, but it took a lot of effort to get to that point.

Near the end of the first year, we started feeling the weight of Every Day Fiction’s demands – the price of success. We started automating everything we possibly could behind the scenes, and Jordan and Camille began a search for volunteer slush readers. We were lucky enough to find Davina Colpman and Hillary Degani, who are both doing an excellent job. The website is a lot more manageable now, and the ongoing flow of fantastic stories from talented authors makes every bit of the work worthwhile.

It’s been a great learning experience, and a true labour of love.

Steven Smethurst first started web design in 2002 by creating simple HTML manuals as a hobby. At first his code was very primitive, but he kept looking at what others did and learning from them. Over time, he found that he had a real knack for web design and his skills grew as he needed to fullfil requirements for new projects. In late 2006, he found himself doing more web sites than utilities and made the mental switch from calling himself a programming monkey to calling himself a web monkey. He reads mainly short Sci-Fi such as Philip K. Dick, and older story books like The Arabian Nights and the Brothers Grimm.

– reprinted from The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008 –

Although there will always be a place for the novel – and I will not deny the pleasures of a good thick novel – it has competition. Short, sweet competition that tells a story with minimal words and maximal impact, to be enjoyed from start to end in a single brief sitting.

Flash fiction is generally recognized as being fiction under a thousand words – the perfect length for a coffee break, for a handful of stolen minutes. It is uniquely suited to online reading and people with spare and precious leisure time.

***

Quite the opposite; it can and should be one of the most demanding literary forms, with a need for perfectly crafted prose, a complete story arc in a tight space, and an immediately engaging hook.

More than in any other form of prose, every word counts in flash fiction. It’s the art and purpose of flash to write with sparse clean prose, and any flaws or filler stand out with jarring effect. In a way, flash fiction is closer to poetry than it is to other prose forms, because of the exacting precision of each single word choice, and because the brief nature of flash lends itself well to lyrical writing. Poets and lyricists often write very good flash fiction.

Flash fiction isn’t only about the word count, though; it tells a complete story. A short piece isn’t automatically flash – it might be a vignette or a prose poem, a character sketch or a free-form stream-of-consciousness ramble. The defining characteristic of flash, beyond the number of words, is that it has a plot structure, with an introductory situation, rising action or tension, a climax, and a resolution. Because of the word-count constraint, some parts of the structure are often implied, hinted at, or sketched in, but the reader should be able to make a guess at the whole story arc.

The hook to grab the reader is the third part of flash fiction’s puzzle. With a novel, or even a longer short story, one is generally prepared to give a few paragraphs’ worth the benefit of the doubt – standing in a bookstore, I’ll read a page or two before deciding whether or not to buy – but with very short fiction, the expectation is different. The first few words have to snare the reader in, and convince him or her that this story, not the next or another, is the one to spend those precious ten minutes on. This is especially true of online reading, so particularly suitable to flash fiction, where a potential reader might scan the page for only seconds before browsing away to some other site if his fickle interest isn’t piqued.

To do all of this, and further still evoke emotion or provoke thought in the reader, is a substantial challenge. The best flash does it with apparent effortlessness, as in ballet – the muscles and training and sore feet hidden away, so it looks just like dancing.

***

The idea of very short fiction has been around as long as stories have been told, but its recent rise in popularity and many of its most appealing facets are inextricably linked to online reading.

Fiction used to come only from bookstores and newsstands, and the shorter forms of it were hard to market, except for snippets here and there in a magazine devoted to a wider purpose. But readers are spending more and more time on computers, wireless connections are everywhere, and we’re getting ever more comfortable with reading from a screen rather than the printed page. The advent of web publishing, with its comparatively minimal costs and wide-reaching audience, has broken down cost and delivery barriers and provides an ideal place for flash fiction. Since many online magazines are advertising-supported and free to subscribers, the reading experience tends to be inclusive rather than exclusive – it’s there for everyone.

Genre boundaries are also being broken down for flash readers. Like sample tastes of different ice cream flavours, flash fiction lets readers venture outside their reading comfort areas without commitment. Most flash fiction magazines publish a mix of genres, with the result that regular readers are exposed to tastes of science fiction, humour, romance, fantasy, horror, and surrealism alongside the more traditional literary pieces. Preconceived notions about various genres tend to dissolve when faced with the evidence that all good fiction can be held to the same standards.

Flash fiction offers a sampling of fresh voices. As a market rich in exposure and promotional opportunity but without much lucrative potential, flash attracts emerging writers more often than established ones – which gives readers an early chance to discover new favourites from the next wave of writers. When editorial decisions aren’t tied to the commercial value of saleable names, the work stands only on its merit, and the reader sees an end product where risks are taken and as-yet-unheard voices are welcomed.

Perhaps more than any other boundary being broken, geographical barriers have shrunk or disappeared in the face of online connectedness. The web publishing world is truly global, often with the only limitation being the language of the publication. With an electronic capability to comment on stories, international readers can also enter the dialogue.

Writers all over the world are speaking through flash fiction, and readers everywhere are hearing them.

***

It continues to amaze me that this tiny jewel-like form of fiction has reached so widely and with such profound effect.