Flash Fiction Chronicles

From now on, let it be known that I am not a writer of flash fiction, slam poetry, prose poetry, poetry, oral tales, character studies, monologues, mood pieces, memoir, reviews, rants, open letters, hyper-extended tweets, shout-outs, sketches, biographies or rune interpretations. I am a writer of short. That’s it. It doesn’t matter what I write, its just how long I do it. And I am a person of brevity (in my writing at least) and that is what I do.

When someone asks me what I write, I say, “About 600 words.” I write short. I like short things. I like to share short things. If you can move someone, make them laugh, piss them off, turn them on, change the way they think in under two pages, well dammit Janet, that’s good enough for anybody. The idea that such power can be embedded in such enclosed spaces is as bright and exciting as nuclear fusion.

I will no longer allow myself to be labeled a slammer, or a flasher (I was busted once, and have learned my lesson) or any other pigeon hole we allow ourselves to be placed in. I will not alter what I write, because it doesn’t follow a narrative arc and I must have that to be a flash fiction writer. If I want a piece to stop suddenly, then it will. If the piece refuses to have plot adhered to its skin, then baby, be naked and free. If I let the piece dictate its form and not the markets, or the trends, then perhaps something worthwhile will occur. Perhaps there will emerge something worthy of sharing.

My name is David Macpherson and I am a writer of short things.

Dave, a writer of short things, lives in Northbridge, Ma. He is a co-editor of Ballard Street Poetry Journal. He has been published in several on line and print publications. He is a former slam poet and has performed across New England.

I’m trying to remember what I know about comma-splices without getting out of my chair.  It’s been a while since I had to think about it,  let alone explain it.  (I know.  I don’t HAVE to explain it.  But it’s Wednesday and I need to post a post).

A comma slice comes under the heading of “run-on sentence.”  There are a couple kinds of run-on sentences as I recall, but I think a comma splice comes into being when a comma tries to create a sentence from two clauses where two clauses don’t exist.

A comma alone isn’t strong enough to be used between two clauses, but should only be used between a clause and a phrase.

Let me back up.

A clause has the same weight as a sentence in that it contains a subject and a verb and is a complete thought. A sentence is a clause with a period at the end. One complete thought. It can stand on its own.

Two clauses create a compound sentence. Both sides of the punctuation are complete and each could stand on its own, but if the writer of a sentence decides she wants a softer connection than a period, a comma won’t cut it.  Two clauses need a hard connection.

Let me say that again: If there is a strong divide between one complete thought and the next complete thought, it requires period or punctuation equal to a period.

A period is a hard connection.  And if the writer decides he wants a softer “hard divide,”  he turns to colons, semi-colons, and commas mated with conjunctions, one of the FANBOY set, “but” and “and” the most commonly used.

A phrase is like a clause, kind of, but it’s not a complete thought because it’s missing either subject, verb, or both depending on what kind of phrase it is. A phrase cannot stand on its own. It needs the rest of the thought to be considered a clause or a sentence.  It must be attached to or shored up by a clause.

There are exceptions to this rule. In some progressive and/or experimental fiction, incomplete ideas are acceptable. Rhythm and pacing is often more important to a writer than following certain rules.

Grammar exists, however, for the sake of clarity. If I break a rule, I have to ask myself, will the reader still understand what I am saying? If the answer is “YES,” then I go for it. If it’s “NO,” I refer back to the rules.

Now have I totally confused everyone out there?

Content, structure, and language work together. No one element can make a story work. Many writers use a series of steps—brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revision, editing, and proofreading—to juggle content, structure, and language. The order of each step is a matter of choice and fluctuates with story ideas. Here is my preference:

•  To create content: brainstorm, free-write, draft a first draft
•  To apply structure: outline first draft, then draft second draft
•  To perfect language: revise, edit, and proofread

Content refers to the subject matter of a story.

• The who, what, when, where, and how of a specific idea.
• A character (the protagonist) finds himself in a difficult situation at a certain time and place and must deal with that situation. 
• How the protagonist deals with the situation depends on the protagonist’s wants, character, and the nature of the obstacles he must overcome.
• Content provides the “story question or problem” that propels the protagonist through the plot and ultimately reveals a universal theme, a jolt, an epiphany, some small observance of life.
• Content evolves from a premise, notes, a rough draft, research, observation, plus the attitudes and concerns of the writer.

Structure refers to the basic organization of a story.

• Just as a play is divided into three acts, most stories have three main segments
  • The opening (Act 1) gives a story focus and meaning by providing the premise, setting, and tone of the story as well as hints at the nature of obstacles the protagonist will face.
  • The main body of the story (Act 2) focuses on the protagonist’s actions to resolve the story problem.
  • The conclusion (Act 3) reveals the results of the protagonist’s struggle and infuses that struggle with meaning.
• Each segment of a story has a similar structure: the overall story as well as each chapter, each scene within the chapter, each beat within the scene
• Structure also involves other devices such as set-ups and pay-offs, sub-plots, and the shaping of structure specifically to content.
• Structure evolves from outlines, note-taking, drafts or a combination of the three.
   

Language refers the diction and style used to express a story’s idea.

• Diction refers the specific words that are chosen
• Style refers to how those words are combined, the order, the length of sentences and includes the use of literary devices such as metaphor, symbolism, and allusion.
• Grammar keeps writing clear and understandable.
• Language evolves from revision and rhythm.

Process is what brings these three basic components of composition together.

Writing is a Process. Yeah, it is!

The rough draft is about content…
making it up.
The second draft is about structure…
making sense.
The third draft is about language…
making it clear.
The fourth draft is about perfection…
making it publishable.

Actually, the steps to the writing process bleed into each other like ink dropped from a leaky pen over one spot. The blotches don’t land in exactly the same place, but they seep beyond each other’s borders, and create a new kind of art.

This post appeared last year at Gay Degani’s Words in Place Blog.

I have set stories in many places, all of which, now that I think of it, I have either visited, lived in, passed through or been introduced to by friends who have either visited, lived in, passed through or been introduced to by other friends. All, without any notable exception that spring to mind, I have had some personal connection with, if a degree or three removed.  In noting this, my statement seems a bit glib — after all, doesn’t every writer just somehow reconfigure a place that is somewhat familiar to her, however slight that may be, and just stick the characters in? — but I don’t mean it to be.  I couldn’t set a story on Mars or in Atlanta.  No connection. Perhaps I should elucidate by telling you how I don’t work with setting.

Though I would like to, I haven’t set a story in Sao Paolo.  I don’t feel close enough to it because it meets none of the criteria I seem to unconsciously use when setting a story:  no friends there, never been, never chatted someone up who’s blown through.  Things I’ve read about Sao Paolo, pictures I’ve seen and its weirdness intrigue me:  the busy air highway of helicopters that the rich use to avoid the daily kidnappings that go on in the streets below; the billboards advertising bulletproof glass for the urban businessman and promising the lowest price, if not guaranteeing the life behind the glass; the plastic surgeon who’s made a career singularly from reattaching the ears of kidnap victims.  This odd and curious hunger for the world I have goes for Alaska, Detroit, Seattle, Moscow and dozens of other places I’ve wanted to set a story in but find myself too paralyzed to do so.

I have, however, set stories in Arizona, from top to bottom; the black and white beaches of Hawaii; Chicago and her delicious tree-lined suburbs; the marred rural halfway homes in the forests of Maryland where old drunks sip orange soda and smoke thin menthols; a Toowoomba pub; the schoolyards of Switzerland where ski jumps litter the grounds like baseball fields do here; myriad locales in eastern Europe that I can recall like photographs fifteen years after; Alaska fishing boats that have been described to me by friends so dear I have phantom pains from them nearly losing fingers or hands; rest stops along the I-10 in vague, dusty in-between places; the immediate space above Hemingway’s Ketchum grave; the sad motel room and bar of a Rockville, Maryland motor hotel where a woman was raped and never shared her story; my boyhood housekeeper’s bedroom, wrongly remembered, no doubt, but still spooky with its assorted wigs on styrofoam heads high and lined up and hidden in the long closet.

I’ve set stories in a great many places and have a many more locales that I’m familiar with which I haven’t yet used.  So, I guess for me, the elements that prescribe my settings are:

• that I feel I could somehow truly pass it off to a native who reads my story and
• that the setting gives me a little chill in the possiblility it is the only place on earth I could tell a particular story.

These last points are interesting to me in that I’ve never really though about setting that way.  But the composition of this essay has convinced me, though I seem to understand it intuitively, that setting  is of primary importance to the thrust and ultimate success of one’s story.  It seems obvious, maybe the kind of observation only a child writer may make, but in thinking about the settings of my own stories, the stories of others that I love and the stories of writers who are abysmal, that if setting is of secondary or tertiary concern, the story fails.  So many writers, who I won’t name here for fear of offending anyone who might be a fan, could set their stories in a gargantuan bag of sand, the surface of the moon or a Venetian gondola and it wouldn’t matter.  They’d still be unable to transmit any emotion through their words.

Visit www.littlefiction.blogspot.com for a selection of Mark’s stories and www.fictioncontests.blogspot.com for the best contests on the web.

Recently I was invited to submit to a new market, and even given a prompt with which to work, but none of my initial attempts were panning out. Then, random perusing of the Internet gave me this interesting bit of trivia – there is a clock tower in Ireland, in Cork, which has four faces, and each face tells a different time. This inspired the thought: “What if, rather than three of those faces being wrong, all four are right?”  Breakthrough!

Wait, and somebody even wrote a poem about this clock? Get outta here! The story practically wrote itself! Seriously, I’m not sure why I showed up that day.

Research can take a number of different forms, each of which serve different purposes, and all of which are invaluable to honing the craft of writing. Here’s a few:

Reading other stories in the genre is research, as you need to see how it’s been done, learn the conventions of the genre, pick up tips, etc. Don’t put blinders on to what’s going on in your chosen field.

Names are important, so don’t just randomly grab a name from a phone book. Make sure characters have period-appropriate names, and be aware of ethnic implications (of surnames in particular). Look out for historical or pop culture significance that might color a reader’s view of a character. There are plenty of resources to check (my personal favorite is Behindthename.com). Don’t overlook the meanings of names, there’s rich material there for inspiration. I’ve jump-started stories based purely on some interesting meaning of a randomly-generated name.

History matters. It seems silly, but there it is. Even if you’re radically changing the history of a place, it’s important to know what really happened, how the people lived, how they thought. Not just the bare facts of how many people lived in what city, but what their philosophy was, what the issues of the day were, and so forth. What’s the difference between a 20^th century hero and a 16^th century brigand? How did people talk in the 1200s? Or even last year? A single bit of slang can transport the reader to an entirely different decade.

Technical vocabulary can make or break a story for some readers. Tom Clancy has legions of followers who read his work simply because he can, step by step and with all the right technical terms, describe how a nuclear reactor on board a Russian submarine can melt down. Does the gun in your narrator’s hand use shells or bullets? Was the city hit by a meteor or a meteorite? Is this cop a detective or a constable? Does this patient need blood or plasma? Some portion of the audience, maybe even most of the audience, won’t know the difference, but some will and they’ll nitpick themselves out of enjoying the story. Then they’ll post about it somewhere online.

Research is important to creating realistic and believable people and settings, and just as important in flash fiction as in a novel. Be as familiar with the subject matter as possible, because for your flash piece it needs to be summed up in a sentence, or a few words of dialogue. You won’t have the luxury of a whole chapter to explore the ideas.

Most of all, let research inspire your stories. There’s so much available in the real world that’s interesting, it would be a shame not to take advantage of the free ideas. Research is not a chore. And it gives you a good excuse to check out a lot of cool books.

Alexander Burns lives in Fort Worth, Texas. He writes because he doesn’t have a basement in which to build robots or time machines. His work has appeared at Every Day Fiction, A Thousand Faces, 10Flash, and forthcoming from The Future Fire.

Did you receive my query?  Did you receive the follow up message I sent you a week later?  If you have received either, please, please, just tell me that you have.  That’s all I need to know.  If you don’t have time to critique me, I don’t mind.  If you had no time to read it, send me a rejection note anyway; just a simple “thanks, but no thanks,” is all I ask.

A critique may bruise the ego slightly, but I come away from it having learned something.  A polite rejection note is slightly less enjoyable, but at least I know where I stand with the editor.  The type of rejection that burns me every time is the silent treatment.  Was it something I said? Is my idea so stale that it doesn’t deserve a response?  Or can I continue to tell myself that I’m a flawless writer; maybe some technical issue caused the silent person at the other end to never receive my work?

It feels like I’m screaming into a snowstorm in a remote location.  I’m completely blinded, except for a moment where the snow stops or a breeze pushes the snowflakes to reveal a faint promise of a solid object.  A few solid objects could help lead me through the storm, so I could actually get somewhere.  The snow blinds me again, and as I reach out, I find nothing.

The journey of getting my work published has just begun this year.  I’m pleased to say that I have had some success; I have been published a few times, so maybe I should not complain.  The rejection responses are something I was prepared for; the silent treatment, not so much.  I still continue to wander through the storm because I love what I do.  I just wish I could find more solid objects, find a path, or perhaps find some kindly person with an extra pair of ski goggles to lend me.

Yvone has come out of the closet as a writer.  She always puts a little extra care and love into herEnglish assignments, and has taken to writing lyrics very seriously, even though they would never be heard in the genre of music she used to sing.  It finally dawned on her in 2009 that writing is a passion; so here she am, tinkering away at the keyboard constantly, and loving it for everything that it is.

She has written news articles for her local sports paper.  Blogging is her new hobby.  Read her here.  She’s taking it slowly because she has also joined the ranks of motherhood – times two – in the last two years.

When I started writing seriously a few years ago, the novel was, in my mind, the pinnacle of fiction.  Flash fiction sat at the other end of the writing spectrum, the wasteland of lazy writers without much to say.  I wrote that first novel, edited it countless times, and failed.  The process held value; my manuscript did not.  Since then, I have written two more short novels for young adults and I am working on a third.  Along the way, I fell in love with flash.

I have always had a passion for words.  As an undergraduate student, I found myself at a crossroads.  Teaching was the family curse, but what subject would I study?  Math and science seem too clean, too perfect.  History, while fascinating, is an adventure to discover what actually happened.  English—especially literature—is an adventure in what is possible.

But words are difficult.  Too often, I find myself struggling for just the right phrase to make the jumbled mess in my brain make sense to another person.  As a high school teacher, I try to make sense of the curriculum, school expectations, and the future for my students. 

Words are difficult, but mighty, and flash allows words to share the spotlight with all other elements of fiction.  In longer works, the words sometimes move aside for characters, conflict, and plot.  Sure, no story lives without words, but a reader can lose sight of them when they are strung together 100,000 strong, just as the beauty of a single tree can be lost in the forest. 

In flash, each word counts.  A story of 500 words only has so much wiggle room.  I welcome the challenge of trimming a flash piece to fit a market’s guidelines.  Two words too long?  Time to revisit the verbs and nouns, making sure they deliver as much impact as possible.

I primarily write dark fantasy and horror.  Readers come to a horror story with certain expectations, and some are quite jaded about trick endings and long, drawn out narratives.  Flash fiction can free a writer to grab the reader with powerful language and force them to an inevitable, horrifying conclusion.   It is a quick jab in the gut, a jolt to remind weary readers that they do love stories.

For this writer, flash reminds me why I love words.

Aaron currently resides in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, two sons and a tattooed rabbit, enjoying every mood swing in the Midwest weather. His flash fiction has appeared in Every Day Fiction, 10Flash, Northern Haunts, Everyday Weirdness, and on various bathroom walls.  Stop by his blog and read the free Friday flash.

I didn’t choose to be a writer. I write because I must. I write because if I don’t, I’ll go crazy. There must be thousands of writers who say this. I know I am not unique.

I have been writing since the age of seven, may be earlier, since the time I learnt the alphabets perhaps. During those innocent days, I did not question myself why I scribbled poems and sometimes songs in notebooks. I just knew that if I didn’t jot down whatever picture and emotion came into my mind immediately, I would feel angry and physically sick.

Once during a two hour math exam in school, I finished my paper forty five minutes early, just so I could pen the lines of a poem that were constantly coming between me and the numbers (I don’t remember how much I scored in that exam, but even if I did, I wouldn’t tell, so don’t ask!) Sister Padua, our music teacher, who was minding us, saw me mumbling to myself and scribbling on a paper after I had given up my answer sheets. She told me to stop distracting the other girls who were still writing. Disturbed, I stormed out of the room. She was shocked by my impudence. Afterwards, when I apologized to her and explained why I had become agitated, she said that she understood, but I should have trusted her enough and told her the reason instead of becoming emotional. She gently told me that she would have allowed me to leave the classroom and sit in the library and pursue my poetry in peace.

Another time, I became nearly hysterical with grief because my poetry notebooks couldn’t be found shortly after we had shifted to another house. I don’t recall this incident, so I must have been much younger than the math exam episode. Years later, my mother told me that that day she realized how much my writing meant to me. Yet, I myself didn’t know it. For a long time, too long for my own good, I neglected my writing self. I felt embarrassed to tell people about it. When I did, it usually produced strange reactions ranging from derision and mockery to irritation (“oh, don’t act intellectual with me”) to jaw dropping awe, to in one case, even titillation.

Over the years, I withdrew my writing self, until I hardly ever wrote for myself, except for the occasional poem. I had a job that entailed a large amount of creative writing, so I lulled myself into thinking that I was fulfilled. I felt stories and poems rampaging about in my head when I took a long maternity leave when my first child was born, but did nothing to capture them on paper. Foolishly I told myself that I just needed to get back to work. The inner disquiet did not go away. Life went on. And, except for the one or two stories that I wrote during lunch hour at work, I continued to ignore my writing self.

I began writing again in earnest shortly after my second child was born. Not tentatively, but furiously and angrily, hating anything that came between me, my writing and also my family. I chucked my lucrative full time advertising career; after a couple of years, I even stopped freelancing. My world revolved around my husband, my children and my writing. A couple of stories appeared in online journals. I became more and more detached from the social world. At times it felt like my head would burst if I didn’t leave everything aside to write. I wrote in my head all the time, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, at the playground with my babies, even while watching the occasional television. And, I took time off from my family and home constantly to bang away on my computer. But I still couldn’t tell people that I was a writer.

More stories and poems began to get published. I wrote more stories and poems. I wrote a novelette. I finished writing the first two drafts of my first novel. My husband got transferred and the new city we lived in gave me opportunities to touch base with writers groups. But I still couldn’t say it, when people, outside the writers’ circle, asked me what I did. The words stayed in my throat, hurting my gullet every time I swallowed them down again.

One day, my son, told me quietly that when his friends asked him what his mom did, he said that she was a writer. My daughter joined in and said that she was proud I was not a ‘normal’ mom. My husband, who has always supported my writing, said nothing. He only smiled his “I told you so” smile.

Rumjhum Biswas has a great family, and is also a writer. So it is a good thing she has a great family to start with! Some of her work – poetry and fiction – can be viewed at her blog: Writers & Writerisms And at her website.

It’s summer and toodling through various writing sites this week, I remembered that August kicks off  ”Submission Season,” the time when college literary types head back to school and brace for the mudslide of submissions coming their way.

I’ve been writing for years, but I haven’t always subbed with any consistency.  In the old days of  “No simultaneous submissions,” I’d send a piece to one venue and then wait three to six months before the postman delivered an SASE with my returned story.  Clipped at the top would be a  slip of  paper addressed to “Author”  followed by the cryptic message, “No thank you.  This piece does not suit our current needs.”  Okay.  So.  I’d rewrite the story (I can always find something to fix, change, deeper, scrap) and send it out to the next lit mag on my list.   And wait another six months. 

There were so few places to submit, it took so long to hear back, and I was so unsure of my abilities that it was tough to stick with the writing, to have the sense of progress.  While writing groups and writer friends can do a great deal to help someone come into his or her own, it is the relationship with the market that produces professional writing.

The submission process is better now.  With the advent of the internet, online literary and genre magazines, email, and submission software, there are fewer trips to Staples for envelopes, less waiting in line at the post office, and even better, a real possibility for dialogue between author and publisher, even if such a relationship consists of nothing more than several submissions and several rejections in a row.  The time between sub and NO is usually shorter than it used to be and that alone makes learning the craft much easier for new and emerging writers.

A while back, I decided my goal for the year would be to get 100 rejections. Yes. I know. That’s weird, but if I’d called my goal  “To Get Published,” each rejection would mean failure.  While I had limited power over an editor’s choices, no one could stop me from writing and submitting.  So I played a trick on myself.  I changed the language.  By making “rejection” my goal, I could not fail.  The power shifted to me.  

Quality was in my power too.  Even if my goal seemed to be negative, what would be the point of writing lousy stories?   I had to make them the best stories I could.   Then if a piece was rejected,  I’d be one story closer to my goal 100.   If it was accepted, I’d open a bottle of champagne.

The goal of 100 rejections forced me to write more often, with more commitment and awareness of what professional writing looks like.  After writing, editing , polishing, and submitting one story, I have learned to write another story and another and another.  This is a good thing.  I don’t have time to sit around to see if the first 5 or 10 places reject me. I have more rejections to apply for!  

So I write a new story and send it to 5 or 10 other magazines.   It encourages me to write with purpose and to submit to the best market for each piece.   And the more I write, the better I get. 

Maybe I won’t make my 100 rejects per year.  I haven’t yet, but that’s not my goal.  Not really.  The jig is up.  I’m onto myself. 

And while getting published is certainly a wonderful result of all that work, it ’s not the goal either.  I’ve been published and it’s very cool.  But writing is really about–oh, dear, I’m going to sound like an American Idol contestant–the journey.  What turns out to matter is learning the craft, becoming aware of what works and what doesn’t, acquiring skills, and allowing imagination and passion to find the page, and maybe someday writing something really good. 

Here’s to Submission Season!  I hope I get to open a couple of bottles of bubbly this year too.

To read Gay Degani’s stories online, visit her Words In Place blog.

• From Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, submissions will be taken for the 3rd Annual Micro Award.
• The Micro Award is a competition for fiction not over 1000 words, published in 2009.
• Editors may submit two stories and anyone else may submit one.
• This year, self-published stories are eligible and the prize for the winning story is $100.
• Rules and submission information are posted at the Micro Award Official Website, www.microaward.com.