Flash Fiction Chronicles

With NANOWRIMO, (National Novel Writing Month, www.NANOWRIMO.org.) starting on November 1^st, I’m faced with a challenge . . . can I practice what I preach?

Once I bring up a topic on my blog, I feel obliged to take my own advice. When I wrote about the awesome sensation of finishing a novel during the 2008 NANO, consciously or unconsciously, it was a set up. In talking about last year’s experience I was giving myself an ultimatum. I have to sign up for 2009, and I definitely have to write the 50,000 words!

Okay, maybe I’m delusional, but this little ploy works for me. Here’s another example. A few weeks ago I picked up the hub at the Halifax airport. He had been in the States for over a month and we agreed that a long weekend would be a good welcome home gift to each other. We headed to Prince Edward Island to explore, eat seafood, and play kissy-face. That was our agenda. Writing was the last thing on my mind.

Yes, I brought my computer, and yes, I brought the outline and notes from my work in progress, but it was mainly because I feel lost without the computer close by, and believe that having the current WIP at my side is kind of like actually working on it. (Probably a topic to pursue with my therapist.)

Driving to the north cape, (the point where the waves from the Northumberland Strait crash against the waves from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, we listened to CBC’s Definitely Not The Opera. It was a show on transformation and reinvention, and explored how hard it is to escape your past in the days of Facebook, MySpace, and camera-phones that record daily activities. Today it’s suspicious when someone drops off the grid and reappears in a new location, with a different look, and sporting a different personality.

It made me think of my main character, Ellie. When I started the novel I thought the biggest challenge would be finding the voice of a contemporary teenager. The real-time lives of today’s teens hadn’t occurred to me. My first thought was to turn up the volume, listen close, and write down my thoughts later. But no . . . I had to practice what I preach. I dug out my little notebook, got into Ellie’s character, and wrote my impressions on the topic.

Back at the hotel I found a podcast of the show and downloaded it to listen again later. I read over my notes and realized there was no way I could have “remembered” in such rich detail. I also knew that I wouldn’t have bothered to write in the notebook if I hadn’t just talked about it on the blog.

So, be prepared to read numerous blog posts about my NANOWRIMO experience next month. It’s all one big plot to get 50,000 words on paper in 30 days. That breaks down to 1,667 words a day . . . or about 90 minutes of straight writing . . . or 3-30 minute sprints.  Are you with me?

Ginger B. Collins writes short fiction and creative non-fiction. Her work appears online and has been published in Freckles to Wrinkles, Silver Boomers, and the newly released Scratch Anthology of Short Fiction. She recently completed her first novel. Read excerpts at www.gingerbcollins.com.  All writers are invited to follow the blog and share experiences. http://coppertopcollins.blogspot.com.

I’ve noticed something about my writing lately. The less I TRY, the better the finished product is. This seems counterintuitive, so I spent some time thinking about it – while I was supposed to be editing Fear of Falling.

If I were a comic book character (Writer-Girl, saving the day with her impeccable grammar, excessive parenthetical references, and her catchy turn-of-phrase!) I would have an arch-nemesis. (That’s one of the rules. Good guys are really boring without bad guys.) Self-Sabotage would be mine, thwarting me at every turn. (Kind of like Spiderman vs. Spiderman in the black outfit. I picture Self-Sabotage looking like Writer-Girl, only dressed like one of those women in a courtroom drama with the suit and the glasses perched on their nose so it looks like they’re looking down on everyone else.)

To carry on with this analogy, the second Writer-Girl sits down at her keyboard to Write Something Important, Self-Sabotage gets a call and shows up to throw the whole arsenal at her – insecurity, fear, distraction, indecision, doubt … you name it. And sure Writer-Girl can slog through, pretending to ignore the efforts of her arch-nemesis, telling herself she can revise it later. But we all know that Self-Sabotage shows up at the revision table too.

Interestingly enough after fifteen minutes visualizing the adventures of Writer-Girl and her struggle to finally defeat Self-Sabotage, the few plot points in Fear of Falling that had been giving me trouble fell into place, and I finished the revision without difficulty.

I had an idea yesterday morning. I looked at the word-crumbs for writer-pigeons, and did my vocabulary thing. (I list the prompts, then give either a definition or a synonym or two or three out beside it. Thinking about non-traditional ways to use a prompt sometimes starts the creative process.) But then I pulled up Bejeweled 2, and started playing in Hyper mode. Self-Sabotage just smiled to herself, thinking she was so good at her job, she didn’t even need to show up anymore …

And between rounds, I made a few notes about how the prompts could tie together. But before I could get too serious about it, I went back to Bejeweled. While most of my brain was scanning for matching gems at warp five, the rest of it was thinking about the prompts and the quote.

Twenty minutes later I had the skeleton of an entire story, which I wrote with little interference, and which turned out to be pretty decent. Decent enough, in fact, to have the potential to be a real short story and not just a flash piece. (Not that there’s anything wrong with flash. Just sometimes the characters need more space to tell their tale.) In contrast, the story I tried to write last week – when I was determined to write and wouldn’t let myself do anything else until it was written – is terrible. Beyond terrible. A complete cacophony of contrived, disjointed images. I only haven’t deleted it entirely because I can’t bring myself to think it’s beyond saving. Yet.

To test the theory that sidetracking my logical mind can improve my creativity, I did the same thing again this morning with a different set of prompts. And lo, twenty minutes later I have the outline of a story that looks to be good (I was so excited that the shameless trickery worked that I had to blog before I actually wrote the piece.) I guess it’s based on the same logic that dictates you will not think of the answer to that random question while you’re thinking about it, but hours later you’ll sit straight up in bed and say “Ethyl Merman!” (or whatever the piece of information you were looking for is.)

So yeah. In case there’s anyone out there who gets super paralyzed when they sit down with the intention to write, maybe you can try not trying and see what happens. Worst case scenario: you’ll get better at Bejeweled. :p

(Reprinted from Blogging in the Dark)

TL.Schofield is an old mom and a new bride, living in central GA with a white dog and a black cat – one of which she is allergic to. Her first published piece is currently posted at 10Flash. She recently placed two stories, Arrival and Escape, in Flash Fiction Chronicles String-of-10 Flash Fiction Contest and blogs at Blogging in the Dark.

When my story “Nipped in the Bud” posted on Every Day Fiction in August, I was eager to see the sort of feedback I would receive.  And then I saw what people had written.  Oh boy.  Reader comments ranged from calling it “hokey” to “it just doesn’t seem to go anywhere.”  I cringed, but I couldn’t really complain.  After all, when my own mother read “Nipped in the Bud,” her first reaction was, “That’s awful!”  She understood the story, and it horrified her.

If one of my greatest supporters says that, I can’t really gripe about comments from strangers.

However, I’ve seen other stories on Every Day Fiction and elsewhere get similar feedback.  Some authors don’t take it well.  They respond to every negative comment, getting both apologetic and defensive.  It leaves me wondering – will this author keep writing?  Or will these harsh words convince them to stop submitting?

Internet anonymity inspires people to type words they wouldn’t dare say face-to-face.  Honesty is important, but so is tact.  Instead of subscribing to the motto of, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all’ people do say very un-nice things to total strangers – and people get hurt.  Some give up writing.

I’m not at that point now, but I have been in the past.  When I was a teenager, I vowed to be a published novelist by the time I was twenty.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the spine to make a real attempt.  Two of my well-meaning uncles approached me and told me that I was putting my immortal soul in peril by writing fantasy.  My college creative writing teacher witnessed me reading a fantasy novel and was aghast.  “That’s not a real book,” he said.

By the time I was nineteen, I wasn’t even sure what to read anymore.  As for writing, I stopped completely.

Yes, I was a wimp.  Writing and rejection require a hard shell, and I couldn’t cope.  I wanted my writing to please everyone – which was downright impossible, no matter the genre.  It took me another ten years to mature and take my writing seriously and understand that criticism is part of the business.

Time and time again, editors advise writers “don’t take it personally.”  There is truth to that.  However, as a writer – especially a vulnerable beginner – some people will have a harder time separating themselves from their writing.  That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be given negative feedback.  It’s necessary.  It’s how we grow and improve, whether the project is flash fiction or a full novel draft.  But even if a story comes across as complete nonsensical garbage, that doesn’t mean it should be described in comments that way.  Tact and respect are not antiquated notions.  At least, I hope not.

I can handle my story being hokey and sometimes misunderstood.  As long as some people get it – and enjoy it – that’s what matters.  If I’m going to put my soul on the line, I don’t want it to be a total waste.

Beth Cato’s work has appeared in places such as Every Day Fiction, Niteblade Fantasy and Horror Magazine, Crossed Genres, and Six Sentences. A full list of her publication credits is available at BethCato.com.

Congratulations to Mary J. Daley for her story “The Forever Summer.” 

She placed second in The Flash Fiction Chronicles String-of-10 Contest held in August.  The challenge was to write a piece of short fiction, 250 words or less, using at least four of the following prompt words: 

 STRING OF TEN: BLOW BACK-STORM-JAUNDICE-STEAM-TATTOO-SENSE OF FUN-CANTALOUPE-STREAKED-UMBER-DRIPPING SWEAT

 QUOTATION: And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? –Tillie Olsen*  

THE FOREVER SUMMER
by  Mary J. Daley

He had seventy-nine tattoos from his ankles to the nape of his neck. All declaring the same thing, “Wanda Forever.” Wanda’s sense of fun had started it. On the twenty-first day of June she approached him and said,  “I’ll let you bed me on one condition.”

He happily left her bed two hours later for the tattoo parlor.

He loved her immediately.  She stood four foot four and had long golden hair streaked with black that she refused to touch with clip, elastic or brush. She smelled of ripened cantaloupe during sex, ate only steam vegetables, and liked her whisky neat.

Wanda blew his summer into all shades of happy, and only asked that he mark each bout of love making with his confirmation that it was forever.
But when autumn came, Wanda refused his touch, even when he stood naked in front of her pointing to her name and his promise that encompassed his body.  She just shook her head and said nothing, and he stood there with seventy-nine tattoos, hoping somehow they would blow back the best summer of his life.

Mary J. Daley lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband and  two daughters. Her short fiction has appeared in Allegory, The Harrow, Gryphonwood ,and Gemini Magazine. 

Third Place was published here at Flash Fiction Chronicles on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 and First Place will be published at Every Day Fiction on Sunday, October 25, 2009.

 *The quotation was also part of the prompt, but there was no requirement to use it in the story.

Congratulations to Jim O’Loughlin for his story “Choices Made.” 

 He placed third in The Flash Fiction Chronicles String-of-10 Contest held in August.  The challenge was to write a piece of short fiction, 250 words or less, using at least four of the following prompt words: 

 STRING OF TEN: BLOW BACK-STORM-JAUNDICE-STEAM-TATTOO-SENSE OF FUN-CANTALOUPE-STREAKED-UMBER-DRIPPING SWEAT

 QUOTATION: And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? –Tillie Olsen * 

CHOICES MADE
by Jim O’Loughlin

Later, he would be able to consider all that he had left behind and never saw again: the wedding album, the birth certificates, the kids’ favorite toys, even the laptop.  In the moment though, with the storm surging and blow back peeling off the roof like masking tape, he only had time to grab what he could on the way out.  

Still, even as he ran to the car, dripping sweat and bleeding from the gash in his forehead, with the river already up to the wheel wells, he realized that the choices he had just made said something about who he was.  In his arms, he held a phone book, the cantaloupe that had just turned ripe, and a gallon of milk. And he had made sure to lock the front door.

Jim O’Loughlin’s flash fiction has appeared in Quick Fiction, The Pedestal Magazine, and North American Review.  He is the publisher of Final Thursday Press  at http://www.finalthursdaypress.com.

Second Place will be published here at Flash Fiction Chronicles on Friday, October 23, 2009 and First Place will be published at Every Day Fiction on Sunday, October 25, 2009.

 *The quotation was also part of the prompt, but there was no requirement to use it in the story.

Mid-September of this I spent a week in Banff, Alberta at The Banff Centre Fall Writing with Style Program* taking a workshop on “Historical Fiction” in preparation for an additional four weeks in Vermont to work on my novel.  Faculty member Joan Clark, distinguished Canadian author of books for both adults and children facilitated our workshop.  Here are a few of the points made by Joan that particularly resonate with me.

Process of Circling:

And I quote: “Circling is a process of writing to yourself about the impetus of the story, why it matters to you, what you want to do with it, what you hope to achieve.  It is a process of backing off to help the writer—you—gain perspective on what preoccupies you fictionally, and prevent you from becoming locked into a structure too soon.”

Submitting too soon:

Paraphrase: A story needs to rest (did she say “like bread?”)

Revise. Revise. Revise.

 Discipline to go deeper:

Paraphrase: Don’t keep your story on a level plane.  Go deeper.  Joan uses the visual of a straight line to represent a story, but suggests that a deep gorge occur somewhere along that line.

Tension:

Paraphrase: Tension between the work and you helps to create tension between the reader and the work.

Why this story matters:

Paraphrase: A writer needs to ask herself why her story matters.  It has to matter to the writer.

What some refer to as Truth:

More direct quoting: “Credibility in fiction is tricky and variable, subject to reader response as to what is ‘true’, ‘believable’ in a story, and what isn’t.  Readers who pick up on familiar situations and human foibles in fiction are more apt to keep reading.  Recognition is a dynamic factor in reading and writing fiction.  The recognition factor aids credibility—what some refer to as truth.”

Clarity:

Paraphrase: The writer should be in control of the story and have the story clear in her mind.  Readers want to feel they can trust the writer, that they are in good hands.

 Be Flexible:

Paraphrase: Be prepared and willing to move things around in your story.  Everything should serve the story rather than to convolute the story to accomodate an idea that no longer fits the story.

Time:

Paraphrase: Time challenges in writing in terms of shaping the story.  How a writer handles time shapes structure.  Be aware of the passing of time in relationship to the whole story, when it needs to be moment to moment and when it needs to jump.

 “The secret life of the story:”

Paraphrase: The phrase above from John Gardener, but read A Passion for Narrative by Jack Hodgins for a meaningful discussion of this idea that when you start a story, you think it’s about one thing and usually it turns into something else.

*The Banff Centre’s Writing with Style Calendar with deadlines has not been posted as of this writing.  If you are interested, please check the site often.

Someone mentioned not long ago that I don’t discuss rejections very often at A Moving Line, my writing blog.

Why bother?

I don’t obsess over rejection notices, don’t keep a notebook full of them or tack them to the walls of my workspace. I’m not interested in how many times I fail, only whether or not I succeed.

No one likes to hear “No!” Tim Powers, the science fiction author, has told Writers of the Future winners that we write because we want to be noticed. I suspect he’s right, I know it’s true for me. And it’s damned difficult to get noticed if no one buys your work.

But you’re guaranteed never to get noticed, at least not for your written words, if you stop trying to get your stories in print because you’re afraid they will be rejected.

Frank Sinatra made a movie in 1959 called A Hole in the Head. It featured a song, High Hopes, that won the Academy Award that year for Best Original Song. It became one of his signature pieces.

Part of it goes:

Once there was a silly old ram,
Thought he’d punch a hole in a dam.
No one could make that ram scram;
He kept buttin’ that dam.

‘Cause he had high hopes, he had high hopes.
He had high apple pie, in the sky hopes.

I suspect that giving up, refusing to return to the keyboard because of a devastating rejection, is the biggest reason why so many folks remain talented wannabes, instead of working, published writers.

I have a hand-lettered sign taped to my computer monitor, right above eye level. It’s just a little-bitty thing, half an inch high and two inches long, but it’s always at the edge of my vision as I write. It has one word printed on it.

Persistence.

Here’s how the rest of that verse goes:

So any time your feelin’ bad, ‘stead of feelin’ sad;
Just remember that ram.
Oops, there goes a billion-kilowatt * dam.

I intend to spend the rest of my life, however long that may be, as a dam ram.

How about you?

* A terawatt is a trillion watts or a billion kilowatts.

K.C. Ball lives in Seattle, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound. She is an night writer, an afternoon sleeper, who works through the wee hours because there are so few interruptions and because that is when all the good air is.

Her short fiction has appeared in various online and print publications, including Flash Fiction Online, Every Day Fiction, Boston Literary Magazine, Big Pulp and Murky Depths.

Her flash fiction story, Hair of the Dog, was included in the 2008 Best of Every Day Fiction anthology and her story, Coward’s Steel, won third place in the 1st Quarter 2009 Writers of the Future competition. It will appear in the Writers of the Future XXVI anthology in August 2010.

K.C. is editor of 10Flash Quarterly, an online magazine featuring genre flash fiction, and she blogs about writing at A Moving Line.

Recently I attended a book reading by an up and coming writer in Chennai, India and I was pleasantly surprised to hear her say that going for walks triggered story ideas in her head.  I found myself nodding in agreement.Walking is great exercise, for both body and mind. What makes it even better for writers is that as you walk you unwittingly keep observing the world around you in a detached sort of way. Objects, people, stray thoughts gather momentum with every step or stride.

Your head begins to clear up and soon a kind of informal creative mood sets in. You begin to look at the world around you (and I mean really look at the the world around you) with fresh eyes. A slant of sunlight on a pathway you never noticed before, an expression on the face of a passerby you see most days but never notice, the sudden pattern of paint peeling off a fence… Before you know it, an image has become a sentence, a thought has become a phrase; one word has sparked off a whole string; your mind has come alive with sound and colour. Pretty soon you have a dialogue happening between characters that suddenly appeared between your eyes. The first lines of a poem begin to meander. A storyline erupts and starts to bubble inside your head…

Many of my stories and poems started out that way. However, unlike the noted Indian writer Ruskin Bond, I don’t carry a notepad and pen with me when I go for my walks. No longhand first drafts for me. I need my computer, always. The only exception that I can think of is the odd poem that crops up at an Airport or during a train journey. The rest of the time, I am comfortably creative when I sit before my own computer, in my own room. And no where else.

Not jotting down your thoughts the minute they arrive does have its pitfalls. I have lost a number of good sentences, phrases and ideas that way. But everything does not melt away in the sunlight of a normal working day. After my day’s chores are done (read wife and mum!) there is still enough fodder gathered during my morning walk left over in my mind to fuel the creative writing process. That apart, walking also works like a creative excercise. All those random thoughts, mostly unrelated and unregulated, produce a kind of cleansing effect. And then when the dust settles down, you get some clear directions as to where your muse is headed for the day.

In a previous post I talked about the limits of flash fiction — the hard ceiling of 1,000 (or sometimes less) words that force a writer to focus his energies in such a way that makes him, paradoxically, freer to explore techniques of language and narrative. In that post I talked of gardens of various sizes, and mentioned walls and fences. The walls of my analogy were the hard word limits of flash beyond which no word count could go.

But think of flash fiction — indeed, all fiction — as being surrounded not by a fence, but a window frame. When we look out the window from a fixed position we see only a slice of the world itself. Prior experience tells us there is more to the world than meets the eye, but so too do various clues in the scene itself — perhaps we only see a part of a road, or the shadow of a tree, or, indeed, neighbors moving in and out of frame. Good, evocative fiction should do this too, it should hint at a larger world.

My own domain of genre fiction demands this more so than contemporary fiction, and so as a technique I think it is more important for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and assorted other ’speculative’ or fantastical stories to seed their story with such cues to achieve a measure of believability. Set a story in the modern world dealing with modern problems and the believability is already there — both the audience and, perhaps more importantly, the author believe in that world because they live in it already.

One of my favorite things about Every Day Fiction are the comments left by such a large variety of readers. And there is always one thing I want to see in the comments section, one thing that lets me know I succeeded in my job as illusionist and world-maker, and that’s when someone tells me that the story felt like part of something larger. That means nothing more nor less than my fictional world had achieved a level of believability that persuaded the reader into thinking that there was indeed more beyond the frame of the window.

And, truth be told, there always is more beyond the frame that the reader does not see — the ideas the writer has about the world and its characters that just don’t fit in the story in explicit or elaborated-upon ways. But rarely is there a great deal, as least for my stories, as it doesn’t make sense to imagine a novel’s worth of back story to lend authenticity to a 1,000 word piece of fiction — if that were the case, one would just write the novel. No, there is a trick to it.

The first and most important aspect of doing this has to be the the writer’s own belief. You have to believe you are writing about a world and character that exists beyond the 1,000 word window frame that you are confining them to. This isn’t magical thinking on the writer’s part, rather it is a deliberate way to get into the mindset of someone writing contemporary fiction. In contemporary fiction, the author knows the world intimately because it is the one he lives in, and he is free to reference or hint at so much that we all take for granted. And that’s the second part of our approach, taking things for granted.

Robert A. Heinlein is famously held up as an example in this regard; whereas science fiction prior to him would often draw attention to the differences in the setting with descriptions of the gee-whiz gadgetry, Heinlein would cut right through it with something as simple as his character crossing from one room to another through an electronic door with the words ‘the door dilated.’ Major breakthrough in believability, because it presents an unfamiliar world as familiar, and therefore gives it a reality that exists apart from the narrative. Heinlein took the old SF fence of highlighting the differences of things and turned it into a window frame that suggested that those things you wanted to know where all there if you were to just tilt your head and look through the frame at a different angle.

Giving your audience everything on a plate is the worst way to tell a story — in fact, it’s often what’s meant by the condemnation of ‘telling’ rather than ’showing.’ The best way to paint a scene is to get your reader to imagine it for themselves — and sometimes that can be done more effectively with fewer, rather than more, words. By the same token, making a world feel real to an audience involves getting them to supply the answers to questions you carefully suggest to them. ‘The door dilated’ does this beautifully, as the reader instantly imagines for himself what a more plodding author would have begged him to believe with an extended description. Getting your reader to internalize the truth of your world by forcing them to meet you halfway on some of the speculative or unique elements within it makes such fiction essentially collaborative.

Curiously, I sometimes hear ‘this felt like something bigger, I wanted more’ as a kind of minor criticism, as if by suggesting a larger world and then not delivering it in full I’ve somehow reneged on my authorial agreement. I know how to read between the lines when I see this. When the reader might bring this up as a flaw I see it as proof positive that they had become emotionally involved in my story and believed it enough to be disappointed when they realized there was in fact a fence obscuring their view of the rest of the world where they had been certain a window frame existed. Perhaps they feel as if a trick as been pulled on them — and it has, as writing is a great deal about illusions and trickery.  Wanting to see the rest of a world that does not exist — that is, in fact, constructed almost entirely out of a few hinting references scattered here and there and made stronger by authorial conviction — and then being disappointed that you can not indeed actually see that world, must to be the greatest compliment of all. Especially in flash fiction. The point of hinting at a larger world within flash fiction is not to satiate readers, but to whet their appetites.

Bill Ward is, most probably, a figment of his own imagination. His flash has appeared at Every Day Fiction, Murky Depths, and the anthologies Dead Souls and Northern Haunts, as well as The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008. He blogs about all things genre at www.billwardwriter.com.