Flash Fiction Chronicles

I’ll admit, my attention span is shortening.  Over the past 18 months, I’ve published eight flash stories, seven humor pieces under 500 words, and five short (2,000 word) stories and articles.  I’m afraid I’ll never write another novel or collection of short stories, but then, isn’t everyone limiting their online reading to the equivalent of cereal box text?

I’m afraid our future is going the way of Japanese keitai shousetsu—novels downloaded to cell phones with chapters of just 70 to 100 words.  I had a Eureka moment when I discovered Brian Huggett’s Short Humour Site  .  He offers 500-or-fewer-words shorts to meet today’s rush-hour needs “between stations on the metro, during lovemaking, during lovemaking between stations on the metro, during free-fall skydiving.”

E-zine editors are becoming as snippy as Elizabethan sonnet writers in limiting word counts.  Entirely new classes of writing are resulting.  Recently, I updated our writing group here into the differences among flash, drabble, nano, 55ers, single sentencers, and six worders.  This is what the situation looks like:

 Flash is generally 1,000 or fewer words, although some fudge the issue like a gourmand in a bake shop and take more words.  Popular sites include Flash Fiction Online, FlashQuake , Every Day Fiction  (which has carried several of my pieces), Everyday Weirdness  and K.C. Ball’s 10Flash .  365 Tomorrows   restricts sci fi writers to a skimpy 600 words; however, Micro Horror , with tongue firmly planted in cheek, limits the writer to 666 words.

 Drabble “centenarians” boil a story down to 100 words.  The Drabbler is a contest-laden, paying market.  The 100-Words style grew out of the original drabble site started by Jeff Koyen and Roy Batchelor.  Subscribers may post anything—in exactly 100 words—that opens “a tiny window into their lives.”  

Nano, or micro, fiction is longer than drabble and shorter than flash.  Interesting sites include Rumble Magazine  (500-word limit) and Nano Fiction (with 300-word max). 

 Like The Incredible Shrinking Woman, word counts continue downward with the 55er.  New Times began competitions in 1986 to write a short story in 55 words.  Yes, only 55 words, with examples at http://55-fiction.org.

Finally (is there no end in sight?), we have One Sentence Stories, with insightful examples at http://onesentence.org.

 Six Words is a tough challenge.  Hemingway famously wrote his “best story” in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”  My favorite is William Gibson’s “Bush told the truth.  Hell froze.”  You can find terrific one-liners by famous writers at Wired magazine.

Are these valuable new reading forms?  Possibly, if you’re jumping off a building and have only six floors in which to complete a story.  But I think it all started with Genesis and the shortest anagram in the Bible: “Madam, I’m Adam.”

Walter Giersbach’s fiction has appeared Bewildering Stories, Big Pulp, Every Day Fiction, Everyday Weirdness, Lunch Hour Stories, Mouth Full of Bullets, Mystery Authors, OG Short Fiction, Northwoods Journal, Paradigm Journal, Short Fiction World, Southern Fried Weirdness, The Short Humour Site and Written Word.  Two volumes of short stories, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue, have been published by Wild Child (www.wildchildpublishing.com).  He also served for three decades as director of communications for Fortune 500 companies.

In his post “Make in Fun” (on Wednesday 11th November ’09) Alexander Burns wrote “To that end, I’ve determined that a writer has learned most of what they need to know about storytelling by the age of 10 or so. After that, all that’s left is to learn how to make it good.” I totally agree. What’s more it reminded me of something that I do from time to time – Eavesdrop! On my kids, and especially my daughter who will turn twelve this month!

I know it is a sneaky habit. I’m a bad mom. Sorry! But I can’t help it. The stuff they talk about, the books they read, the things they do, and more importantly write and so often the stories they tell themselves or to each other is so interesting. So inspiring too. For my writing I mean.

You see, kids have these absolutely wide open windows in their minds. Information, ideas, imaginary things keep flying in and out all the time. They have this absolutely fresh way of looking at everyday, mundane things. They keep “discovering” the world around them. If you sneak around the kids, your imagination is sure to get fired up.

I loved it when my daughter and son too, were younger and talked to themselves when they either drew pictures or played with their toys. The stories they told themselves were entertaining, though not always, actually almost never, logical. Probably that’s why they were so entertaining in the first place. I did not plagiarize their stories (it seriously didn’t occur to me at that time, and now I wonder if I did miss an opportunity, since my kids wouldn’t sue me for that, would they? ). I wish I had recorded some of that prattle, though. Sigh. Nevertheless, eavesdropping on their imaginary voyages and adventures did inspire me and often liberated me from my adult constraints of fact and form.

Anything is possible in a child’s inner world. Nothing is improbable!

Not even lemon yellow polka dotted purple ice cream
Served in a jelly belly bowl with a slice of moon beam!

Some of the stuff they think of and say actually provide fodder for us adult writers. Like the time I found my daughter, then around nine years old, looking thoughtfully at the artificially created turquoise waters of a swimming pool. After sometime she muttered, “Rapture of the deep is what happens to sailors when they are drowning; they don’t want to come up.” I stood still. She had connected something ordinary with something extra-ordinary and seemingly unrelated to the present. She skipped away to do something else and I found myself seeing a vast stretch of turquoise water all around me and feeling an immense sense of ecstasy wash over me. My daughter had just opened up a new dimension, another portal before me. The first draft of my poem “Rapture of the Deep” was born then and there; the poem was later published in A Little Poetry. Another time, on a rainy evening, I heard her advise a frog that was staring at her from its perch on a low railing, almost eye level with her, that “he was better off as a frog!” She was around six then and far more fond of birds and animals than Barbie dolls and princesses. My Story “Return of the Frog Prince” almost hopped off my head and was published a couple of years later in the Lily Literary Review!

It’s not always that a poem or a story takes shape every time I eavesdrop on my kids, or any kids for that matter. But their artless words and wide open hearts are not merely joyous to behold, like a rainbow seen in the crystal light after a shower, with the scent of renewed life all around you, they have a potent magic in them. I think the magic is really the cleansing quality that they have, something that makes you shed, at least want to shed, your inhibitions and adult complexes. The effect is wonderfully refreshing. And I think that is good for writers.

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Rumjhum Biswas has been writing poetry almost since she learned to read and write. It was her way of getting back at the world. Now a plump, bespectacled and hopefully respectable mom of two and wife of one she continues to write poetry and also fiction, because while poets remain poor some fiction writers do get rich and that gives her hope. Her publications and mutterings are here: http://rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com/ She also jabbers from time to time at Flash Fiction Chronicles.

“Writers write.”  Who said that? Flannery O’Connor or Stephen King? I can’t remember, but the veracity of the statement cannot be challenged. No words on paper: no tome.

The better question might be, “How do writers manage to write in REAL LIFE?” How do they come up with a steady stream of sentences, paragraphs, story beats? Maybe some are born with enough talent and drive to block out the temptations of the Friday morning Sudoku, but for most of us, the world is full of enticements, obligations, distractions, and bicyclists smashing into trashcans, pounding on doors to harass owners about city-dictated trashcan placement. These intrusions challenge our ability to meet writing goals, but retaining focus, an outlined plan to commit to writing, helps us remain in office chairs, fingers flitting over keys, heads hunched toward screens.

But how can I ignore husband, kids, friends? Don’t I need to exercise, shop for healthy food? Stay up on the election news?  Do I have to skip Project Runway, American Idol, Without A Trace?

It’s a balance, and focusing on that balance leads to symbiotic interplay between the two. In other words, pay off.

Family? Friends? We have to have them. Can’t really live–or write–without them and all those obnoxious, needy, freeway-jamming, gum-chewing, rude and crude other people too. They are our characters, and the subsequent drama of their–and our–tangled relationships provide us with themes and plots. So letting people muddy up our lives? Gotta happen.

Then there’s the issue of health, exercise, brushing teeth, and that no sugar rule. And the need to refill Julia Cameron’s proverbial well with sunny days of rebelling against routine and late nights devoted to deep substantial reading. Plots build themselves on early morning walks, scene by scene, block by block. “To Build a Fire” gave birth to my story “Richie’s Last Shot” and The Red Tent to “Honeymoon at the Oasis Hotel.” Are these distractions or assets? Both.

As for the news, election or not, jury duty, the media, the Lakers, pop culture, and the biggest distraction: TV? Acts of living can shatter anyone’s focus, but while they confuse us, they provide us with insights, while they frustrate us, they bring us understanding, while they subject us to banality and routine, they teach us the rhythm of patterns. These lessons, in turn, gift us with material from which we pull universal truths, the heart of good writing.

Awareness of how REAL LIFE devours both our time and our passion is all-important. The solution is deciding to do something about it–Plan. Follow through. Rejoice. And accept the idea that spending time in the act of writing is a blessing.

I used to believe that “having talent” meant writers were born, not made, and were compelled to write day and night. With no effort on their part, they could separate themselves from what other people wanted them to do and instead, blissfully compose epic novels. That certainly wasn’t me. I had tasks to do at home, sometimes a job, demands of family, obligations to others. Since I was overwhelmed by RL, I wrote sporadically, fitfully, so I couldn’t have been “born to write.” I took this logic another step: “Not born to write” must mean I have no talent. I let this idea defeat me. Since I struggled to overcome distractions to writing, I must not have been born to write. If I was, I would let nothing stand in my way.

I don’t believe this anymore. People who want to write eventually figure out some way to navigate the obstacles. They will find a balance. Writing is a choice. And choice demand action–and focus.  After all, writers write.

Post originally published at Gay Degani’s Words in Place blog on Wednesday, March 05, 2008. Gay is the editor of EDF’s Flash Fiction Chronicles. She has stories forthcoming in Paradigm, Every Day Fiction,  The Battered Suitcase, and 10Flash.

I sold my first piece of fiction in 2007 to a small magazine that has since folded. After I’d done a happy dance around the house and called to order a celebratory pizza, I reread the editor’s note and started to panic.

She really liked the story and wanted to publish it. But she also asked if I could rewrite the ending to make the story a little more speculative in nature. Since I thought the story was perfect in every way already, I emailed a friend to complain that the editor was an idiot, an idiot! and that she wanted me to ruin my story for a token payment. But once I’d finished venting, I opened up the file and rewrote the ending.

The editor loved the new version–and so did I. Since that first sale, I’ve had a few dozen stories published, and a number of editors have asked for rewrites. In every single case, the rewrite has made the story stronger. The same goes for edits.

A lot of writers are so focused on the process of getting accepted that they have no idea what to expect afterwards. I know I didn’t. The rewrite and editing process for that first story confused me. If the story wasn’t perfect in the first place, why did the editor accept it? Why did she want to change it?

Nearly three years later, I now know that there is no such thing as a perfect story. Of course, I try to make each story as near-perfect as I can, but I’m not insulted or worried if an editor asks for a rewrite or extensive edits. Sometimes an editor sees an underdeveloped theme in a story that I never noticed, and wants me to emphasize it. Sometimes an editor finds a plot hole or pinpoints a problem with motivation. Sometimes, alas, my writing is unclear.

There are all sorts of reasons why an editor wants changes. I may complain (to myself or a friend, never the editor), but I always make the changes and I always end up happy with them. After all, the editor and I are both aiming for the same result: to make my story as good as possible so that readers will like it. That’s worth a little extra work.

Look for K. C. Shaw’s story, Fall or Fly tomorrow November 24th at Every Day Fiction.

K.C. Shaw’s fiction has appeared in Every Day Fiction, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Space Squid, Fictitious Force, and many other fine magazines. Her first novel, Jack of All Trades, was published in September 2009. Visit her website at http://kcshaw.net and her blog at http://kcshaw.blogspot.com/.

When we are new at something, sometimes all we can think about is that first goal.  Learning to skate doesn’t look that hard.  If  we can stay upright, feet on the sidewalk, body vertical, we’ll soon be doing figure eights and sailing backwards. The same goes for writing.  When we sit down at the keyboard to write a story, we figure if  we can get enough words on the screen, we’ll have a tale worth telling. 

In some ways, we need this attitude to get started.  If we knew we’d fall on our asses for the first twelve times we skated over a twig, a crack, our sister’s Barbie doll, we probably wouldn’t try.  We need that initial belief in ourselves to put the skates on in the first place.  The same is true for writing.  We picture ourselves  clacking away at the computer keys with lines of type building and building.  It is the only way to deal with our initial fear.

However, how we handle the results of those first attempts can dictate success or failure.  For many, a bruised butt and bloodied knees spell defeat.  “I don’t want to do this!  This is too hard” and they head inside to watch Saturday morning cartoons.  Others wear their scabs like badges of honor and take a moment to reassess their goals.  They realize they can’t jump from standing upright on skates to skimming down Devil Hill, carving eights in the liqour store parking lot, floating backward to the awe of the younger kids without blood and guts.

The same is true with writing.  Although there are those who have a natural talent for the written word can sit down and write it without too much angst.  But these are rare cases.  Most of us may write a story that has many strong elements, but as a whole it doesn’t work.  Not yet.  And we need to reassess and learn the craft.

This is the make-or-break moment for most writers, the moment of looking at a piece of writing as it might be read by others, readers who do not live in the head of that writer.  The ability to look at one’s own work with a critical eye does not come easily.  It is a skill that is learned with practice, patience, and awareness of what works and what doesn’t.  An expertise that evolves over time. 

Just as a young roller skater learns the sidewalk is smoother than asphalt, a writer learns clarity is more important that an obscure turn of phrase, but to do this, both must be willing to see beyond their first goals.  They must accept the reality that becoming good at something requires the understanding that learning is a process, that the large goal must be broken down into smaller goals because everything is more complex than we first perceive. 

There is a difference in skating and writing.  We teach different muscles to work harmoniously together.  In skating we train our bodies and our brain too, but most it’s about legs and balance and reaction.  In writing we train our brains–and our hearts. 

How do we train our brains to write?  We set up mini-goals, lots of them, beyond our first goal.  Here are a few I believe in, though sometimes I find it hard to actually do them all!

Mini-Goals for Each Story

• Create content by taking notes, brain-storming, writing a “shit” draft
• Write a draft
• Do research to understand the world you’ve created or the personalities
• Think about story structure
• Make certain everything in a story serves a purpose (especially in flash)
• Be willing to delete that which doesn’t fit into the structure
• Go through the story to improve the language
• Make certain everything that needs to be clear is clear
• Make certain that verbs are active, that nouns are specific
• Proof-read carefully
• Set it aside (this is one of the hardest mini-goals because usually at this stage we are sooooooo excited about what we’ve created, we can’t wait to send it out)
• Reread and make changes after it’s been set aside
• Ask a trusted reader to read it (trusted: gentle, supportive, yet honest, honest, honest)
• Decide what notes you agree with and what you don’t and make edits
• Set aside again, at least an hour or two so that when you proof-read for the final time, you have enough distance to find now what your eye skipped over before
• Send out and cross fingers

Mini-Goals for Personal Growth

• Read widely and deeply
• Talk to others about writing
• Be open-minded
• Try new genres
• Be a mentor

 None of this is necessary if a writer is writing only for himself.   Just as skating up and down the block might make one child happy, putting together a story for fun can work for the “Sunday author.”  But if your goal is roller-derby, you’d better to be willing to work.  And if you want to be published?  Guess what…

Gay Degani  is the editor of Flash Fiction Chronicles.  She has been published in print and on-line, her work appearing in or forthcoming at Best of Every Day Fiction 2008 and Best of Every Day Fiction Two, Night Train, 3 A.M. Magazine, Tattoo Highway, 10Flash, The Battered Suitcase, and Salt River Review.

The worst thing about writing groups is their tendency to become “reading groups.”  It starts with someone saying, “Here’s a piece I wrote in college,”  or “One I dusted off so I’d have something to read.” 

“NO!”  I’ve been shouting at our group of  ten or a dozen writers who show up.  “Read the things you want critiqued.  They’re being criticized so you can submit.  And you submit for fame, money or simple self-validation.  But no desk-drawer crap!”

 The best thing to come out of these groups is solid commentary, insights into what you’ve just read, and “gotchas” for those damn typos that creep in.  (The aural experience may also lead a writer to clasp fist to forehead and realize the words are hollow exercises in periphrastic verbosity.)  Educationally, the group can provide information on multiple submissions, markets, querying, confusion over editorial style and on and on.

Suggestions:

• First,  the value can be ramped up if members will share copies of their writing.  (Copies can be printed cheaply in draft quality mode.) 
• Second, someone needs to lead the group to keep order.  (The group I began facilitating was floundering and leaderless.) 
• Third, set the ground rules: No one delivers a recitation about what they’re going to read in a few minutes, the critiques must be constructive, and the reader should keep quiet until the comments are all in. 
• Fourth, “someone” should recap in an e-mail who read what, encourage members, mention successful sales or book signings, provide links to sites like Wordtrip and Duotrope, and maintaintain an all-members mailing list.  
• Fifth, send out the occasional news release that your group will be meeting at the library or local bookstore—and invite all interested writers.

 Those are just my opinions, but early on, our members–some 27 in all–asked to begin meeting twice a month.  So, how are you guys doing with your writing groups?  Are they useful?  Any tips to add?

Walter Giersbach’s fiction has appeared Bewildering Stories, Big Pulp, Every Day Fiction, Everyday Weirdness, Lunch Hour Stories, Mouth Full of Bullets, Mystery Authors, OG Short Fiction, Northwoods Journal, Paradigm Journal, Short Fiction World, Southern Fried Weirdness, The Short Humour Site and Written Word.  Two volumes of short stories, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue, have been published by Wild Child (www.wildchildpublishing.com).  He also served for three decades as director of communications for Fortune 500 companies.

To outline, or not to outline: that is the question.

And it’s a surprisingly tricky question.  I’ve always been a proponent of the Whatever Works for You School of Writing, but some people seem to have very strong feelings one way or the other when it comes to outlining.   I once saw an online discussion where someone vehemently insisted that it was impossible to write a good fantasy novel without an outline.  Not too surprisingly, others strongly disagreed.

I think the extreme views some people take on the outline vs. no outline issue stems from the fact that one writer’s idea of an outline doesn’t necessarily match another’s.  Some people have very detailed blow-by-blow breakdowns.  My outlines tend to be a loose collection of sketched-out scenes—some detailed, some no more than “Joe does something to annoy Mary.”

Also, different writers have different feelings about outlines.  I know some writers who feel they have to stick to the outline no matter what.  For some, that’s a good thing because it keeps them focused; others find it constraining and therefore don’t use outlines.  And then there are people like me for whom the outline is a very fluid, ever-changing thing.  I don’t always use an outline, but when I do, I have no qualms about changing it if the story wants to take a different direction once I start writing.

So when do I outline?  Not very often for a girl who’s writing a blog post about outlining.  I used an outline for the novel I’m currently revising, and I have outlines for two sequels to it.  Even though the first novel’s outline changed constantly, having it was extremely helpful while writing.

For short stories and flash fiction, however, I’ve found that the write-the-first-draft-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach works better for me. Sometimes I do a sort of pseudo-outline partway into a story.  I’ll start writing with no idea where I’m going, and once I figure it out, I’ll jot down some notes real quick and then get back to the draft.  Mostly, though, I need to spew out the wordage to find the story.  Then I can worry about the proper structure for it.

When I attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2007, we were encouraged to experiment with a different approach to see if helped:  try outlining if you normally didn’t use one, or vice versa.  So I tried outlining a short story first to see if worked any better.  It didn’t.  In fact, I ended up with lots of unnecessary scenes and a story that was almost twice as long as it needed to be.

While outlining a short story didn’t work for me, I think it was an experiment worth trying.  Some of my Odyssey classmates found that a different approach improved their writing, and that’s the kind of thing you’re never going to discover unless you try.  Also, it may not have helped my story, but it did help me better understand my process.

I’m a singer as well as a writer, and I realized that my short story writing isn’t all that dissimilar from how I learned to approach a song.  During my voice lessons, we’d pick songs apart to the smallest detail.  Notes, rhythms, phrasing, dynamics, tempo, breathing, interpretation—there’s a hell of a lot that goes into just one song.  But my college voice teacher always reminded me that, when it came time for performance, you couldn’t think about all those things on the same analytical level you did during practice.  Thought during performance is required, of course, but for the most part, you just had to sing and hope all the minutiae clicked.

So that’s sort of how I’ve come to view writing short stories now, except the process is reversed.  The revision and critiquing stage is when the thing gets picked apart.  The first draft is when I just write and hope that all of my previous practice clicks.

As with performing a song, if I make a mistake in the first draft, the best thing is to just keep going.  But every so often in performance, I’ve seen even professional singers get off on such a wrong foot that they have to stop, apologize to the audience, and start the song over.  The same thing sometimes happens to me with a story.  Luckily, writers generally don’t have to start over in front of an audience.

Partway through a story I was writing a few months ago, I became stuck and felt like I was flailing blindly.  The more I tried to plow forward, the worse it got.  So I started over.  The first thing I realized was that what I had written, even when slogging, wasn’t as terrible as I thought.  Better yet, I figured out why I was stuck.  By the time I reached the point in the story where I had given up and started over, everything clicked and I knew how to move forward with the rest.  That time, I got through the whole song without apologizing and starting over.

Would outlining first have helped me avoid starting over with that story?  Probably not.  While thinking about this process, I realized that outlining doesn’t necessarily keep you (or at least me) from having to start over.  For example, I ran into the same problem with the first draft of my novel a few years back.  Even though I had an outline, I got stuck somewhere around chapter 2 or 3.  I kept trying to move forward, but it was rather like bashing my head against a wall—not a pleasant feeling.  So I went back to the beginning, started revising, and voila!  I figured out what wasn’t working and was able to plow straight through the rest of the novel.

So, the lesson learned for my writerly self is this: outline or no outline, sometimes you’re better off apologizing to the audience and starting over.  If the final product’s good enough, no one will care that you screwed up the first time, and they certainly won’t care if you used a road map to get there.

Barbara A. Barnett is a 2007 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, where she learned valuable things about writing and the evil ways of chickens. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Shimmer, Hub, Every Day Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Kaleidotrope and Flash Me Magazine.  She lives with her husband in southern New Jersey, works for a theater company in Philadelphia, and frequently bursts into song. You can find her online at www.babarnett.com.

So it’s November again, and that means that since it is already November 16th, many of us aspiring novelists are knee deep in NaNo.

It’s hard to believe that there are many authors out there that are at least not peripherally aware of this seminal masochistic endeavor, but for the sake of clarity, I’ll summarize: Between November 1st and November 30th an author makes a dedicated effort to hack out an entire novel of 50k. Whoa, that’s a lot of words, right? It’s quite a few, yes, but broken down that’s only 1666 words a day. Within reach for most of us, even with families and jobs.

The idea here is volume, anyway, not quality — although the rules do allow for you create notes, character bibles, plot outlines or whatever esoteric voodoo you might practice. I don’t do any of that, and don’t know anybody that does. (But hey, I live in a small world.) NaNo is really about writing on a schedule, about letting go of your preconceived ideas about what writing well means. It really is quite liberating to be excused from over-thinking every scene and every line of dialog. The end result will almost certainly be a raw and rough bit of fiction, but don’t let that stop you, with a little work you just may have something worth sending out to a lucky agent or publisher.

As a quite biased example: my 2007 run at NaNo landed me a contract with BeWrite Books, an awesome European indie press. My book should be available as a paperback before the end of the year. That book is called The Movie, and I hope everyone will buy, borrow, or beg a copy, it’s a fun story about hopes and dreams, and bad science fiction. Of course, as nearly all my stories, it’s  really about ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Okay, okay, you are saying, I’ll buy the book when it comes out, (Thanks!) but what does NaNo have to do with flash fiction of all things? Flash fiction is just the opposite of NaNo. Well, to that, I assert the definitive reply of: well, yes and no. I’ve done NaNo in 2007, 2008, and 2009. And each and every time I can recall exactly how my work with flash fiction paid off to get these manuscripts written.

2007: The Movie

This was actually the third novel manuscript I wrote, and I was terribly intimated by length, and still wasn’t really sure I could write a novel manuscript that wasn’t painful to read. So I said to myself,  Bosley you’ve written a few short stories, you know a bit about character arcs, and motivation, and conflict. Just set a goal for your protagonist and make sure he can reach it if he works hard enough. (Who likes a lazy protag?) So that’s easy enough, I said to myself … but it kind of wasn’t easy. Nope. Not for Bosley.

So I came up with the idea to put bits of a meta-story in the book, as a kind of way to refresh the readers perspective and hopefully distract myself long enough to forget I was writing a very long novel manuscript. In this case the meta-story was scenes from my protagonists fancy-pants movie script. And can you guess? Yep, those scenes are essentially flash fiction. I’m not so sure I would have finished the novel if I hadn’t been able to look forward to writing these silly little stories within the bigger story. Not only was it fun for me, it allowed me to indirectly communicate the protagonist’s thoughts at a personal level. (We are what we write, right?) If  I hadn’t taken the time to learn the craft of flash fiction, the manuscript would have had much less impact, me thinks.

2008: Americana: The Last Gleaming

I actually punted on this manuscript and finished up at 30k. So I lost the NaNo that year. But I ran out of story, and happily finished it up at its natural stopping place. This story is about Drake Carson, a detective in the final stages of dementia who is chasing the Misfit, believed to be evil incarnate. Drake is a good guy even if he is insane. This story proper is actually 6 intertwined short stories/vignettes. How were  are they intertwined, Bosley? You might ask.  Flash fiction, naturally. What all the stories have in common are a series short flashbacks and self-contained scenes that describe the Misfit’s previous crimes and evil deeds.

These bits, essentially flash fiction, are the unifying force that holds the main story arc together. I’m on the second draft at the moment, so I’m not sure how well the final manuscript will actually work. But I am certain that this is 30k I wouldn’t have written if I hadn’t been able to look forward to those the ‘breather pieces’.

2009: Sweet Lies

There is less to say about this story since I’m only about 20k into it. But the first thing I did is find some method to my madness. In this case, Howie, a young murderous sociopath, has a tendency to deflect any serious thoughts by telling bizarre and surreal stories about his past. Not only does this keep others from thinking to hard about his actions, but it keeps himself from doing the same. What sort of bizarre and surreal stories? you might ask — right! What amounts to flash fiction. Good job. :p

I might even go so far as to cite upcoming novel, Servant of the Mud with Shadowfire Press as using that same technique of embedding mini-stories in story. This an urban fantasy with some tiny chapters woven into the larger story. These chapters attempt to show the more human side of the antagonist (despite not being human). It allows the reader to feel at least some sympathy to what would otherwise might be a kind of cardboard villain. Of course, these tiny chapters bear a great deal of resemblance to flash fiction.

So while flash fiction might seem tiny and insignificant next to a novel of even 50k, if one looks carefully enough it becomes clear that flash fiction can become another ingredient in a beautiful soup of words that perhaps someday will become a published novel.

And for those of you doing NaNo this year, come join me. It’s really not too late.  You’ve got almost half a month left!  Enough time to write half a novel.  And if you are sitting this one out. No sweat, there’s one every year. And keep in mind that the Office and Letters and Light needs money to continue doing what they do. If you can spare couple of bucks, why not make a donation?

Saddly, as a postscript, I’ll say that I am a couple of days behind in NaNo, but I have a very good excuse.  His name is Luke Fredrick Dean.  We’ve taken him home on purely trial basis, but after some discussion with my wife, she seems intent on keeping him despite his prodigal efforts to eat us out of house and home.  And, I’m told the grace period for returns is a measly five days.  So it seems he will need to board with us for the next twenty odd years.

Until next post … ciao.

Bosley Gravel, eclectic hack of an author, was born in the Midwest, and came of age in Texas and southern New Mexico. He writes in a variety of genres. 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.  You can find links to his flash fiction, short stories, novels, and other credits and affiliations at http://www.ripcot.com.

People ask me all the time, “Where do you get your ideas for a story?”

When I hear it, what I want to ask is, “Where do I not get an idea for a story?” Inspirations are everywhere, just waiting to hurry off into a story, and all I really have to do is ask one little question — “What if . . . ?”

But I’d like to talk a bit just now about one of my sources — the daily news — and why I like it so much.

One of the first stories I had published, when I started pursuing writing with some vigor last year, was Stand and Delivery at Boston Literary Magazine. It’s a fun little piece about a pizza delivery man I called the Pizza Dude and it’s based on a piece of television news footage.

In that footage, a pizza delivery man aids a police officer, chasing a suspect on foot, by pulling his car over the curb into the path of the fleeing suspect. It was fun to watch and I asked myself, “What if I told this from the point of view of the delivery man.

It’s a simple story — no vampires, no murders and only a bit of violence — that is effective because of it’s fast pace and it use of detail to make it feel real. And it is, I believe, fresh because it doesn’t make use of worn-out tropes.

The Maple Leaf Maneuver, another story pulled from the news, is set to run November 23rd at Every Day Fiction. It’s satire and it uses exaggeration and an eye for detail to poke fun at both American and Canadian national images.

It began as another “what if” question after I read a story about amendments made last year to Canada’s Citizenship Law, which now automatically grants citizenship to people living in other countries whose parents left Canada during the second half of the twentieth century.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as I read it, what would happen if Canadian authorities decided to enforce the changes in a proactive fashion by hunting down those “lost” Canadians.

My point with both stories is that you don’t need high drama to write effective flash and avoiding much-used plot lines is a good way to make your fiction stand out from the rest of the pieces in the slush pile.

So next time you’re in need of a story idea, pick up the newspaper or turn on the even news — and write right from the headlines.

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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.

I’ve long held that any story should first and foremost be entertaining. It doesn’t matter what the story is trying to get across, what great comment on the human condition, or political figure is being skewered or whatever, if the story isn’t a joy to read. Ulysses may require eight PhDs to understand, but that doesn’t make it worth reading.

To that end, I’ve determined that a writer has learned most of what they need to know about storytelling by the age of 10 or so. After that, all that’s left is to learn how to make it good.

By my measure, the following items are awesome:

• Dinosaurs
• Robots
• Spies
• Detectives
• Cowboys
• Knights
• Guitars (drums are acceptable, but barely)
• Spaceships (really, anything that flies)
• Monsters (or other strange creatures)
• Super-powers (I suppose you could just say the metaphysical – this could be anything from telepathy to time travel to concussive eyebeams)

Your mileage may vary, and obviously there are other things that could be put on here, but basically these are my ingredients for fun. And what do they all have in common? They are all found in stories for children. Whether it’s Labyrinth, Where the Wild Things Are, Transformers, Batman, or My Little Pony, any given person will likely encounter all of these items well before they start getting distracted by the only thing that gets added to the list later in life: Sex.

We put them into stories for kids because there are certain urges, dreams, and concepts that are universal, that pretty much everyone can enjoy at a young age. This is all before social pressures force some of us to give up on the fantastic. Maybe that stuffy professor refuses to acknowledge it now, but when he was young he laughed at Plastic Man as much as the next kid, or she rocked out to Jem.

Ignoring all of this is folly. A good writer can take items from childhood and weave them into stories that are perfectly entertaining for adults (see, for example, every Pixar film ever made). Doing so taps into emotions that have existed in people for years, possibly long forgotten, and allows the writer to introduce new layers of meaning to those feelings. These items have built-in significance and metaphor, so really half the work is already done (my own story, “The Overdue Protocols,” is a good example of that).

It’s not lazy or hackery to build on what’s been done already. Just make sure that something new and fresh is added (after all, even Ulysses was based on the Odyssey). And, for all our sake, make it fun.

Alexander Burns‘s most current story “With the Band” is currently available at Every Day Fiction.  He lives in Fort Worth, Texas. He writes because he doesn’t have a basement in which to build robots or time machines, and because he is terrible at math. His work has appeared at Every Day Fiction, A Thousand Faces, 10Flash, The Future Fire, and Big Pulp.