Flash Fiction Chronicles

A. S. Andrews won First Place in the String-of-10 THREE Flash Fiction Contest sponsored in February 2011 by Flash Fiction Chronicles. The contest challenge was to use four out of ten prompt words in a 250 or fewer word story.  Those words were: DUST-SUSPECT-VIRGIN-COOL THINGS-CRACKLING-UNWRITTEN-FEEDER-QUARREL-DOGGED-JAM.  An aphorism was provided for inspiration, but not necessarily to be used in the story.  Here is the one for this contest: A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.   –Mohandas Gandhi

To find out more about the contest, go to String-of-10 THREE Winners.

A. S. Andrews‘ winning story, “Pretending” will be published at Every Day Fiction on Friday, April 29.  Read her interview below by Michelle Reale; read “Pretending” tomorrow.

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Interview with First Place Winner A. S. Andrews

By Michelle Reale

Flash Fiction Chronicles: Tell us a bit about the evolution of this piece.

Anna S. Andrews: When I looked at the string of words, I made a list of the first things that came to mind.  One of them was the phrase “feeder fish.”  That got me thinking about all the goldfish I had as a kid, and how, at the time, I had

no idea they were sold to be eaten by bigger fish!   Then I thought what if a person ate one?  And the story took off from there.

FFC: How does writing to a prompt differ from generating a story from your own idea?

ASA:  I don’t know that it differs all that much.  A lot of my ideas are prompted by things I see in everyday life, often images that stick for some reason or other.  A prompt provides another source of images, and from the images come the ideas.

FFC: What challenges does the compression in these small pieces create for you, the writer?  For the reader?

ASA: As a writer, the challenge is to create movement and depth, to bring the story to life.  You want to give the characters life and history and texture, all in a tiny space.  As a reader, you have to have an open mind, and be willing to imagine the possibilities, because there is only so much a writer can give you in a small piece!

FFC: All of the winning stories left me wanting more, in part, because all of them had amped-up imagery which kept me engaged.  Take one of the images from your story and tell me how it came about

ASA: Let’s see, how about Darryl as a grizzly bear.  Once I’d decided to have Darryl eat the fish, I wanted to make it realistic. I’d just been to the zoo, and I have young children who love to pretend at snack time, so I thought, why not have them play zoo animals and Darryl takes it too far?  So I made Darryl a grizzly bear, since they’re big and fierce, and also eat fish.

FFC: Tell me about averages per story:

• average time to write a story
• average number of words
• average number of re-writes
• average number of people you share it with for feedback
• average number of places you submit one piece at a time

ASA: My average time to write a story varies with the word count.  I write everything from twitter fiction to poetry to novels.  For flash fiction, I generally write the first draft in a day, and my average number of words is 600 – 700, unless I’m writing for something in particular with a shorter length (twitter, for example, or this contest!).

I do a lot of re-writes. 12 on average, but sometimes more.  Not all of these are full-blown re-writes.  Sometimes a sentence or a paragraph or two just doesn’t sound right, so I’ll play with it, set it aside, play with it some more, set it aside, read it again, over and over until I like it.

I don’t usually get feedback on my shorter fiction before I send it out, and so far, I’ve only submitted to one place at a time.

FFC: Which writers inspire you the most?

ASA: I read so many different things it’s hard to choose!  Writers I’ve been reading for years, like Stephen King, John Updike, and Douglas Coupland.  Success stories like J. K. Rowling, and, don’t hate me here, Stephenie Meyers.  But every day, I’m inspired by writers whose stories pull me in and make me feel or make me think.  Also, by writers who keep going.  All the people who sign up for challenges like NaNoWriMo, and keep writing!  The folks doing Write1Sub1 this year.  The folks I’ve met over the years that are slowly but surely getting their work out there and published.

FFC: Which book have you read that you wished you wrote?

ASA: Wrote word for word?  None.  I’ve never quite thought of it that way!  But one of the earliest books I remember reading that really made me stop and say, wow, I want to write a book like that, was “A Wrinkle in Time.”

FFC: Make a 30 word “story” with the following words:

• cheese
• match
• rag
• cough drop
• hair band
• Dalmatian

ASA: Daisy’s hair band hurts.  She yanks it out, sucks her cough drop, wipes her brow with a rag.  Notices her Dalmation eating cheese. Slams the ball.  “Match point, you bastard!”

FFC: Have the last word:  Give us your thoughts on being one of the winners—and again, congratulations!

ASA: Well, really, it feels great to have won!  Very exciting!  Thank you!  And a big congratulations to all the other winners!

_____________________

A. S. Andrews enjoys writing short fiction.  She lives in the Los Angeles foothills, but you can find her online at http://asandrews.com.

Romit Berger placed second in the String-of-10 THREE Flash Fiction Contest sponsored in February 2011 by Flash Fiction Chronicles. The contest challenge was to use four out of ten prompt words in a 250 or fewer word story.  Those words were: DUST-SUSPECT-VIRGIN-COOL THINGS-CRACKLING-UNWRITTEN-FEEDER-QUARREL-DOGGED-JAM.  An aphorism was provided for inspiration, but not necessarily to be used in the story.  Here is the one for this contest: A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.   –Mohandas Gandhi

To find out more about the contest, go to String-of-20 THREE Winners.

Now for:

TODAY SHE WILL WRITE COOL THINGS

Fiction by Romit Berger

T

angled orbs of dusty words roll in the desert of her thoughts – her inner Wild West ghost town. She chases elusive unwritten verse, fugitive story schemes. Riding high, her spinning cerebral lariat might ensnare exotic phrases, peacocky opening lines. Riding low, she tries to lure tiny gaunt creatures into her barren mind-cave. They eye her with suspicion and vanish into the dark.

Ghost town. No music. No saloon girls. No drunken laughter.

Most days, the bucket of virgin hope will emerge empty from the bottom of her inspiration well, its rusty chain crackling, its form echoing hollow against the cold stone.

But sometimes, her mind is a feeder – all life thrives on her ranch. Fertile bovines jam her shed’s door, bursting out to luscious meadows. Crops quarrel to ripen in her fields. She is dogged on reaping a bounteous harvest today.

__________________________________

Interview with Romit Berger

Interviewed by Michelle Reale

Flash Fiction Chronicles: Tell us a bit about the evolution of this piece.

RB: I am not a born writer. I always find it difficult to start writing and develop a story.

The morning I wrote my piece I was contemplating what to write for our next writing group session. I was frustrated with not being able to come up with anything and the phrase that formed itself in my mind was: The desert of her thoughts. Then I sat down to read emails and discovered that a friend from our writing group sent me a link for the String-of-10 Flash Fiction Contest.

That day the ten words you listed for the contest were like a gift sent ‘from above’ to enable me to describe precisely how I feel about the difficulty of writing. I could clearly see the images in my mind’s eye and put them down in words.
The piece actually wrote itself…

FFC: How does writing to a prompt differ from generating a story from your own idea?

RB: Most times I need a prompt in order to generate a story because my creativity has always been in visual arts and my writing began as an intellectual activity.

FFC: What challenges does the compression in these small pieces create for you, the writer?  For the reader?

RB: I find it much easier to write compressed writing pieces than writing long stories. Writing this piece and an enlightening comment received from my friend in the writing group made it ultimately clear to me that this should be my writing style – prose poem or flash fiction.  For me, as the writer of such pieces, it is a fascinating creative challenge to find the one exact word that would convey the idea and image I wish to portray, and a wonderful feeling when I do.

It may be more demanding for the reader because every word in the piece bears a heavier load of meaning and imagery.

FFC: All of the winning stories left me wanting more, in part, because all of them had amped-up imagery which kept me engaged. Take one of the images from your story and tell me how it came about.

RB: “The desert of her thoughts” generated the whole piece – it resulted in the images of a “Wild West ghost town” and

the contrasting ”luscious meadows.”  And again, I must say that all other words and images just fell into their ‘inevitable’ places…

FFC: Tell me about averages per story.  What is the average amount of time to write a story?

RB: 3 hours.

FFC: Average number of words?

RB: 200

FFC: Average number of re-writes?

RB: 3

FFC: Average number of people you share it with for feedback?

RB: 4

FFC: Average number of places you submit one piece at a time?

RB: 1

FFC: Which writers inspire you the most?

RB: Ian McEwan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jeffrey Eugenides, Kurt Vonnegut, Boris
Akunin

FFC: Which book have you read that you wished you wrote?

RB: Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake.”

FFC: Make a 30 word “story” with the following words:

·        cheese

·        match

·        rag

·        cough drop

·        hair band

·      Dalmation

RB: Say “May I?”

Ginger fireworks in a hair band, her bikini sprayed with cough-drop-size spots matching the Dalmatian’s coat.  Sun-struck waves caressing.

She stops.

“Say cheese,” he rags.

FFC: Have the last word:  Give us your thoughts on being one of the winners—and again, congratulations!

Delightful surprise, a sense of accomplishment, an immediate desire to write more—and thanks!

__________________________

Romit Berger is a graphic designer and artist, living in Prague for the past ten years. In 2008 she joined a writing group – “Morning” is the first piece she ever wrote. English is not her native language but she graduated from an international school, so it has been a part of her life ever since.

She  feels that the dual process of finding words to describe mind images and illustrating written words, opens a new exciting dimension of creativity for her.  Her work can be seen on www.romitcom.com

by Jim Harrington

Additions
Weave Magazine (1,500)
Feathertale
 (1,500)
Journal of Microliterature (1,000)
Shotgun Honey
 (700)
Thunderclapp Press
 (700)
The Short Humour Site
 (500)
Monkeybicycle
 (1,500, one sentence)
Short, Fast and Deadly (420 characters)

Deletions–ceased publication
Glossolalia
Every Day Weirdness

Editor interviews added
Weave Magazine

______________________

Jim Harrington discovered flash fiction in 2007, and he’s read, written, studied, and agonized over the form since. His Six Questions For. . . blog provides editors and publishers a place to “tell it like it is.” He’s also the Markets Editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles’ Flash Markets Page. He can be contacted at jpharrin [at] gmail [dot] com.

Karolyn J. Reddy placed third in the String-of-10 THREE Flash Fiction Contest sponsored in February 2011 by Flash Fiction Chronicles. The contest challenge was to use four out of ten prompt words in a 250 or fewer word story.  Those words were: DUST-SUSPECT-VIRGIN-COOL THINGS-CRACKLING-UNWRITTEN-FEEDER-QUARREL-DOGGED-JAM.  An aphorism was provided for inspiration, but not necessarily to be used in the story.  Here is the one for this contest: A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.   –Mohandas Gandhi

To find out more about the contest, go to String-of-20 THREE Winners.

Now for:

WINGLESS

Fiction by Karolyn J. Reddy

No matter how much dirty sex we have, I’ll always be virgin to your whore. In the unwritten history that crackles between our bodies I remain untouched, whole, waiting for someone whom you refuse to be. All of my delicious embarrassments – the reality of fluid and sweat and bruises and bite-marks–don’t exist in your vision of me, where I am only a pale set of wings lifting me above our bed, the car, the couch, my office, the tent, the earth. I doggedly contort my limbs into the shapes I think you want, but those shapes are out of reach, impossible for a terrestrial being let alone for me, the resistant angel. My muscles won’t conform, my joints fail me. Even my tongue won’t cooperate. My mind can’t think its way out of a celestial box that doesn’t belong to me, and so I become what you think I am. Virgin to your whore.

Not until years later will I understand that you are the one waiting, waiting for a return to a self you gave up on long ago, a self who believes as much in dirty sex as she believes in the raw purity of love. Then you will finally become an earthly being, equal parts virgin and whore, whole and broken, wingless and winged.

#####

Interview with Karolyn J. Reddy

Interviewed by Michelle Reale

Flash Fiction Chronicles: Tell us a bit about the evolution of this piece.

Karolyn J. Reddy: “Wingless” evolved quickly. I hadn’t done any non-academic writing in a long while, so when a friend posted about the contest I decided to use it as a motivator. Perhaps it worked out that I’d written nothing by the deadline because I had no time for the usual self-doubt or internal criticism; I simply had to write in the moment. Since I’d recently argued about the speciousness of the virgin/whore binary I took virgin from the list of words and ran with it. The basic elements of the story emerged in a flurry and I uploaded it after a few hours of fine-tuning. Of course I later did more tuning so it’ll be strange to see the original again!

FFC: How does writing to a prompt differ from generating a story from your own idea?

KJR: I find prompts liberating, in part because I see them as inroads into my own ideas rather than as something separate. They help me open up to the stories I want to tell by redirecting some of the pressure – instead of feeling lost in the immensity of my desires and dreams as a writer, I can work within the boundedness of specific guidelines. Plus if what I write to a prompt doesn’t turn out well, I can move on from it more easily because I have less invested in the source than when I start with my ideas alone.

FFC:  What challenges does the compression in these small pieces create for you, the writer?  For the reader?

KJR: I always struggle with perfectionism, but especially when working on short pieces. Physically seeing the whole story on one page challenges my capacity to let go and to remember that I’ll always have more and better things to say, whether in two hundred words or in two hundred pages. In terms of reading, I think small pieces challenge us to slow down and spend time with nuance. Flash fiction works superficially well with a rush-rush-rush pace, but (as with many things that move fast) we miss so much if we fail to pause and take in all that the work offers. And for both writers and readers, I love that small pieces encourage us to experience the richness of the miniscule.

FFC: All of the winning stories left me wanting more, in part, because all of them had amped-up imagery which kept me engaged.  Take one of the images from your story and tell me how it came about

KJR: Hmm. Well, one of the first images in the story came directly from the prompt, with unwritten and crackling – “the unwritten history that crackles between our bodies.” I wrote the piece soon after enduring an unexpected and painful change, a change that underscored for me how the histories and identities we imagine for ourselves exert as much power as do our lived realities. If that particular image succeeds in leaving readers wanting more I’ll be thrilled because it honestly bears with it multiple unwritten histories.

FFC:  Tell me about averages per story:

·      average time to write a story

KJR: Anywhere from a few hours to a few years. Depends on the story, I guess!

·      average number of words

KJR: Around five or six thousand for stories, but usually no more than a few hundred for poems.

·      average number of re-writes

KJR: Innumerable tiny revisions – obssessions over this word or that word – but probably three or four larger re-writes.

·      average number of people you share it with for feedback

KJR : My three sisters are my first readers, so at least that many. Ideally, I like to workshop pieces with a handful of writers.

·      average number of places you submit one piece at a time – Ask me in a year – “Wingless” was my first submission to anything beyond my college literary magazine, and I graduated more than a decade ago.

FFC: Which writers inspire you the most?

KJR: Wow – such an impossible question to answer! Today, the first who comes to mind is Gloria Anzaldúa. I’m teaching her in my class this week and I never cease to learn something new from her work. The same goes for bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Eduardo Galeano, Meena Alexander, and Mary Oliver. I return most often to Rilke and Austen, and Rachel Guido deVries was one of my first mentors and she inspires me to this day. Really, the world surrounds me with beautiful writers and beautiful writing of every sort.

FFC:  Which book have you read that you wished you wrote?

KJR: Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats. It weaves together so many of the things I care about in writing and in life, and even though I haven’t read it in a few years it stays with me in the best way.

FFC: Make a 30 word “story” with the following words:

·      cheese

·      match

·      rag

·      cough drop

·      hair band

·      Dalmation

No match for my nerves nor never-to-come government cheese, I wrap a Dalmation-dyed rag of a hair band round my wrist, bite into my cough drop, keep waiting.

Keep waiting.

FFC:  Have the last word:  Give us your thoughts on being one of the winners—and again, congratulations!

KJR: Thanks for the congratulations and for your work on the contest! The unanticipated delight of placing third couldn’t have come at a better time – just the experience of sending something out into the world meant so much, let alone sending it out into a world of generous readers. And it’s kept me connected with FFC, a reward in and of itself.

____________________________

Karolyn Reddy has a day job involving writing of a different sort: she teaches introduction to composition and studies literature, critical theory, rhetoric and composition at the University of California, Davis. Before entering graduate school she worked in social justice and community organizing, and she sees her recent return to writing fiction and poetry as a way of uniting all of these interests.

Look for the String-of-10 Three 2nd place winner this coming Monday.

by A. T. Greenblatt

The beauty of flash fiction stories is that you can read one from beginning to end in the time it takes to eat your breakfast. And though they only take one sitting to get through, they can still deliver all the emotional impact and satisfaction of a novel.  Which is what makes flash fiction so addictive.

But even though these stories are only 1000 words, flash fiction is not easy to write.

In the last six months of slush reading for Every Day Fiction, I’ve noticed several traits that make some flash pieces more effective than others.  Being the compulsive writer I am, I started experimenting with this story type; trying to apply what I learned and testing my theories.  This is an ongoing study, but according to my results so far, here are a few reliable rules to follow:

1. Make it simple enough to do the story justice.  First, consider what 1,000 words are: Four pages double spaced.  Next, imagine a bleary eyed reader who has either just battled the morning commute or will shortly.  Now, consider your story.  How involved is your plot?  How much time do you devote to descriptions?  How wordy are your words?  Flash fiction is not the form for complicated story arcs, long scene set ups, or endless run-on sentences.  Make it bite-size and digestible, with a strong beginning, middle, and end.
2. Make it complex enough so that the story stays with the reader for the rest of day.  To do this, it’s good to apply the same philosophy that’s used for micro-fiction, which is to hint at the larger story which the piece is a part of before and after the writing begins and ends.  This is difficult, at best, and hair ripping, curse hurling, painfully frustrating at worst.  But it’s important.  For me, it’s what makes flash fiction such an effective art form.
3. Make the opening grab the reader by the collars of their ironed shirts.  With flash fiction writing, you don’t have time to ease your reader into the story.  The opening sentence should bring the reader in right away.  This doesn’t mean you need to have a train wreck or a gunfight to kick off your story with a bang.  All you need is one good sentence to get the reader curious enough to fall haplessly into your story.
4. Make the writing seamless, so that the reader forgets that they are, in fact, reading.  It helps to read your piece out loud to yourself so that you can catch all those hidden word snags.  If you do this step right, your readers’ first reactions should be “Damn, the story’s finished.” and then “Damn, my coffee’s finished.”  If you can craft a story that so smooth and compelling it makes breakfast secondary, you have succeeded as a storyteller.
5. Make your characters living, breathing people, to snare the reader’s empathy.  Skimp with the butter on your toast, but not on your character development.  It doesn’t matter that you only have 1000 words to tell your story.  That’s no excuse.  Your characters need to have feelings, regrets, personalities, and flaws.  And a good way to connect to the reader quickly is to make your characters relatable or sympathetic.  For example, most people have had to deal with an annoying sibling or friend at some point in their lives.  So they’ll understand when your main character evens the score by pulling a sly but humorous prank on that irritating brother or best friend.
6. Don’t overcrowd your story. Just like it’s not good to have too much buttered toast in one sitting, it’s not beneficial to have too many characters in a single flash piece.  This makes the story too crowded and confusing.  I would recommend four characters maximum in a flash piece.

The thing is, most of my favorite flash fictions conform to the characteristics above and I’ve had great success when I’ve applied them to my own stories.  Are there exceptions?  Certainly.  But as a general rules, they seem to work well.

When it comes down to it though, the only way to write a story worthy enough to have a place next to your coffee and scones is to experiment.  Then get some honest feedback it.  I’ve found the best way to get feedback is to email your story to your test subjects first thing in the morning and promise them a cup of coffee for their efforts.

Works every time.

____________________________

A. T. Greenblatt works in a firmly non-writing field when the sun is up and writes under a desk lamp at night.  Fueled by a sheer love of books and a tyrannical imagination, she writes the stories that appear over her morning coffee and won’t leave her alone until they are put down on paper.  Her work has been featured in flashquake (scroll to page 57), The Absent Willow Review, Thrillers Killers n’ Chillers, Girls With Insurance, as well as a variety of micro-fiction and twitter fiction magazines.  She writes, raves, and blogs at http://atgreenblatt.com.

I’m going on record that we are now a blogzine.  I just thought of the word because I always have trouble describing exactly what we do  and I was hoping I coined the word, but alas, I have not. Wah!  Still that’s what we are.

by L. McKenna Donovan

In Part I of this two-part article, we talked about storytelling as a bridge between the writer and the reader, about creating a stronger story by knowing from the outset the chasm we wish to cross—be it sadness, joy, tragedy, comedy.

We also talked about keeping our story from falling apart by following our story’s cable all the way to The End.

In Part II, we’ll look at how we explore and ultimately shape our story. This is about narrative.  In the bridge analogy, narrative is our deck of the bridge, i.e., the way a traveler crosses from beginning to end.

Remember:

• story is about character, plot, motivation;
• narrative is about shape, selection, diction.

To illustrate the difference, take a story about forbidden love between two young lovers. Whether forbidden by family or ethnicity or politics or religion, this story has been told many times.  However, the narrative of West Side Story, written by Arthur Laurents, is hugely different than the narrative of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Same story; different narrative.  (Let’s not quibble about West Side Story being a musical, please.)

Superb writers shape their narrative with an indelible awareness of the flexibilities and inflexibilities of language. With a keen ear, they tap into the sounds of words and delve into the structure of sentences.  Priscilla Long, in her truly excellent text, The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life, opens with this observation: “For writers dedicated to their craft, learning the craft never ends”.

How true! To write superb stories we must keep learning; we must continually and consciously extend the range of our narrative skills. This makes sense, but is it really that important?

Yes.

Because our narrative skills must earn the reader’s trust:

• trust that our telling of this story is worth the reader’s time;
• trust that our telling of the story will provide value, be it insight or satire, entertainment or knowledge, laughter or tears;
• trust that in our shaping of the story, we will not cheat the reader with clichéd endings, flimsy motivations, or mundane writing.

So how do we earn a reader’s trust?

We create a narrative as smooth as the paved layers of a bridge deck—a narrative so smooth the writing disappears from the page and the reader slips between the covers of our created world. When we pay attention to our narrative, the reader trusts us, even though few of them will understand the engineering involved in crafting the narrative.

A smooth narrative, by the way, does NOT mean uniform. It does not mean lacking in feeling. A smooth narrative perfects the illusion for the reader so their hearts race, so they laugh, so they cry, so they look feverishly for your next story.

How do we shape a smooth narrative?

Selection and diction.

About Selection

Why not let the sentence perform its meaning? Let short sentences punch. Let long, meandering sentences flow in and around each image, wafting the reader along the swells of sensual detail.

To let our sentences perform their meaning, we must know our sentences.

Thoroughly.

“Writers like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and Colette and Cormac McCarthy and Eavan Boland and Joan Didion and Don DeLillo and Susan Sontag and James Baldwin and William Gass have taken on the sentence as its own project”.

Too often as school children, we were soured on sentences due to excruciating grammar drills. The mechanics were drummed into our reluctant, uncomprehending heads, but the melody, the music, the singing, was  neglected.  Sad. Very sad.

After all, what carpenter isn’t aware of the difference between rosewood and oak? What carpenter doesn’t know when to use a sledge hammer versus a nail punch?

The same goes for writers and our sentences.  Writers who take on the practice of sentences, learn to sing in their narrative.  They earn their readers’ trust, and in the long run, their readers’ loyalties.

There are many good texts on the sentence, though several stand out in my opinion.  For one, The Art of Styling Sentences, by K.D. Sullivan and Ann Longknife. This illustrated workbook lays out twenty basic sentence patterns. The text includes exercises that truly sharpen the eye. They teach us to see sentences.

Another great (though excruciatingly detailed) text is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style.

Both of these texts provide a trove of beautiful sentences selected from well-crafted literature  and reviewed for why they work so very, very well.

About Diction

In terms of narrative, diction means allowing the sound of the word to perform its work.

Much of our English language recreates sound based upon its intended meaning.  For example, murder is defined as “The unlawful killing of one human by another,” and kill is “To commit murder.”  Basically the same word, yes?  However, listen to the difference in sound. Murder sounds low, ominous; it lingers on the lips as if being savored; it growls of intent.  Kill is definitive, crisp, and impersonal; it’s over in a flash.  Also, examine another word in that same family: “assassinate,” which is again to murder or kill, but it takes on a hissing of repeated esses. It suggests conspiracy, a word itself replete with s-sounds.

Skilled writers pay attention to the sound on the page. They even capitalize on the range of sound from lowest to highest frequencies.

Lowest Frequency:

Long o (boo)

Long o (bone)

Short o (book)

Highest Frequency:

Long e (bee)

Long a (bay)

Long i (buy)

Notice how the lowest frequency sounds are soothing? And how the highest frequency sounds are vital, energetic, and snap at the calves of our attention?

How would you use this knowledge to create a smooth narrative?

If your character is agitated, nervous, scared, use higher frequency diction, i.e., words like shriek. If your character can barely speak, use words like moan.

Diction in the hands of skilled writers creates shadow and shade and light and sense.

In conclusion:

When you create a smooth narrative, you earn your reader’s trust.

Remember:

1. Select your diction deliberately. Consider the song on the page.

1. Select your sentences so they perform your meaning.  Let them gesticulate in agitation; let them flow and ebb with movement and pauses and uncertainty and whirls and reversals and intent. Use long vowel sounds. Let your sentences rise and fall and carry on them the readers’ emotions.

Your readers will love you.

___________________________________

McKenna Donovan is the founder and Executive Director of To Write Well, an online writer’s workshop. Her writing crosses a landscape of fiction, non-fiction, and creative non-fiction. Her work has appeared in literary magazines, such as The Aquila Review, the Surrey International Writers Anthology, and Diversity Woman Magazine.  One of her favorite short stories, The Story Rug, can be found at Sniplits, an audio publisher of short stories and short story anthologies.  She is currently completing the first novel of a tetrology, which blends historical and science fiction based on the premise that “mankind’s thought is not entirely his own.” From her website, she teaches two premier courses on diction and narrative skills: Impact of Style I: Language and Emotion, and Impact of Style II: Figurative Language.

by L. McKenna Donovan

A writer friend recently made a curious statement, which gave me pause, then gave me pause again—that for her a piece of written work is not complete until it’s published, because for her a piece of written work is a conversation with the reader.

I like that.

Our work is a conversation.

So we start that hot, new piece until several chapters (paragraphs?) later, it falls apart. At best, we set the idea aside; at worst, we trash it.  Then we start the next hot, new piece and several chapters (sentences?) later it also falls part.

Why?

The usual comment is “I haven’t figured out ‘what happens next.’ ”

The reason we don’t know what happens next is simple: we’re trying to write like we read. We “begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop,” as the King told Alice in Alice in Wonderland.

That’s how we read, so why not how we write?

Because to complete a piece—to hold that conversation with the reader—we must write to a structure. Professional writers who produce on a consistent basis not only write—timed or otherwise—every day, but they select a structure beforehand. For example, poets will choose to write a poem as prose or haiku or sonnet, and their creativity is set loose within that structure. Yes, the structure might change, but they start with a structure in mind.

T.S. Eliot once wrote: “When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost—and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.”

If you don’t believe Eliot, consider this: At the July 2004 Pacific Northwest Writers Association conference, three writers chaired the panel called “Work Habits of Highly Successful Authors.” At that point in time, Carolyn See had completed six novels, three non-fiction books, and co-authored five more books; Donald E. McQuinn had completed nine novels; and Terry Brooks, his amazing twenty-three novels. Each of the three has the same two habits: 1) write 1,000 words/day, and 2) write into a structure.

Yes, write into a structure.

If we consider what Eliot, See, McQuinn, and Brooks achieved with writing into a structure, why shouldn’t we?

Bear with me here for a few moments as I share with you how I view the relationship between creativity and structure.

I think of storytelling as a bridge with me (the writer) standing on one spit of land and you (the reader) standing on the other spit of land. The chasm that lies between us—let’s call it a river—is a flow of joy, sadness, mysticism, romance, mystery, loss, love, adventure. My first job as the writer is to determine which river I wish to cross: love?

Good. It’s a love story.

My second job is to determine the ending, i.e., where the reader is standing. Is my story a tragedy or a happily-ever-after story?

Happily-ever-after?

Good.

Now back to our structure. Before a bridge can be built, engineers pound stanchions into the river. I envision those stanchions as the turning points in my story. Maybe the first one is “New Situation,” where my lover is deserted by a long-term love (or death separates the two); maybe the second stanchion, i.e., turning point, is “Point of No Return,” where my lover is being forced into a new relationship in order to save a brother from financial ruin.

Good. I have a structure. I have a river. I have an ending point.

Notice that my creativity is only limited by my current selection of “love,” and “lover,” and “New Situation / Point of No Return.”

As I write, I explore who this lover is, what makes this lover struggle with the loss, what’s in the lover’s backstory to make this so terribly, terribly difficult for my lover. Lines of dialogue come out of nowhere; images of the lover’s past plague me until they fall on the page. This is the discovery process of writing, and it’s exciting, energizing.

Fulfilling.

Now the next part of the storytelling process amazes me—constantly!—with its richness and strength: the strength of the “cable” (bear with me here).

Sometimes a story is going “wrong,” and I can sense it but not figure it out. At least not until I “come back to the cable.” (I even have these words in large type on the bulletin board above my desk: Come back to the cable. Can’t figure out WHY a character does such-and-such? Come back to the cable. Can’t figure out what happens next? Come back to the cable.)

So what is the cable?

For a bridge, the cable is the set of wires, twisted and wrapped around each other in a predetermined design—wires that strengthen each other as they ascend to the stanchions, carrying an amazing amount of weight, including the bridge deck the cars drive over.

For storytelling, the cable is the set of wires, twisted and wrapped around each other, but these wires are characters and backstories. They are history. They are plot and motivations. They are setting.

The strength of this story cable comes when these wires are twisted in the same direction—all pointing toward the stanchion of New Situation, all swooping towards Point of No Return, all racing toward the ending, which was selected right up front.

However, there are times when my love story with a happily-ever-after ending turns into a tragedy. The stanchions are still valid; the bridge is still anchored at both ends — the writer and the reader—but now the twisted and wrapped cable ascends to the stanchions and bears the weight of the story using a love-lost tragedy rather than a love-found drama. My writing process discovered a better ending, but at this point, all that needs to change is the cable.

Story problems are resolved along the cable; character issues are resolved along the cable; missing plot points are resolved—you got it, along the cable. By knowing my ending, I have not sacrificed my ability to explore, discover, and amaze myself. Nor have I sacrificed my ability to change the story. By writing to a structure, we keep writing. We complete the story; we complete the conversation with the reader.

We publish.

The final part of building your story “bridge” is the deck, i.e., the narrative. We shall talk about narrative as the deck of your bridge in my next post.

So if you’re still thinking structure limits your creativity, I would like you to consider that the Putrajaya Bridge in Malaysia conforms to all engineering specifications, all weight-bearing mathematics, and all structural engineering limitations. And what a thing of beauty!

And at night, let there be light.

As a creative writer —whether fiction or non-fiction–we have an endless supply of ideas, emotions, images, characters, settings, places, lines of dialogue. But when we write like a reader—when we “begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop”— we often build only part of a bridge. At this point, two things happen: either we give up on our story or it takes an extraordinarily long time.

We have too many conversations to share with our readers to be stymied by a half-built bridge.

I hope you return here to read Part II: How Narrative Builds the Deck between Writer and Reader.  This will be published at Flash Fiction Chronicles this coming Thursday.

P.S. And in case you’re wondering, yes, I wrote that last paragraph first—it helped me keep sight of the most important point of this article—and then I wrote the first paragraph, to ensure my conversation with you had come full circle.

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McKenna Donovan is the founder and Executive Director of To Write Well, an online writer’s workshop. Her writing crosses a landscape of fiction, non-fiction, and creative non-fiction. Her work has appeared in literary magazines, such as The Aquila Review, the Surrey International Writers Anthology, and Diversity Woman Magazine.  One of her favorite short stories, “The Story Rug,” can be found at Sniplits, an audio publisher of short stories and short story anthologies.  She is currently completing the first novel of a tetrology, which blends historical and science fiction based on the premise that “mankind’s thought is not entirely his own.” From her website, she teaches two premier courses on diction and narrative skills: Impact of Style I: Language and Emotion, and Impact of Style II: Figurative Language.

by Walter Giersbach

These are hard times for writers due to a Malthusian conflict – there are more writers than readers.  In the near future, there will be room for just 20 authors — those featured on The New York Times Book Review best-seller list.  (This may devolve to zero readers when the NYT ceases publishing.)  Most writers’ work will then be consigned to desk drawers or photocopies they sell outside supermarkets.

But, there’s hope.  Four “hopes,” specifically, that you can use to gain writing fame and fortune.

1. Censorship.  Google some secrets that might embarrass the CIA, NSA, or people in high places, then go to print-on-demand with your manuscript and order 50,000 books.  The government will buy up all copies and reimburse you.  Operation Dark Heart by Anthony A. Shaffer irked the Pentagon, Defense Intelligence Agency, and a few other espionage agencies in 2010.  The Pentagon paid St. Martin’s Press $43,000 for all 10,000 copies, then pulped them.

2. Insult that Religion with No Name.  This is somewhat dangerous, so first secure your family in Arizona where even children can carry guns.  If no one pays any attention to your turgid-but-blasphemous book, notify an imam.  He will issue a fatwa to kill you.  You then join your family in Arizona (after calling The New York Times) and wait for the royalties to roll in from the resultant publicity.

3. Build a Ghost Audience.  Contact all of your friends by e-mail, texting, Tweeting, and Facebooking.  Instruct them to go to their local bookstore and demand your book.  You don’t actually have to write it yet.  When thousands of people begin screaming for, say, Existentialism Takes a Pratfall by [insert your name], publishers will come running to you.  This happened in 1957 when radio personality Jean Shepherd had his audience demand I, Libertine, a non-existent book about an 18th century rake.  Three months later, Ballantine rushed the book into print.

4. Calling Tree, or Prayer Chain.  Call it what you will.  The author needs to have 10 friends each call 10 of their friends who, in turn, call 10 more friends.  Arrange to meet on a Saturday afternoon at a central, urban location like New York City’s Union Square.  The police will be very perplexed.  So will the TV and newspaper reporters.  They’ll want to know why you’re all demonstrating.  Everyone should insist they’re not protesting, just minding their own business and thinking about your book.  This is benevolence at its best.  Like a good Japanese wabi sabi print, the space becomes solid and the non-event takes on substance.

Some people may accuse you of perpetrating a cheap marketing trick, like telling everyone it’s your birthday so they’ll give you presents.  What you’re really doing is opening the floodgates of communication.

Rallies are fundamental grassroots efforts by people who believe in a cause.  They’re a manifestation of our popular culture.  With the demise of culture and any pretense of serious thought today, you will have created Astroturf — bright, green grass that is plastic and artificial.  Just like money.

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Walt Giersbach has published a number of crime stories, introducing Newark Detective Mike Mullally in “The Bone Yard”(http://www.bigpulp.com/chill_giersbach_boneyard.html) and “Chain of Events”(http://www.overmydeadbody.com/giersbch.htm).  He’s putting Mullally into a novella now.

In my English classes in high school, I was never one for sonnets or villanelles. I found them to be a bit too restrictive and concluded that I must be a fiction writer, because fiction writers like their space. So you can imagine my surprise when the students in my flash fiction class in the fall almost unanimously reported that our unit on fixed form narratives was their favorite.

A fixed form narrative is basically a story that has rules that dictate its structure.   Think of them as the prose equivalent to poems that have prescribed lengths, rhyme schemes, etc. In prose, these fixed forms can be “organic” (like a story that masquerades as a series of Facebook status updates), or “abstract” (built around specific criteria, like word count, sentence count, and so on).

The more I thought about my students’ attraction to fixed forms, the more it made sense. Writers love writing prompts because they help generate ideas. But rather than offering students an idea to respond to, fixed forms help shape their work stylistically. This kind of play allows them a chance to be adventurous, forces them to try on new types of sentences, and refuses to let them settle for the first phrasings that pop into their heads.

In class, we tried out a few forms from Bruce Holland Rogers’ list (which is great, and can be found here). Then I asked the students to group up and invent their own fixed form narrative, complete with a name, a list of rules, and an example written by their group. Each group presented and we tried them all on for size. I wrote along with them and found my old fear of rule-based writing melt away.

I don’t know of any magazines that actively seek fixed form narratives (anyone?), so for now the added challenge of taking on these forms is that the resulting stories have to be brilliant in their own right, not just as examples of the form, since editors may or may not even know what you’re responding to. But fixed form narratives are also great for generative play. Once you have the idea and a few lovely images or sentences in hand, you can knock out the scaffolding and re-write the piece sans constraints.

I’ve got my eye on fixed form narratives as something I imagine we’ll be seeing more of as time goes on. Do hop over to Rogers’ website and try a few out on your own.

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Aubrey Hirsch is a native of Cleveland, Ohio. Her stories, essays and poems have appeared in literary journals both in print and online including Third Coast, Hobart,SmokeLong Quarterly, Vestal Review, The Los Angeles Review, PANK, Annalemma, and The Minnetonka Review. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has also been honored with a nomination for the Micro Award and as a top-25 finalist in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open.  Her posts appear regularly in this spot the first Monday of every month.