by Joe Kapitan

Once in a while, I read a piece of flash fiction that really sticks with me. Scott Garson’s “Hourly,”  published online recently by Matter Press along with five other short fictions, is one of those stories, and it makes a great case study for the importance of word choice.

HOURLY by Scott Garson

They gave me a job at Halloween Town. Strip mall with vacancies. Sad. I was a wizard, vaguely swinging my wand. “Everything change,” I commanded.

This sophisticated and powerful story is only twenty-five words long, so each and every word carries four percent of the load. There’s no room for fluff or filler; each word has to have forethought, and a solid reason to remain there after the editing.

The first two words fascinate me—“They gave.”

First thought—why “They”? Third person plural is so detached and unfamiliar. Note that it’s not Uncle Johnny or the nice lady next door or any of the known persons that would usually help one locate a job. The reason for that detachment doesn’t become evident until later. And “gave”? The passive voice speaks volumes. The character didn’t “find” a job, “land” a job, or even “get” a job. No active voice verb here. The job was given, almost as if the character wasn’t seeking it and only reluctantly accepted.

I love how one word can paint a whole scene. Look at the word “vacancies.”  When I read it, I immediately picture a tired Midwestern city, its industries shuttered, its workers gone, streets of homes still up for sale, Halloween Town one of the few teeth remaining in the darkened, gaping frown of the beleaguered strip mall. So much mileage from that single word!

Most writers know that verbs are the engines, nouns are structural, and adjectives add layers, but adverbs rarely get any love. In Scott’s story, “vaguely” is a hero and does far more than its share. A different character in a different story may have swung the wand “fiercely,” “determinedly,” “hopefully.” Instead, our character goes through the motions. It’s such a portrait of resignation and defeat. Didn’t the Harry Potter series teach us that nothing good comes of half-hearted spell-casting? Without conviction, nothing will change in Scott’s unnamed town—not the “they,” not the “vacancies,” and certainly not the “vaguely-lived” lives of the people that are left behind.

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Joe Kapitan writes from a brick house surrounded by pines, southwest of Cleveland. From there, troublesome stories have escaped out onto the internet or into print. Like these: A Late Winter’s Conversation and “Art is Dead.”

by Jim Harrington

Market Added

• The Laughter Shack (500, varies) publishes comedy in any genre
• Lurid Lit ($, 500-1,000, unknown) publishes “literary equivalent of a good B-Movie”

Editor Interview Added

• Cheek Teeth (1,000, monthly) open to all genres
• Black Heart Magazine (1,500 & 500, weekly) open to all genre

Market Deleted

• Dog Oil Press — declared “dead” market by Duotrope

Flash Fiction 101

• Flash Fiction: What’s It All About — advice listing Dos and Don’ts of writing flash

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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. You can read his stories on his blog. He can be contacted at jpharrin [at] gmail [dot] com.

by Rumjhum Biswas

Nathan Rosen is NOT a physicist! (Though I doubt that would handicap him from writing a bite-sized piece of physics related horror story!) Nathan Rosen is a number of other things though–actor, singer, pirate ( a singing one!) , writer, editor, Notary Public and horrorist. In his own words, his skills and talents are strange ones.

Out of all these disparate activities or personae if I may call them that, we are concerned with specifically two. The editing part and the horrorist bit.  Put these two things together and you get Nathan Rosen the founder and editor of MicroHorror, the world’s largest free online archive of short-short horror fiction. In this interview, I invite you to sink your teeth into a lot more Nathan than his websites allow. One more thing, there are still a couple of more days to go before Microhorror’s Micro Horror Contest closes on –31st October is the deadline–so if you have a 666 word length horror piece, now is the moment to send it in.

Rumjhum Biswas: Do you believe in spooks and things that go bump in the night? Have you ever seen a ghost?

Nathan Rosen: I suppose that depends on your definition of belief. For that matter, what do we mean by “ghost”? I’m a skeptic and a scientist for the most part, and I’ve never personally witnessed anything that couldn’t be explained by mundane phenomena. I always keep an open mind, though; I’ll happily go on ghost hunts, and I’ve heard stories from others that have made chills run down my spine. I’m not out to prove or disprove anything.

RB: What is this thing you have about horror? Did anything horrifyingly scary ever happen to you?

NR: I’ve been fortunate enough to have never suffered any truly horrifying life experiences, and I suppose that’s part of horror’s appeal. It lets us feel those deep, visceral emotions without being in any real danger, and gives us a safe way to explore our own limits.

RB: Take us to the beginning of your horrific journey. Did you look for monsters under your bed as a kid?

NR: I was a coward as a child. Everything scared me. I’d run up the stairs in the dark and leap into my bed, certain that something or other was going to grab me. But despite all this, I was still fascinated by horror. For years I could be found staring mesmerized at lurid VHS boxes (remember those?). I was far too scared to watch the movies themselves, but I just couldn’t keep myself away from looking at those illustrations. (And speaking of illustrations, another great childhood horror influence was the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series, by Alvin Schwartz. Stephen Gammell’s ink wash paintings are still terrifying.) But when I hit my teens, I decided to confront it all head-on, and discovered that I love horror and the places it can take your psyche. I’ve never looked back since.

RB: Tell us about the day you opened the crypt, when MicroHorror was brought to life.

NR: I wish I had a tale about some sort of demonic geas  that compelled me to create the site, but the truth is much more mundane: I was bored at work. I needed a little horror boost to get me through the day, so I looked for a site where I could read short-short horror online. I found micro fiction sites, and I found horror sites, but I didn’t find anything that would give me exactly what I wanted, so I decided to start it myself. Of course, then I had to decide on a word limit, and 666 pretty much came in a flash of inspiration: a useful number and a perfect gimmick, all in one. And so a legend was born.

RB: Who according to you are the world’s best horror writers, past and present.

NR: You certainly can’t go wrong with the old masters, like Poe and Lovecraft. If you’re any sort of horror fan at all, you need at least a solid foundation in these two. Nowadays, Joe R. Lansdale never fails to entertain me, and Bentley Little and Jack Ketchum are other favourites. I’d also like to give a plug to Michael Arnzen, who’s got one of the most wicked minds working in short-short horror prose and poetry today. Check his stuff out; you’ll never forget it.

RB: In your FAQs page you say, “Horror, I’ve come to believe, is particularly well suited to the microfiction form, and the best horror microfiction can be as brief and shocking as a punch to the stomach.” Can you give us some examples that best illustrate this, from MicroHorror and/or elsewhere?

NR: I found Stuart Hughes’ story “In His Own Way“  on another website, and it hit me so hard I had to track Stuart down and ask permission to reprint it. It’s not for the squeamish, this one, but it’s a perfect example of the power of micro fiction. In three short paragraphs it builds its weird atmosphere, and then ties it all up with a twist that recasts everything that came before.

RB: Many people are daunted by the prospect of writing horror. Should they be? Is writing horror that hard?

NR: Before you can write horror, you have to open yourself up to it, and that’s the hardest part. Each and every one of us has our own comfortable paradigm, and horror comes from outside of that. You have to take a chance and look beyond the things you know, and when you do that you run the risk of discovering literally anything. It’s difficult, and it’s scary, but I like to think that by pushing those boundaries horror writers are doing a service for all of humanity.

RB: What do you look for in a piece of horror micro fiction, apart from the fact that they should be no more than 666 words and of course “shocking as a punch in the stomach”?

NR: Like any editor, I’m looking for the new and original. That doesn’t mean I dislike stories about old familiar tropes, but I’d like to see them explored in unusual ways. I want good atmosphere, realistic dialogue and characters who are more than just props. And for my own tastes, I love twist endings– I’m a huge fan of the old EC horror comics. If you can twist a story well, and create an ending that brings the whole thing around without cheating, it’s guaranteed to make me smile.

RB: How often do you write horror fiction or poetry yourself?

NR: Not nearly as much as I’d like to, sadly. I’ll dash something off if I feel particularly inspired, but most of the time it’s more important that I work on MicroHorror. My most recent publication was a story in the first issue of Angel Zapata’s 5×5 Fiction.

RB: What mistakes do submitters commit that makes you want to drive a stake through their, well, not hearts, but manuscripts?

NR: For the love of the Old Gods, people, please take care with your spelling and grammar. The English language is the tool you’re using to create your stories, and no good craftsperson abuses tools. If a writer doesn’t care enough to proofread, I’m going to assume that he or she doesn’t care enough to write a good story, either.

RB: Please tell us which stories you liked best from the ones you have published since 2006 in MicroHorror.

NR: There are so many brilliant stories that if I started picking out certain favourites I’d be sure to miss others, and then everybody would feel bad. I’d rather hear other people’s favourites. That way I’ll know what stories people most want to see in the inevitable future book.

RB: Can you tell us a bit more about your horror spoken word albums?

NR: I love audio horror, and I love voice acting, so last year I decided to record two spoken-word horror albums. One contains my own stories, and the other is three classic short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft. I had a lot of fun recording them, and frankly I think they sound great– a lot of credit goes to my engineer, Trevor Simpson, who was able to create some incredible sound effects on “The Statement of Randolph Carter.” Both of the albums are available on a pay-what-you-want model at http://microhorror.bandcamp.com/.

RB: Do you watch horror movies as well? Which ones are your favourites?

NR: I most certainly do watch horror movies, whenever I get the chance–like short stories, they’re designed to be taken in in one sitting. I’ve got any number of favourites, including Return of the Living Dead and (the original) The Wicker Man, which makes a perfect double feature with Simon Pegg’s Hot Fuzz. I love TV horror anthology shows, too, like Tales From the Crypt, and right now I’m watching Monsters, a late ’80s Canadian production. But the movie I evangelize more than anything is Phantom of the Paradise: it’s a glam rock horror musical directed by Brian De Palma with songs by Paul Williams. If that description alone doesn’t make you curious, I don’t know what to tell you.

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Rumjhum Biswas lives and writes in Chennai.

by Michelle Reale

Michelle Reale: Len, first of all you are one of my favorite flash fiction writers. Second, you are extremely prolific—lucky for your readers! How do you manage this?

Len Kuntz: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. I’ve wanted to be a writer since age nine, so it’s very flattering and humbling to have someone like my stuff. I’m very lucky, because I retired from the corporate world about six years ago and now I write full time. I try to write every day. I try to get 2,000 to 4,000 words down, but that doesn’t happen very often.

Even though most people call me prolific, the truth is I’m kind of a slacker and should be writing much more than I do. Honestly. I mean, I have the ability to write all day, every day. I just fight what all writers fight—that subconscious which will have us doing almost anything—yard work, dishes—but write.

Michelle: How did you start writing flash fiction?

Len: I didn’t even know what flash was. I started writing seriously about two years ago. They were all 4,000 word short stories. I sent them to the traditional lit journals via postal mail—it was arduous, archaic and, I eventually realized, idiotic. Then I learned about the online literary community. I was fascinated.

It sort of blew my hair off. People like Kim Chinquee, Brandi Wells, xTx, Roxane Gay, Matt Bell and Meg Pokrass—they were the early ones who really inspired me, and I basically just studied the hell out of them, trying to learn the craft by reading everything they wrote and submitting to the places where they got published.

Michelle: You are a poet, as well.  Do you write in both forms concurrently or do you tend to concentrate on one over the other for a certain period  of  time?

Len: Actually, it just depends on what I’m reading at the time. Whenever I read poetry, I feel this huge surge to  compose poetry. Same with flash. Same with novels. When I write a novel, however, I have to consciously stop reading flash and poetry or it’ll pull me too far away from the bigger story.

Novelists are my heroes. Teachers, soldiers and novelists.

Michelle: Which form do you believe expresses what you want to say, best?

Len: Flash is my favorite. I like something sharp and tight, like getting a bullet to the heart, so that the person walks away shaking their head, feeling a sting for the rest of the day, if not longer.

Michelle: One of your predominant themes seems to be the body, which fascinates me. Stories such as “Thoroughly Modern Families,” “Skin,” “Motion Sickness,” and “Medicine and Meat” are incredibly inventive and vivid. How do stories like these come about?

Len: You picked some of my more bizarre pieces there! For longer stories, I usually have a theme or idea in mind. With poetry I find a line I like and just start writing. But I never really thought I had a fixation with “the body.” Maybe I do. Usually my central themes are about broken people, damaged families, abandoned or wounded children. All of the pieces you mentioned above cover those subjects. “Medicine and Meat” is a tough story (“You wouldn’t expect a little girl like me to have such a big penis inside her panties, but I do…”) about rape and vengeance. The body parts are sheer symbolism.

Michelle: Your micro piece “A Parent Your Own Age,” hit me in my solar plexus. I read with an eye towards poignancy. If there is suffering, I am sure to find it. I don’t want to pick apart the piece so much that the mystery and magic is laid entirely bare, but please talk about the writing of this piece.

Len: I wrote that at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop this summer. We were doing days of free writes. One day we were given a selection of titles, so I picked “A Parent Your Own Age.” Without saying too much, I know someone like the woman featured in the story, and so I tried to imagine what her life might have been like—all the raw tragedy—that eventually brought her to the polished, steely sort of way she ended up being as an adult. I think we all have had bad things happen to us, dark secrets and whatnot. I like to bring that to life. I don’t know why, exactly, but it’s the stuff I’m drawn to and that I find interesting. Happy stories don’t do a thing for me.

Michelle: “Happy Campers” made me squirm. You so nailed those types of conversations where people who love each other often have: passive aggressive with anger pulsating just beneath the surface. Does the “chick squirrel” really want the “red-faced curmudgeon” to choke to death in the woods?

Len: Maybe. Well, yes and no. Some spouses have that love/hate thing, don’t they?

Michelle: I have been fortunate on many occasions to receive incredibly kind kudos from you on my work and encouragement to go further. You are a wonderful presence on Facebook and you always have something nice to say to everyone—you are incredibly supportive. Tell me how the online writing community of flash fiction writers inspires you and how it has changed and/or influenced your writing.

Len: Well, Michelle, you’re a fantastic writer. Really, you are, so it’s easy to tell you that. As writers, we’re so lucky to have this incredible community to associate with. It makes the world small. And I love all things writerly. People like Sara Lippman, Meg Tuite, Robert Vaughn, Nicolette Wong, Cheryl Gardner—they’ve really gone out of their way for me and what’s impressive is—with the exception of Sara—I’ve never even met them. I always feel compelled to tell someone when I admire their work. It’s actually a thrill to be able to connect with other authors (remember, I love all things writerly.) Plus, I know how good it feels to have someone say, “Nice job.” It can get very lonely, this writing thing we do, to the point where you go, Why even bother? So, a kind, honest word from someone goes a long way.

Michelle: Who are your flash heroes and why?

Len: There are so many. Here are some I haven’t mentioned yet: Aubrey Hirsch nails it every time. Julie Innis—she can be incredibly poignant or remarkably funny, often at the same time. Riley Michael Parker writes with razor blades. Brian Olio paints gems like “she’s a name you once knew, the death of a star.” Kevin Sampsell says the things we’ve all lived. Barry Graham makes an overloaded ashtray seem sexy. Ben Loory—every one of his stories is a fable with loads of depth. And Sam Pink—I don’t even know if this guy is a real person, but he once wrote a 50 word story about a Jolly Rancher that was brilliant.

Michelle: Give your most sage advice to flash writers new to the form.

Len: Read lots and lots of flash. Write every day. Find a mentor or two. Learn to ask good questions. What do you do when you aren’t writing flash? I read a lot. I’m a runner. Plus I love movies and great TV like “Dexter” and “Six Feet Under”.

Michelle:  Time for Michelle’s “Flash Challenge!”  Here are your words should you choose to accept: Exhibition, bombast, fingernails, spirals, turbulence, plasma, barrage, conjecture and , last but not least, guts.

Len: Here you go…

Monsters

She could be anybody’s monster, but she’s mine to tend. One day my wife says I have to choose and so I do. “Really, Len?” she says. “Really? You’re choosing her?” When we were very young kids, my sister was still happy. She had a filmmaker’s imagination. Then Mom remarried and Sis’s stories got darker and darker. Each night she told me a story about a monster that lived under our bed, how this part-wolf part-serpent would fly the neighborhood at night, searching bedrooms for young children to eat. “You don’t have the guts to leave me,” my wife says with bombast. But I do. I leave. *** At my sister’s, the proof is everywhere–her shredded fingernails, pupils pulsing like copper spirals, the tang of tar hanging heavy yet strangely invisible in her apartment. “It’s not what you think.” She’s a thin sheet, bones, limp flesh and cloth. When we were kids our stepfather used to beat her for no reason, with a barrage of blows. Sometimes he made up reasons to be ruthless. “What?” she asks, smearing a pink plasma of mucus across her cheek. It’s not hard to conjecture how we’ve gotten here, to this moment and this place on the planet, but it doesn’t make this any easier. I make for the door but she blocks the way. “I thought you loved me,” she says. Her hair is a mop of tangles, her skin pale as curdled cream. “I do,” I say. “I do, but I can’t.” “You promised.” Her voice is jagged, laced with desperation. “It’s not too late to start fresh.” She cackles, filling the air with spiced turbulence. “Well, I’m not going to do it. No way. I can’t.” “Fine.” “Call the hotline.” “You’re my hotline.” “I’m not going to kill you. Not a chance.” “It’s not me, you’ll be killing. You know that.” “He died last year.” “No,” she says, jabbing her chest with a finger. “He never died. He’s here and I can’t stand it.” “Please.” “The monster’s still here.” *** That night we sleep under a full moon staring at us with its one, voyeur’s eye. Her head is curled under my arm. “Thank you,” she says. “I mean that.” The pillow doesn’t seem thick enough, my hands don’t seem strong enough, but I’m wrong. I’m wrong about this.

Michelle: Awesome, Len.    Thanks for offering insight into you process and for such a great flash piece!

Len: Thank you so much, Michelle. Your kindness means a great deal to me.

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Len Kuntz lives on a lake in rural Washington State.  His writing appears widely in print and online at such places as Elimae, The New Verse News, Red River Review and also at lenkuntz.blogspot.com.

Check out some of Len’s stories mentioned in this interview:  “Thoroughly Modern Families”, “Skin,” “Motion Sickness,”  “Medicine and Meat,” and “Happy Campers.”

McCarty: I was reading Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King at the time and had fallen in love with Native American literature.  Creation and the power of story are powerful themes.  As a writer, how can you not be attracted to them?  And in the end we’re all reduced to stories and maybe a headstone.

I liked the idea of a character picking up words to make something.  Not write them out but actually pick them up and assemble them. Reading that book and ruminating on the power of creation stories, it had to be his heart.  He was going to recreate himself.

McCarty: It was pretty arbitrary.  Three hundred seemed too much.  Fifty was way too short.  I liked the sound of “150 by day” so I went with it.  I probably should have Googled the phrase first because all the links that come up sound like investment sites.  My blog is probably the worst financial site on the web.

The word count needed to be a small number.  I wanted it to be a real challenge to fit something in there.  I wanted to eliminate digressions.  I wanted to force myself to cut things out.  To not get needlessly word drunk.  I can still get word drunk, but there has to be a need for it.  There isn’t much room for wasted space and when I start writing longer pieces again the skill I’m learning in the blog should serve me well.

McCarty: Stephen King has a great quote comparing short stories with novels that I probably can’t repeat here.  Novels are marriages and short stories are something more immediate and visceral.  Flash fiction is even more so.  It’s the first look that could lead to the marriage.  Or to that other thing.  It’s the shy first kiss filled with implication.

I love the implication.  I have 150 words to work with so oftentimes I need to come up with a way to say something “off the page.”  I don’t have the space to spell it all out.  I can point to something and let the reader fill in the details but it’s only implication on my part.  It was interesting to read the different takes people had on HEART.  They took it in so many different directions.  Being so spartan with the words makes that possible.

There are so many definitions of what flash fiction is and all of them seem too long to me.  I’m sure the phrase “flash fiction” uses the word “flash” to mean “quick” but I think of flash in terms of the flash art you see hanging in tattoo shops.  Those little drawings just ready to go. Almost doodles in a lot of cases.  That term has probably has the same etymology but I think what’s coming out on my blog has more in common with that.

Flash forces an economy of words.  It’s a sort of prose haiku.

McCarty: It adds a sense of play to the writing that usually isn’t there when you sit down to do The Big Work.  With flash, you get the story down and then play a game of “What has to go?”  Or more importantly, “What can’t go?”

Flash is more of a writer’s thing than a reader’s thing.  A good story is a good story.  If people are going to read, they’re going to read.  It can be a hundred and fifty word story about a guy in a train station or it can be a billion word opus about a kid in wizard school.  If it appeals to them, they’re going to do it.

That being said, flash is all first impression.  You don’t win the reader over and then draw them into a larger story because if there’s a larger story, it’s all implied.  You do your thing and, when it’s good, it sticks with the reader.  It gets stuck in their head like a song.  People don’t get novels stuck in their heads.  If they do, they must have very, very big brains.

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SUBMIT

by Shannon Hart Hudnell

As writers, we often find ourselves stuck on a word, a deeper meaning for our stories, or names for our characters. Using books as fundamental tools rather than depending on technology can ease frustration when finding what we’re looking for. The internet often contains inaccuracies or too many choices, whereas books may be considered more reliable sources. Finding the right books to use as tools is critical in helping your skills as a writer. It is also important to do small exercises to hone those skills.

Here are five must-have books (and exercises) to assist with writing:

1. Thesaurus – Thesauruses force us to learn new words, which increase our vocabulary – a very critical part of being a writer. I’ve been carrying one around since high school and have found that the thesaurus is a wonderful tool when I find myself repeating the same word and want to find one with the same or opposite definition.

For example, I was writing a story and noticed that I kept using the word “said” over and over. I didn’t see the word “said” in my thesaurus until I had a “duh!” moment and realized that I had to look up the infinitive - ”say”. The thesaurus gave me more than a handful of other words from which to choose.

Exercise: Choose one word you find yourself using often and research synonyms to use instead.

2. Symbolism book – It is important at times to get to the deeper meaning of an object, color, or place for our stories and symbolism books can often provide us with a new understanding or point of view. For example, if I wanted a particular kind of bird in my story, the symbolism of that bird is very crucial to that particular moment.

One of the best books I have found on this topic is The Encyclopedia of Symbolism by Kevin Todeschi. It’s simple to use and contains an array of meanings from different religions and cultures.

Exercise: Choose an animal and research its symbolism to use in a story.

3. A Baby Name Book – Whether writing fiction or creative nonfiction, many writers have difficulty coming up with new names for their characters. Baby name books are the perfect resolution, as they provide origins and meaning behind names. Name meaning can either fit the character or create irony. For example, one of my characters carries an innocence about her, so I chose the name Kayla, which is a form of Katherine, meaning “pure.”

Exercise: Randomly select a page and choose a name for a character. Consider the name meaning, and write a short paragraph describing the character.

4. Dictionary – This is probably an obvious book on the list, but believe it or not, a lot of people don’t use dictionaries anymore. Before I attended college, I worked a somewhat redundant office job. I made a point of choosing a random word out of the dictionary each week and using it in a sentence. It increased my vocabulary and my boss was impressed with my initiative. Dictionaries are an extremely essential tool for writers. Not only will they help with spelling, but if the thesaurus you’re using recommends an unfamiliar word, you might want to look up its definition.

Exercise: Once a week, choose a random word from the dictionary and use it in your writing.

5. A Journal – Every writer needs a journal! If you are experiencing writer’s block or simply have too many things on your mind to focus on the writing at hand, a journal can be your best friend. It will listen to you without judgment or interruption, and it can provide insight to your innermost thoughts. Even better, there have been studies that show journaling relieves stress.

Exercise: When you wake up or before you go to bed, write at least one to three pages in your journal – every day!

If you’re a writer and you’re not already taking advantage of these books or exercises, start now. They are an inexpensive way to help improve your writing skills. The exercises provided are a simple way of improving some of the techniques of your talent. You can change and increase them to your own liking. Happy writing!

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By Wendy Ogden

Janice Ian learned the truth at 17. She sang a beautiful song about it when I was eleven.  My lessons at seventeen were a lot less soulful than hers. Firstly I couldn’t play the guitar, or sing, and secondly because at seventeen I only learned to touch type.

I remember enjoying the physical side of this practice and how proud I felt at mastering a new practical skill. I don’t think I realized at the time how beneficial it would be to put words on the page while my mind was entirely free of the process of getting them there. It is similar to how thinking too hard about how you are breathing, can lead to the timing becoming erratic, and leave you breathless. When your mind is on other matters, breathing looks after itself.

My machine was a traditional manual typewriter. The college, where I learned secretarial studies, was in the process of changing over to electric models. The class I was in only had three, so that left twenty-seven girls bashing away at their shiny, round keys. I can’t help wondering what the three girls who rushed to embrace the new technologies are sitting in front of now, but then, everybody in an office has a keyboard.

The course included office skills, many of which are now obsolete, making most typists redundant, and today, our backspace buttons delete mistakes that we were not allowed to make. Correction fluid, in my classroom, was the devil’s work and fingers were taught to hit the right key the first time.

You had to have strong fingers to make any writing appear on the page with a manual typewriter. The keys needed sharp, strong hits. For me this felt empowering. Our machines had no letters printed on the keys, but the blackboard showed the layout. We looked up and felt for the letters with our fingers. As long as your left little finger started on the ‘a,’ and your right on the colon, the rest would reach for the right letter. We taught our fingers where the letters were by looking and feeling and with hundreds of hours of practice. Once our fingers found the right keys automatically, and could even capitalize and punctuate, we were able to apply our eyes only on the text we were copying, instead of the position map of the keys.

In the evenings I borrowed my older sister’s records. While she was out, probably exploring truths she’d learned at seventeen, I was home alone copying out the song sheets. My favourite was “Songs In The Key Of Life.”

AS

As around the sun the earth knows she’s revolving,

and the rosebuds know to bloom in early May,

just as hate knows love’s the cure,

you can rest your mind assured,

that I’ll be loving you always

I just lifted Stevie Wonder’s first verse from memories ingrained thirty years ago. I learned them by rote: copy typing, hour after hour with the music playing in the background. When I had achieved accuracy, I stopped looking at the lyric sheets and worked on my speeds by typing as I listened to the lyrics. I tried to type in time with the music. I remember thinking hard about the depths of imagination behind the words. None of the obvious flowery attributes like scent or texture, but exploration of deeper instincts like timing. I wondered at hate, and it’s knowledge, and cheered at its cure. I mulled over the title being ‘As’ and not ‘Always.’

Typing out these words, and many like them, with my new exciting ability to re-produce, if only someone else’s words, blind, connected me to this artist and encouraged what I now believe is my most important writer’s tool. It was learning to write, without the need to see, that had me sharing a piano stool with Stevie Wonder. Once I was there, and working with him, it was his artistic ability that helped me learn how to look around, or see things in different ways.

Even though I’m not a secretary now, I believe that my ability to touch type became a very useful tool in my writer’s box. While everybody has a keyboard nowadays, many writers do not have the QWERTY system fully at their fingertips. Flash fiction writers, in particular, might benefit from any lifting of physical or mental barriers to getting a story down. I feel closer to my own writing, as I watch it appear on the screen, by being more detached from the way the words arrived there. Is being closer to your writing a good thing? I’m sure it is. When I wrote my first novel recently I feel that this closeness helped me walk in the shoes of the characters.

Some writers turn their computer monitors off, as a free-writing exercise, the idea being to remove any temptation to edit while you write. It occurred to me that some of them are still hindered by having to look for letters on the keyboard. The process of learning touch typing, and then tapping down inspirational lyrics to music, could also be a fun and inspiring exercise for writers who feel blocked or rusty.

Touch typing is liberating for creative writing and the software is easily available to anyone who would like to learn. You only have to look down once, to position your fingers on the correct keys to start with, and after some practice it is easy. Removing one barrier to getting words down on a page, or a screen, will only leave you with the problem of deciding which ones to write, and eventually to close on.

“As” is a song about love, and the title hinted how. The music bounces along with the joy in the underlying message of always. I didn’t learn any important truths, at seventeen, but developing this practical skill got me deep inside words, exploring the poetry, and forever typing in the key of life.

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Wendy Ogden lives on the south coast in England. She has won first and second prizes for flash fiction, one judged by Kate Mosse. She has published fiction and non-fiction in small press, The Lady and The New Writer.  Her blog is  here:   http://wendusworld.blogspot.com.

by Gay Degani

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

In April of 2009 an article appeared at Flash Fiction Chronicles called “Hint Fiction: When Flash Fiction Becomes Just Too Flashy,” written by Robert Swartwood. He coined the phrase, “Hint Fiction” which started a conversation about how short a short story could be. He launched an on-line 25-words or fewer contest and created an immediate to-do which led to the subsequent publication of Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer  by W. W. Norton.

With the publication of his short story collection, Phantom Energy, it’s time for Flash Fiction Chronicles to catch-up on his writing endeavors—and there’ve been many—and his continued involvement in everything “hint.”  If I remember correctly, I first heard of Robert Swartwood when he was a finalist for the Second Annual Micro Award. His piece, “Between the Keys,” originally published at elimae, is included in his recently-released eBook compilation.

Flash Fiction Chronicles: The impact you’ve had on online fiction since you wrote your article about “hint fiction,” continues. Can you give us a thumbnail history of what’s happened over the last couple of years?

Robert Swartwood: I’m still trying to process how the whole Hint Fiction thing created such a stir in the first place; after all, anyone who reads the original essay can tell by its sardonic tone that the thing wasn’t supposed to be taken too seriously.

For years I had been trying to break into publishing, writing novel after novel and securing first one agent and then another. Initially, after a novel was submitted to publishers and ultimately rejected, the idea was to put that novel away to come back to later when there was a book deal. I’ve been sitting on novels for years, many of them publishable, but just not right for publishers at that time.

Then over two years ago, after that essay was published and that stir started, Norton approached me about putting together an anthology of Hint Fiction. It was one of those publishing ironies that after years of searching for a publisher, a publisher found me.

Since the anthology was published the feedback has been pretty great. It received great reviews in The New Yorker and The Los Angeles Review and was even featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday with Scott Simon. It was even chosen as one of The Nervous Breakdown‘s favorite books of the year. This past September there was an art show inspired by the anthology courtesy of the Columbia Art League, and there is currently a very short film contest based on some of the stories from the book which will premiere at next year’s Vail Film Festival.

FFC: Whoa.  That’s a lot going on, but after visiting your website, it’s obvious you spend much of your time writing. I counted nine wonderful book covers—compliments to your artist—and that these are all available as eBooks. What’s prompted you to go this route? With the excitement around the anthology, landing a traditional publisher seems like it would be a slam-dunk.

RS: Publishing the Hint Fiction anthology was a great experience, and I loved working with everyone at Norton, but now it sort of feels like I’ve gotten the whole thing out of my system. Granted, I didn’t publish a novel with a major publisher, but it was still the same kind of experience. Since then, major changes have occurred in publishing—eBook sales keep building every month, more and more bookstores are closing—that it’s beginning to look like the better option for authors is to do it themselves.

Before, self-publishing never made sense because to sell books to readers you needed a publisher to get you into bookstores. More and more readers are purchasing Kindles and Nooks and other eReading devices and the need for a middle man is no longer there. Writers don’t need bookstores anymore, and they don’t need publishers.

But, in that respect, self-publishing is a lot of work and responsibility. Pretty much everything—the editing, proofing, cover art, formatting, promotion—falls on the writer’s shoulders. A lot of it can be outsourced at a cost—the only thing I pay for is cover art—and that all adds up.

A lot of writers want to try to slide by with doing the minimum and then complain when their books don’t sell. Well, what do they expect? It’s a business, so it needs to be treated like a business. When I  first had a few novellas available as 99 cent eBooks, they didn’t earn much, but since I started publishing a few novels this past spring, I’m selling over 1,000 eBooks a month, with even more titles scheduled to be released in the next year.

Currently Amazon offers 70% royalties to authors who self-publish through them for eBooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99. So for an eBook priced at $2.99, the author earns just over $2.00. With a regular publisher, they would make a little bit more of that amount on an eBook priced at $9.99 (the royalty is considerably less and averages out at about 25%). If a reader has to choose between a book priced at $2.99 and one priced at $9.99, which one are they going to pick?

Don’t get me wrong. I love bookstores. I love walking through bookstores and seeing all the books on the shelves and on the tables. I loved seeing my anthology in those bookstores (at least for the month or two or three it appeared in those bookstores; the shelf life of most books isn’t very long). But I also love writing novels and creating stories and finding new readers. And right now, it’s clear that eBooks are the future.

Also, when an academic and author friend of mine found out I planned to self-publish Phantom Energy, she said, “It makes no sense why you would do that. The book is good enough to be published as it is.” And I thought, Well, yeah, isn’t that the point? I wouldn’t self-publish a book if it wasn’t any good. For a lot of people, they view self-publishing as a last ditch effort. For others—like me—I see it more as the best option.

FFC: Can you talk a little bit about your longer fiction, your novellas and novels?

RS: I have three novels currently available: The Calling, which is a supernatural thriller; The Dishonored Dead, which is a nontraditional zombie novel; and The Serial Killer’s Wife, which is a straight-up thriller. Among those are a few novellas, like Spooky Nook, which is a “prequel of sorts” to The Calling and which, after my novels, is my best seller among novellas. In the next several weeks, I plan to release a new thriller, the first in a trilogy, called Man of Wax.

FFC: Let’s go back to the collection. This book contains work as short as 14 words as well as longer short stories. How do you approach the 1000 word story vs. one that is 50 words or even 25? How does length impact character, structure, and theme?

RS: For me, a story should always be as long as it needs to be. A lot of writers sit down to write with specific word counts in mind, and I’ll admit I’ve done that too, but I don’t think it’s beneficial for either the writer or the story, at least not for the first draft. For the first draft, the writer should tell the story that wants to be told. The writer can worry later about trimming it down to a certain word count so a certain magazine will consider it.

But yes, of course different lengths will have different impacts on characters and structures and themes. The main reason I started writing flash fiction a few years ago was because I had started a blog and wanted to get traffic to my site. I noticed there were a lot of online magazines around (I had taken a hiatus from short story writing for a few years to concentrate on novels and so was out of the loop) and realized the majority of them published stories under 1,000 words. It made sense because reading on a computer screen isn’t the funnest thing in the world (of course, this has changed recently with iPads and iPhones and other devices that don’t hurt your eyes like a bad monitor). So I started writing some very short stories and submitting them to these online magazines.

I also submitted to a few print journals (and even had some stories accepted), but for me, I prefer online media more than print. Sure, it’s cool to have a journal printed with your story and name in it, but realistically who’s going to read it? Unless it’s in The Paris Review or Tin House, probably not many people. At least with online journals, those stories are constantly there and anybody can check them out with a simple click.

Anyway, going back to your question, I strongly believe that less is more.  Obviously there’s a thin line between telling too much and too little, and that’s the fun of writing these very short stories. So the characters and structure and theme have to be handled even more delicately than if I were writing, say, a 5,000 word story. There I would have a lot more room to deal with these things. But with a 500 word story, or even a 50 word story? It becomes even trickier.

FFC: What I find appealing about your work, whether short or longer, is how you manage to use such an unadorned straight-forward style that also manages to create clear visuals in the mind of the reader. When I say “unadorned” I mean it in the most complimentary way, thinking of Hemingway or Carver.

The spare quality of the language creates an immediacy to the story that keeps me reading to the end. It’s energetic without being frenzied, visual without be overwritten. Your stories are compelling, with a complex, but not complicated structure.

Some of my favorites include “Phantom Energy,” Fright X,” “The Chameleon Kid,” “Between the Keys,” and “The Dry Patch,” though stopping there with my list favs, makes me uncomfortable.  Can you name three or four of your favorites and explain why?

RS: I’m going to give the standard generic author answer and say that picking and choosing which stories are my favorites is like a parent picking and choosing his favorite children. I can’t do it. But I will say this: all the stories in the collection are in there for a reason. I’ve published over 50 short stories in the past three years, the majority of them less than 1,000 words, and I put together what I felt were my very best in this collection.

Anybody familiar with my stuff will know you never really know what you’re going to get when you start reading one of my stories, and that’s because I like playing around with style and language and genre. So in Phantom Energy, there are stories both real and surreal, stories that aren’t at all traditional and break conventions. There were other stories that I wanted to include too, but which I felt just didn’t fit with the overall tone of the rest of the collection.

FFC: Thanks for getting us caught up.  It’s inspirational to read about everything you’ve done.

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Phantom Energy is available for just 99 cents at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. It will also be available for $5.95 as a paperback at Amazon very shortly.

Robert Bio in Brief:

Robert Swartwood was born in 1981. His work has appeared in such venues as The Los Angeles Review, The Daily Beast,  Postscripts,  ChiZine,  Space and Time, Wigleaf, and PANK. He is the editor of Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer, which was chosen by The Nervous Breakdown as one of their favorite books of 2010, and was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday with Scott Simon.

Want more? Check out his recommended reading list, which grows longer and longer by the year.  Find a list Robert’s writing here: Robert Swartwood: Occasional News, Insights, Rants, and Other Miscellaneous Stuff

What I Hope to Get Out of The Los Angeles Review  Workshop

by Bev Elliott

At the end of September, there was a  post by Stefanie Freele in the Zoetrope Flash Factory announcing the upcoming workshops to be held by the staff of The Lost Angeles Review.

There were no replies to this post, but I’ve learned not to gauge interest in something by the number of replies it receives. I crossed my fingers and sent an email to the editors attaching a story I’d written for one of our recent Flash Gig prompts entitled, “Shades of Indecency.” On October 8^th, I received an email from the editor notifying me that I had been accepted to participate in the Workshop.  I was over the moon!

After the excitement abated, worry set in.

I went back to the LA Review site and read the announcement again. It said it was a workshop for “intermediate and advanced fiction writers who want to step up their game.” I began to sweat when I read that because I don’t consider myself intermediate yet.

Would I take this class and fall on my face? Would the other participants view me as an unprepared upstart? A dilettante without an MFA who didn’t belong in a workshop of that caliber? So many worries assailed me that I almost decided to pull out.

Then I remembered, I was in the throes of taking a beginner’s Flash Workshop with Jim Harrington at the Muse Online Writers Conference, where he took us through a very informative Flash Fiction 101, if you will. In this workshop, I took my story, “Shades of Indecency,” from 721 words as it appeared in the Flash Gig, to a tight and complete 520 words. Jim liked it enough to accept it for publication in the December edition of Apollo’s Lyre.

I also remembered that a few weeks into my return to Zoetrope after a fifteen-year hiatus, I wrote a story for another Flash Gig that was accepted for publication by an e-zine quickly. The passion for writing kindled in me as a sixteen-year-old writer of teen romances was back, and I felt like I needed to nurture that passion into a solid career as an author. It’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do, but I let marriage, motherhood, work, and a whole host of other milestones in my life steal that passion from me until a couple of years ago. I took a year to write a monstrous novel that is entirely too long. Publishers wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole in its current form. I needed to learn what I then called an “economy of words.”

Flash has become a near obsession for me now, because it provides a relatively immediate payoff for my efforts. Now that I’ve discovered it, I’m determined to get better at “the art of compression” as Randall Brown calls it. I feel like the LA Review Workshop is another stepping stone to me getting there.

I went back to that workshop announcement and read the rest of it, “Students in this course will learn the importance of strong openings, methods for creating narrative tension, new approaches to the editing process, and much more.”

I figure, at the very least, I’ll come away with something that will add value to my writing. I’m not at a place in life where I can spend several years acquiring credentials in a formal educational setting which may or may not pay off for me.

With workshops like the LA Review, I can acquire small snippets of knowledge in a more economical package that can yield tremendous dividends craft-wise, and I won’t have to spend thousands of dollars and a major chunk of the writing life I have left to get there.

So, I look forward to making my openings stronger, amping up the narrative tension in my stories, and the biggest bonus of all—learning new approaches to the editing process. After all, like most amateur writers, I tend to be wordy, but if I’m ever fortunate enough to get a really good grasp of Flash, I’ll know intuitively which words are the right words. I think the LA Review Workshop will arm me with a new set of tools to rid my writing of the superfluities of the nouveau writer.

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Beverlyn Elliott writes contracts for the State of Florida by day, and flash fiction by night (or whenever she can steal moments on breaks, during lunch, at boring meetings…) She writes because she missed her first calling going into college and is now attempting to rectify the situation. She workshops with a great group of writers at Zoetrope.com, has completed a novel, and is revising it. Elliott lives in the Florida Panhandle with her husband. They have three children who are old enough to know their mother spends most of her free time living in a fantasy world.

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Stefanie Freele on The Los Angeles Review Workshop

FFC:How long has LAR been running workshops?

SF: This is our fourth season. We’ve had little me on Flash Fiction, LAR contributor Liz Prato teaching “Flash! Fiction & Nonfiction”, LAR Non-Fiction Editor Ann Beman teaching “Yanking the Thread: Discovering Connective Elements in Nonfiction”, and Tanya Chernov, LAR Poetry Editor teaching “Advanced Poetry Writing”.

FFC:Are most of the students beginning writers?

SF: Seems to vary. We’ve had folks who are just beginning to explore writing and classes, all the way to people who’ve been writing and taking workshops for years.

FFC:Describe a typical online workshop scenario.

SF:Each week the instructor posts a short lecture, discussion topics, suggested writing exercises and weekly reading assignments from our recent issues of the Los Angeles Review. During the week, participants join in on the discussion, post writing exercises and give feedback to the other participants on their submissions. Every workshop is a little different of course. In mine I also typically interview the authors of the work we’re reading and invite them to comment on our discussion and answer questions about their work.

FFC:How do you, as writer, encourage writers who lack confidence to persist?

SF: I think acknowledging that each writer has different needs for down-time, styles of writing practice, amounts of “drive”, sets a tone that there is no right answer or formula for “how to be a writer” and how much confidence is necessary. Sometimes people don’t persist, but they might later, they might just need some quiet time to cook underneath the skin until they are ready to write again.

FFC:What should a writer reasonably expect from one of your workshops?

SF:To explore in-depth certain short pieces from the latest issues of LAR, to write brand new pieces of prose, to stretch themselves while studying techniques and styles of other writers and most of all, have a good time with it.

FFC:  Thanks so much, Stefanie!  Those interested can contact Stefanie and find out more about The Los Angeles Review Workshops here.

Stefanie Freele was born and raised in Wisconsin and currently lives in the Northwest US. Her short story collection, Feeding Strays released by Lost Horse Press was a finalist for both the Book of the Year Award and the 2010 Binghamton University John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Surrounded by Water, a second collection of short stories will be released by Press 53 in 2012. Stefanie is the fiction editor of the Los Angeles Review and the 2010/2011 Healdsburg Literary Laureate, and has a MFA in fiction from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts: Whidbey Writers Workshop in Washington.  Keep up with Stefanie  here.