Flash Fiction Chronicles

by Matthew Salesses

Talking about a story of fewer than 1000, or 500, or 300 words, means by nature talking about restraint.

I am a firm believer in the idea that limits increase creativity rather than restrict it. Perhaps this is what attracts me to the very short form: flash fiction or prose poetry or sudden fiction or whatever you want to call it. When I am working on a flash project, I like to give myself restraints. I wrote my chapbook, Our Island of Epidemics, by trying to write in first-person plural, which I had never done before. The epidemics themselves were restrictions, as I fit the stories to the rules of diseases like unrequited love or unstoppably growing hearts or memory loss.

My new book is a novel in flash fiction, made up of 115 mini-chapters, called I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying. I wrote it with the following restraints: each chapter could not be longer than a page, each chapter had to include an object chosen at random beforehand, and each sentence should try to include a “turn.” I kept these rules loosely. I considered a “turn” the point where a sentence reveals something new, or moves the story in a new direction, or flips something earlier in the sentence on its head.

For example, a sentence might begin with a man unsure whether the boy beside him is his biological son, and end with the man feeling sympathy for the boy’s understanding of the ocean. That is a turn in a very short story, to me. When I was working on the novel at length, I would write a chapter or two each day, giving myself objects from around the house to work with: a bed, a glove, a hairband, a book jacket, a dinosaur toy. Sometimes these objects made it into the final drafts, and sometimes not.

In one of my many attempts to make ends meet, I teach a flash fiction course in which I have students write a story a week based on prompts. I often tell them that one thing a story does not make, but two or three things a story can make—part of the movement of a very short story is the connection drawn between seemingly disparate objects or characters: a father, a boy, the ocean, dead starfish. If we connect dots that appear at odds, we’re moving the reader from one place or idea to another across a large metaphysical space: we’re creating or at least indicating that there is an arc, an underlying shape.

I read about a study once in which people were forced to look at a drawing that had been left unfinished; they wanted more than anything to complete it. As long as the reader can see that there is somewhere to go, he will fill in the missing path.

I give my students prompts each week that often involve leaving much of the story out: write a list that reveals a character, write a story composed entirely of facts, write a scene with a MacGuffin—an object that is never revealed to the reader. The second prompt, the story made of facts, gets especially interesting results. The example story I give was published in NANO Fiction: “On Stammering,” in which the narrator states a number of facts about stammering that slowly expose his personal relation to those facts. The students who stick closely to the prompt learn the most from it: writing only one type of sentence makes them think harder about how to create a story between the lines. I save this prompt for a certain point in the course, when I think that they are ready for that struggle.

Talking about a story of fewer than 1000, or 500, or 300 words, means by nature talking about restraint. Restraint must be exercised in the diction, the imagery, the characterization, the plot. Everything needs to work on multiple levels. Everything needs to be important. This is usually why students resist the restraints, at first. They think they need more freedom, more tools, in order to be precise. But it is the scene in a movie where the spy is locked up that we learn what kind of hero he is. Is he a planner; is he an improviser; is he a traitor? We must have at hand more than a simple trick to get us out; the best escape is more than an escape, it’s an adaptation. You only have one leg and there is a wide sea to swim across and no food except endless fish? That is when you find your story has always been a mermaid.

by Erin Kelly

Have you ever read Wuthering Heights?

If you’re a writer, you should. At the risk of sounding like your high school English teacher: Add it to your reading list. Even if you don’t care much for the story, Brontë’s narrative technique is one of those things that’ll make you go hmm.

Rather than tell us the story of Catherine and Heathcliff through either of the principals or through one of the secondary characters, Brontë chose to tell us most of their tale through Mr. Lockwood, who is hearing the story from Nelly Dean, one of the family’s domestics. Basically, we get the scoop from Mr. Lockwood, who’s getting the scoop from Nelly, who only hears and sees what she observes.

Tricky, no?

Removed narrators exist mostly in an era that precedes contemporary literature, but writers of any era can appreciate the astonishing craftsmanship that would have been involved in this narration-by-proxy method. Every time I read Wuthering Heights, I wonder how different the story would have been if it had been told from a different POV.

Here’s why Brontë’s method works:

• Nelly experiences Catherine and Heathcliff at the height of their most dramatic moments — when they’re arguing in the kitchen, crying on Nelly’s shoulder, or sneaking behind Mr. Linton’s back, for example. These are the experiences that Nelly relates to Mr. Lockwood. Compare this to, say, Jane Eyre. With Jane’s story, we’re taken through some of the more mundane aspects of courtship. Jane Eyre is its own masterpiece, of course, but in her relationship with Mr. Rochester, we experience their conversations, their insights, Jane’s interior monologue and Mr. Rochester’s stoic playfulness. With Wuthering Heights, those aspects are largely glossed-over in favor of dramatics. When you read Wuthering Heights, you’re caught in a whirlwind. With Jane Eyre, you’re on a steady and picturesque trod with varying terrains.
• Mr. Rochester becomes a stand-in for the reader; you learn knowledge as he learns it and your reactions often mirror his. This prevents the reader from feeling too far from the story. It’s as if you’re the one hearing Nelly dish all the goods, rather than watching someone else listen to the dishing.
• Nelly interjects her own opinions of both Catherine and Healthcliff, which shape how the reader views the couple. Nelly tells us Catherine is spoiled and stubborn, and then provides examples. She also tells us that Heathcliff is vengeful and dangerous, and provides examples of that. Although Nelly is an unreliable narrator in many ways, she provides us an interesting perspective of Catherine and Heathcliff that would have been largely different if we’d heard the story from either of the principal characters — or their family members.

The above examples provide a capsule of my larger point, which was not to obsess about Wuthering Heights to a larger audience, but to encourage you to think about your point of view.

This sounds like obvious advice, but it may not be as obvious as you think. As writers, we often proceed within our initial vision. We think: I’m going to write a story about a mother who lost her child to a drunk driver and is now a vigilante. Then we sit down, craft an outline, and start writing the story of a mother-turned-vigilante. We don’t give the POV much thought, in most cases. In a mother-turned-vigilante story, the mother seems the obvious POV character.

But what if, before you jotted down the first scene, you took it a step further and thought: How would this story read if it were told from the POV of the drunk driver? 

It would be a much different story. It might even be a better story. Or not.

Even so, when you step away from your work and consider all its angles, you can better appreciate the three-dimensional nature of storytelling. You may not write the story from the drunk driver’s POV, but knowing what his POV is – even if you never write it and even if your Vigilante Mother never knows it – makes for a richer story.

Considering alternate POVs in flash fiction is particularly useful because we can take more risks in flash. We don’t have to worry about our readers abandoning the story on page fifty-three because they don’t want to read about an unsympathetic drunk driver . Our characters have to be compelling enough for our readers to reach the one-thousandth word, not the one-thousandth page.

An unconventional POV may not carry your novel the way it carried Emily’s, but it can certainly carry a masterful piece of flash.

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Erin Entrada Kelly is staff editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles. Her fiction has been published widely in places like Keyhole Magazine, Monkeybicycle and the Kyoto Journal. She was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer National Fiction Prize and the Philippines Free Press Literary Award for Short Fiction. Her debut novel is forthcoming from HarperCollins’ Greenwillow Books. She currently works at Swarthmore College. Read more at www.erinentradakelly.com. Find her on Twitter here.

by Erin Entrada Kelly

Have you ever met the Plot Device Character? You know him. Trust me. He’s the guy who lounges around a story, does his job and takes off. He doesn’t have much to say outside his archetype and you never really get to know him, except by simple adjectives. Sometimes he’s Bad. Sometimes he’s Good. He may even be Wise. But he’s rarely Believable or Interesting.

The Plot Device Character is there to perform a specific function. Maybe he’s the Bad Husband who gets your main character, a long-suffering wife, to discover her own independence. Maybe he’s the Evil Lord, in contrast to your Good Guy. Perhaps she’s the Young Daughter who helps the Lost Dad find his way. One thing all these PDCs have in common is that they exist to bring a story from points A to B.

Unfortunately, many writers have their PDCs so securely tucked in their pigeonholes that they fail to be three-dimensional. Writers have their bigger stories in mind and the PDC is just a cog in that plot machine, often seen as disposable once his or her task has been accomplished.

There’s nothing wrong with having characters serve specific purposes in a story – obviously not, since that is why they exist – but as soon as readers discover that you have a plot machine, your story begins to falter. Readers want to lose themselves in your story. They want an escape. They want to share a sliver of life with someone else, namely, your character and the others who people your story. They don’t want to see the wizard behind the curtain. It destroys the experience in the same way that a stumbled line ruins live theater or a flickering projector ruins a good movie.

As difficult as it is to believe, there is no such thing as a one-dimensional person, so there shouldn’t be any such person in your story.

Let’s say this is the one-sentence pitch of your story: Woman finds independence after suffering at the hands of her abusive husband. Many writers, especially when sitting down at that first draft, will gear their story directly toward that pitch. The woman suffers. Her husband is awful – and here are the scenes to prove it. Husband enters, acts like a tyrant, husband exits. The story moves along toward the final climax: Woman fights back. The end.

But to truly appreciate the complexity of this story, to truly delve into the woman’s life and experience it as she does, we don’t just need to know about the wife. We need to know about her husband. Yes, we know he’s a tyrant. Yes, we know he’s evil and she doesn’t deserve the way she’s treated. But is he human? Is he believable? Or is he just a PDC?

He doesn’t have to snuggle up with puppy dogs or rescue kittens from burning buildings, but for the story to truly reach a triumphant climax, he has to be an actual three-dimensional person. Being the Bad Guy to your Good Girl just doesn’t cut it. We need to experience him in life, as our main character does. Maybe he has chronic sciatica after working twelve hours at the factory. Maybe he grudgingly takes his mother to the doctor every Tuesday. Your goal isn’t to make him a sympathetic pitiful antihero. Your goal is to make him real. Because when your story is real, your readers can escape into it.

Go into your story and your drafts. Look at your characters. Think about them. Can they walk off your pages on their own two feet? Have you considered each character as an individual, or only in relation to the main character?

They are all cogs. Just make sure they’re working.

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Erin Entrada Kelly is staff editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles. Her fiction has been published widely in places like Keyhole Magazine, Monkeybicycle and the Kyoto Journal. She was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer National Fiction Prize and the Philippines Free Press Literary Award for Short Fiction. Her debut novel is forthcoming from HarperCollins’ Greenwillow Books. She currently works at Swarthmore College. Read more at www.erinentradakelly.com. Find her on Twitter here.

by Erin Entrada Kelly

Years ago I wrote a short story that received a resounding chorus of identical feedback from editors. The feedback went something like this: ‘Great story, but there’s no resolution’ and/or ‘This is great—but where’s the rest?’ I sat down with the story again, poised with a rewrite pen, and racked my brain for some kind of ending. After a while, I put it in a drawer and let it be. I couldn’t figure out an ending because there was no clear resolution. Life is unresolved sometimes, I thought. Life doesn’t tie itself up in pretty little bows.

It took me a while to appreciate that one of the reasons people enjoy literature—flash or otherwise—is because it allows us to escape out of our own unresolved, un-bow-tied situations. We want something better for the characters we acquaint ourselves with; we want something to change for them, or at least for the story, and we’ll take these changes for better or worse. It doesn’t have to be happily-ever-after, but it has to be something.

That’s it, really. That’s what makes an ending. Something needs to change. The situation, the person(s), the emotional quotient of the character(s). Things won’t always end well for the characters we write, but we know that it’s ended when something about the story becomes something else. As readers, we want to experience someone else’s experience, and that means going through all the peaks and valleys. The valleys aren’t as interesting without the peaks and vice versa. Just as in real life. If life were a plateau, how would we know how it feels to walk uphill or slide downhill?

So how do you know when you’ve reached the end? How do you know if the ending works? You walk the path of your story. When you reach the end, you turn around and stare back at the beginning. If you see a flat horizon, then you need to keep walking.

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Erin Entrada Kelly is staff editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles. Her fiction has been published widely in places like Keyhole Magazine, Monkeybicycle and the Kyoto Journal. She was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer National Fiction Prize and the Philippines Free Press Literary Award for Short Fiction. Her debut novel is forthcoming from HarperCollins’ Greenwillow Books. She currently works at Swarthmore College and is represented by the Jenks Agency. Read more at www.erinentradakelly.com. Find her on Twitter here.

by Erin Entrada Kelly

Come with me into someone’s apartment, where there’s a nonsensical conversation going on. It sounds like this:

Person A: “What was dental health like in the old days—like, around the Middle Ages, about? Or the Renaissance, or something?”

Person B: “I’ve thought about this. I’ve thought about this, and you—you know—you have to see, you have to think about, the fact that in the Middle Ages, the stuff they ate. Their diet. They didn’t eat a lot of things we eat now. We have all these chemicals in our food that they didn’t have back then.”

Person A: “Yeah, uh, that’s true. I was just thinking about how they didn’t have, like, traditional toothbrushes or um, traditional toothpaste, or—what did they use again?”

Based on this snippet, you probably made a few assumptions: 1) These two speakers are a tad goofy. 2) These two speakers aren’t very well educated. 3) These two speakers don’t know how to speak.

You would be wrong on all except point one, which is debatable.

This is a conversation I recently had in my own household. I am Person A. Person B is Jen, another educated writer with strong oral and written communication skills who has a non-fiction history book under her belt. So, what’s the deal?

The deal is this: You are reading the conversation, rather than hearing it. True, our chatter about medieval teeth isn’t going to rock the history world, but the actual verbal conversation wasn’t nearly as goofy as it appears here, on your computer screen. Why? Because the way people talk in real life and the way people talk on paper—or, for our purposes, in stories—isn’t necessarily transferable.

As writers, we rarely have the need or opportunity to write dialogue precisely as it is spoken in real life. The secret to fantastic dialogue is to make it seem as if readers are eavesdropping on actual, verbatim conversations, in which every word rings true and characterizations are clear. We have to learn how to write the way people speak without actually writing the way people speak. If you listen to actual dialogue, you’ll hear just how strange and stunted it actually is.

Dialogue is an essential storytelling tool. That’s been true for virtually every piece of fiction (and non-fiction, for that matter) that I have ever read or edited. Over the years I’ve encountered some similar and repetitive dialogue problems. Not all of them are outlined here, but here are a few highlights:

Writing in dialect. Writing in dialect is an enormous challenge, particularly for the novice writer. Kudos to you, if you write in dialect. It can be done—and it can be done well—but tread lightly, unless you’re Toni Morrison or Mark Twain (neither of whom are reading this, I suspect). Two pieces of very brief advice: 1) Know the rules of the region. Don’t assume you know them. Really, really know them. I’m currently reading a book in which one “Southern” character says to another character (a single woman traveling alone): “Y’all can eat crayfish when y’all get back to the hotel.” I cringed. For Southerners, “y’all” is not interchangeable among the singular and plural in the same way as “you.” And—we don’t call them crayfish. How do I know these things? Because I was raised in Louisiana. Unlike the writer, who is a lifelong New Yorker. 2) Choose your dialect battles. If you’ve written solid characterizations outside of dialogue, then “What you havin’ for dinner and what time you goin’ to the store?” will have the same effect as “Whatcha havin’ for dinner ’n what time is ya’ll gone to the store?”, with less of the distraction.

Make sure your dialogue is useful. Every word. Dialogue should move the story along, not stall it.

Understand how people talk. Then learn how to tweak it to fit your work. While it may be true that 40-year-olds use the word “like” from time to time, understand that it’s mostly used as an interjection for the younger sect, particularly teenagers. If you have a scatterbrained character, make his dialogue scatterbrained. Have you ever noticed that people with busy brains often speak in a series of incomplete sentences? “You know, Eloise, I was just thinking—I don’t know if you think this is a good idea, but—last night, I saw this really bizarre sight, almost like a shooting star, or—no, not a shooting star, more like a comet—and it got me thinking …” Or that those who are timid or uncertain often clarify their speech with vague words? “I was thinking that maybe we should go to the movies. What do you think?” Compare that to a person who is sure of herself and confident: “Let’s go to the movies.” Or one who is demanding, controlling: “We’re going to the movies.”

Dialogue is not a dumping ground for background information. When you go to your sister’s house, you don’t start off a conversation with, “Hey, sis, remember last week when you started telling me about the problems you’ve been having with your husband Ron, and how you’re not sure if you can pay the mortgage next month and you think maybe he’s having an affair with his secretary?” That’s not the way people talk. Instead, people say things like: “Hey, I’ve been thinking about that conversation we had last week …” If you find yourself compelled to use dialogue only as a dumping ground for back story, you can bet that the dialogue won’t be strong.

Contractions are your friend. In most informal speech, people use contractions. You should, too. I’m not going to walk into my daughter’s room and say, “I have told you a million times. You are going to be grounded if you do not turn down your stereo. I will take away your phone as punishment,” only to have her say, “You do not understand, Mother. I will turn it down after this song. I will not be able to sleep without my music.” People. Don’t. Talk. That. Way. They say things like: “I’ve told you a million times to turn down that stereo or you’ll be grounded!” or “You don’t understand, Mom! I can’t sleep without my music!”

Now that I’ve blabbed on for, like, twelve-hundred words, maybe you should, like, you know, get to working on that—uh—that, work-in-progress.

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Erin Entrada Kelly is staff editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles. Her debut novel is forthcoming from HarperCollins’ Greenwillow Books and her short fiction has been published widely in places like Keyhole Magazine, Monkeybicycle and the Kyoto Journal. She was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer National Fiction Prize and the Philippines Free Press Literary Award for Short Fiction. She currently works at Swarthmore College and as a freelance writer and editor. She also trudges through the slush for Stupefying Stories. Read more at www.erinentradakelly.com. Find her on Twitter here.

by Randall Brown

Desire, it is often, perhaps too often, said drives narrative into being, and there is not only the desire of the main character to consider, but the desire of Reader, Writer, and some believe, even the Text itself. When you write very short things, you are often told what your text really wants:

“It’s begging to be a short story.”

“I’m certain this piece wants to be a prose poem.”

“What your text really is, what it’s telling you it is and you can’t hear it but I can, is that it wants to be a novel, maybe even a trilogy.”

So, yes, flash texts yearn, and I wonder, perhaps too much, what they desire and from whom they want it. What does the flash text crave from its characters, its readers, its writers? These text whisperers, the ones who hear things in my texts, would have me believe that the flash text wants to be something other than it is. I doubt it. I’m certain of the flash’s desire to be what it is, but what other yearnings burn inside that flash? Here are six guesses about what a flash text wants.

1. To recreate the world in its image. At the end of ”The Oven Bird,” Frost asks “What to make of a diminished thing?” That diminished has a number of meanings, like most things in Frost’s poems, but I’m drawn to “be-little” as a possible one. It’s the world that has become little, and Frost’s implied answer, or one such answer—”You give it a poem”—might lead some readers to think that the poem itself is a diminished thing, too. I don’t think so. Was it Frost who said, “The world isn’t fallen because Eve bit an apple, but because we believe she did?” Or was it someone writing about Frost? The point is that flash believes the world isn’t captured by words, but recreated by them. Each word carries that weight of re-creation (or is that recreation?), of procreation, of the compressed big bang. It’s the world stripped of the immaterial. It wants not the world as it is but the world as it might be, if flash were in charge.
2. To matter. As most tiny things do, flash knows what you might think of it, its size associated with insignificance in your mind. Flash wants you to confess this thought, that you’re like the middle school social studies teacher who desires a full page for the “A.” Flash doesn’t fill pages the way those “A” students do. Flash must find other ways to matter, to add up to something, than the word after word, the failed action after failed action, the words chasing that hard-earned resolution, hard-earned because it took page after page to get there. Flash searches for the alternative way to matter in this world. Sometimes it finds profundity in what others find nothingness; other times, it finds meaning by eschewing their desire for somethingness. Flash doesn’t fit the tired, old rubrics; it needs another vision against which it gets it value.
3. To be attended to. The process of reading a longer piece is the process of forgetting, so much so that I wonder if the novel, for example, works primarily subconsciously, as much an echo as a voice. A novel’s words want to disappear from consciousness, want to take root like the archetypal images of dreams. A flash’s words demand your attention, especially those (very) tiny flashes. A flash shouts out, “Attention must be paid!” It’s later flash wants to haunt you, like a flashback, a tiny moment in the midst of the ongoing narrative, a burst of something concentrated.
4. To be inhaled. Sometimes, I think flash writers oversell the long hours spent working on a flash piece, as if they feel that anything so small must be defended as “work.” Having written and published longer pieces, I don’t feel that I constructed flash the way I did the longer pieces. Flash is okay coming out as an exhale, and I read somewhere that with each inhale, we take in the molecules from everyone who has ever lived. Maybe I made that up. I can’t remember. In any case, that exhale of flash adds your own nature to the nature of all that’s ever been. Flash is okay being easy to get out of your system. Flash doesn’t want to be constructed and deconstructed, taken apart in bites. Swallow me whole, flash says. That’s the way flash came into the world, the way it’ll go out.
5. To be measured by its girth. If we were to check Flash Fiction’s in-box, we’d find spam after spam for Fiction Extender pills. Too tiny? Take two of these. Girth, that “measurement around the middle of something,” might be a better measurement of flash. Its breadth! And within that breadth exists both breath and bread, something maybe important, for flash is certainly bigger than a breath and smaller than a breadbox, and the point is what? Breadth has associated with it concepts such as range, extent, scope, depth, reach. Flash won’t be taking any pills; it knows there’s more to it than meets the eye.
6. To be loved. Because it’s what we all want, isn’t it?, in spite of our protestations about rejection meaning anything to us. Flash wants your big, big love, and of course it wants to deserve your love, be worthy of it, doesn’t want it given just because it wants it. Flash wants maybe then, the possibility of your big love, the potentiality of it, the hope of it. Maybe flash wants more this than flesh. Maybe flash would burn skin and leave only bone.

This article was originally posted at Flash Fiction Chronicles on March 24, 2010.

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Randall Brown is the author of the award-winning flash fiction collection Mad to Live (Flume Press 2008), a collection that has been recently republished by PS Books in Philadelphia as a Deluxe Edition with “bonus tracks.” Over 300 poems, essays, and short fiction pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous literary journals and his  work has received nominations for the Pushcart, O. Henry, Million Writers, and Best of Web Prizes—and has appeared in various anthologies, both here and abroad, including The Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction. In December 2010, he founded and currently manages Matter Press, a community-based, non-profit literary press that publishes an online literary journal (The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts). He also is the founder of FlashFiction.Net, a nationally recognized blog with a singular mission, “To prepare writers, readers, editors, and fans for the imminent rise to power of that machine of compression, that hugest of things in the tiniest of spaces: flash fiction!”  

He can be reached at http://randalldouglasbrown.blogspot.com/.

By Erin Entrada Kelly

In life, we do a lot of looking around. If I yell out the window right now, people will look at me. If you tell me you have big news, I’ll look at you. When my teenage daughter does something teenagery, I look at her. We all have eyes and they have a lot to say. To quote an old cliché: They are the windows to the soul.

Unfortunately, too many writers rely on these windows to tell their stories.

I recently edited an otherwise well-written manuscript in which characters were constantly looking or glancing at each other in some emotionally grand ways – he looked at her expectantly, she looked at him seductively, they looked at each other longingly [I will resist the urge to lecture on adverbs here; that’s another article altogether, and one that’s been written]. The mantra of show-don’t-tell is etched into the brain of most good writers and some have fallen under the misconception that having everyone look at each other all the time fulfills that mantra. In actuality, all it does is push the story deeper into the vast universe of amateur writing and prevent the writer from truly delving into another lyrical layer.

Based on my experiences editing manuscripts, I’ve concluded that there are three reasons why writers rely too heavily on looks and glances:

• It’s a dialogue scene and they want the reader to know who the speaker is. Writers often have a paranoid misconception that readers will somehow lead themselves astray when reading dialogue. While it’s true that actions should be scattered throughout dialogue to keep actions and speakers intact, it isn’t necessary to tag the end of every spoken line with a look or a glance to identify the speaker. If you go a few lines without identifying the speaker, it’s okay. Readers are smarter than you think when it comes to these things. As long as you have the appropriate paragraph breaks and quotation marks, they’ll probably be able to keep up.
• They want to convey an emotion through showing, rather than telling. Not a bad concept, but here’s the problem: When you rely only on looks or glances, the story becomes stoic and your reliance on this form of communication becomes tired and flat. Think of your story as a movie. Your characters are in a living room, exchanging some good dialogue. But none of them does anything except look and glance at each other. Bill looks at Susan. Susan glances at Bill. They each “flicker” their eyes toward the children. This might work in a singular scene, but after a while we’re going to think it’s the most boring production imaginable. Even worse, it just doesn’t tell us much about the characters, nor is it believable. In real life, people do all kinds of things other than look/glance at each other. They fidget with a blouse button. They fumble with their wallets, rub the stubble on their chins, twist locks of hair around their index fingers, scratch the insides of their elbows, swing their feet, ruffle their hair, play with their belt buckle, tug at their earlobes. People are fascinating creatures with fascinating movements. Don’t believe me? Just watch them. Our body language speaks volumes about our character. It’s not just about “looks.”
• They want readers to know where the characters are looking. When writers create a scene, they often feel compelled to write every single movement because they want everything to come across clearly. Writers want to make sure that readers understand that Bill was looking at Maria, but now he’s looking at Susan. They want readers to know that Susan is speaking to Wayne, and not Bill, so that is who she is looking toward. Once again, I defer to your intelligent reader. Write good dialogue—with good telling prompts—and they’ll know what’s going on. You can even simplify it by writing: “Get out!” Susan said, to Wayne. “I never want to see you again!” It doesn’t have to be an elaborate display of looks and glances.

Is this to say that writers should never use looks or glances to convey actions/emotions/clarifications? Absolutely not. That would be near impossible. I certainly use eyes to send a message when I write. But don’t rely on looks alone to move your story forward. Use it sparingly and take the other opportunities to tell us more about your characters.

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Erin Entrada Kelly is staff editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles. Her fiction has been published widely in places like Keyhole Magazine, Monkeybicycle and the Kyoto Journal. She was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer National Fiction Prize and the Philippines Free Press Literary Award for Short Fiction. Her debut novel is forthcoming from HarperCollins’ Greenwillow Books. Read more at www.erinentradakelly.com. If you’re on Facebook, find her here. 

by Gay Degani

Well, dang.  It’s Wednesday and something needed to show up in this spot and I forgot to double-check last night.  Blame it on the Heat and the Thunder!

What a terrific game.  I just hope the Thunder can come back so the series goes to seven.  Nothing like great basketball to get me thinking about teamwork and how it applies to writing. The writer is the coach.  The team: each member is a story element and they must work together to WIN.   (Indulge me here.  Everything seems like a metaphor for writing to me!)

Think about it.  The coach is the one who teaches, guides, plans, shapes, and has a heart attack when all the teaching, guiding, planning, shaping doesn’t work.  The team has potential, it may even have talent, but if left to their own devices, the members might play well, might even be brilliant, but going all the way, reaching for that trophy?

The big man might not let the others play because he never gives up the ball.  The point guard might try to get everyone to pay attention, to work the ball around to the player with the best “look,” but maybe there’s a bumping battle for position in the key and the player misses the pass.   You’ve heard it before from the master himself, Michael Jordan,  ”Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”  And whose job is it to bring teamwork and intelligence to the court?  The coach.

So how does that apply to writing?  You guessed it, the author is the coach.  He or she is the person in charge, the one who makes the tough decisions, who inspires, motivates, and keeps everything on track.  The starting team includes structure, language, content, theme, and characters with dialogue, setting, clarity, metaphor, and imagery coming off the bench.

The coach puts his first team on the court.  The best players, but he has to switch them out when something isn’t working and he has a strong bench to do so.  Maybe for one story, language is the focus–the element that never lets the author down,  for another, structure, but no matter what strategy the coach decides will work, he has to count on all the elements to do their part.

I love Blake Griffin.  Watched him in the NCAA championships and there was something about him that stood out (damn good basketball) and I remembered him, so when he ended up on the Clippers, I was excited.  We went to a couple games and the Clippers suddenly had enough  talent that we dared to hope they would be contenders, but they didn’t always play as a team.  Whoever had the ball tended to shoot.  There was little working around the floor and while Chris Paul and Blake Griffin might be two of the most talented players in basketball, they could not bring it in the end without the rest of the team.

The same is true in putting together a story.  An author might be brilliant with words, stringing them together like easy lay-ups, but a story needs more than pretty words.  It has to have meaning.  It has to stir something in the reader.  Occasionally, of course, an imagery-rich story might be enough, something there beneath the lines that works for many readers, but we’re talking about the long haul here, making it to the finals, to the championship. Sharp original language is like having a superb big man.  You might win over fans for a few stories, but at some point, the  author needs to send in the rest of the team.

Language, structure, and content need to work together and still have room for the other elements to play their part in order for a writer to produce championship work.  Writing is like coaching.  You can’t just put your best two players in the game and hope they can bring home the  NBA Trophy while you cheer them on.   You need to coach everyone on the team.  You need to get each one to contribute the best version of their skills to the play.

If you saw the game last night, important plays were made by bench-warmers Nick C0llison for the Thunder and Norris Cole for the Heat.  And what about Mario Chalmers?  We expect to be cheering Dwyane Wade and LeBron, but Bosh?  And while Russell Westbrook scored a valiant 32 points, the Thunder lost because yes, late in the game, his team ran out of gas.

So enough of this.  You get the point. We writers need to consider how all the elements of a story can contribute to the overall story and while one or the other may dominate, it is the contributions from the bench that will often carry the day.

by Lucinda Kempe

Writing comes naturally to me—I have been a diarist since age thirteen—writing succinctly has not. About a decade ago, I wrote a 160,000-word draft of a memoir that consisted of a dense, expositional narrative juxtaposed against over-long passages of dialogue. I abandoned it. What I had written only a masochist with a machete could or would slog through.

Honestly, I did not know how to write differently. However, by focusing on the short form, the conventions of writing flash, I have become a better writer of the long and have refined my skills to shape memoir moments into “story.”

About three years ago, I received an invitation to the Flash Factory, an office at Zoetrope.com, an online writers’ site. I had no idea what flash fiction was, but I jumped into the weekly prompts. I had a lot to learn and unlearn. My first flashes were arc-less non-stories, or moments/ mini scenes. Scenes I could do. I have a theatrical background. Literally and figuratively. What I did not know was how to write a compressed piece of prose with an arc where something happens, that something is resolved, and changes.

Flash taught me how to hone dramatic moments. In Something About Your Mother below—a “memoir flash” based on a true event—I compressed a long scene into a dramatic moment where a cruel child tells a terrible lie to another child, leaving in only the most relevant words, details, and dialogue. In memoir, the writer uses fictional devices to create “story” based on personal memory versus pure fictionalization. Ditto “memoir flash.” What could have been a fifteen-hundred-word chapter is now less than five hundred words.

In the story, I introduce the protagonist Lucinda playing a game. Immediately, the antagonist, Cam, arrives and interrupts her play with a lie. This happens within a few short sentences. Upset about the lie, Lucinda runs home to her grandmother and the two of them go onto Chestnut Street to learn if the lie is true. When Mama rides up on her bike, the effect of the lie on Lucinda and Mamoo allows the reader to see the three familial relationships and reveals a universal truth about the cruelty of children.

Did the actual event happen in such a compressed period? Of course not. Things like dinner, baths and or phone calls interrupt real time events. However, what flash has taught me is that fewer words said well are better than many words meandering around with no end in sight.

I have become a better writer of memoir because of the skills I’ve learned from writing flash fiction: to strive to make every word count. I even do a bit of fiction on the side, which is great. It gives me a break from myself!

The 440-word flash below originated from a prompt—to write something about your mother.

Something about Your Mother

Busting ass backwards out of the Lime’s driveway, I laughed.  “See if you can catch me.” I raced to the corner of Chestnut and Second.

“Hey, Lucinda!”

I looked at the short, blond-headed girl two years older than my twelve who blocked my escape path with her expensive French bike.

“Hi, Camille.”

Her eyes scanned my Tomboy-scraped and bruised knees. I scratched my arm irritated by a sting and stared at my neighbor, Cam Mercy. Her younger brother Phinizy was my friend. Phin, I liked.

“Lucindah,” she said, playing with the pronunciation. “Or do you prefer Kemp-e?”

“Whatever.”

“Ya’ll have funny names.”

With a mother named Jay, a brother named Phinizy, and an uncle named Walker, well, what could I say? Bait her? No. I waited.

“There’s something I have to tell you about your mother,” she said, smiling in a way that didn’t look happy. “She’s been in an accident…on her bike. A car hit her. I think she’s dead.”

I looked at her bright white sneakers.

“Did you hear what I said?”

I heard loud. I flew around the corner, pushed open my front gate, and tore up the three front steps. Pounding on the door, I screamed.  “Mamoo, Mamoo!”

My grandmother opened the door.

“Mama? Where’s Mama, Mamoo?”

Mamoo looked startled.

“Camille Mercy said Mama was killed by a car.”

Mamoo’s eyes got big as raccoons. She grabbed the top of her sweater with her little hummingbird-sized hands. “What? No. She went to Zara’s….” She walked past me, down the steps, past the gate and out onto Chestnut Street. I followed behind her.

“To Zara’s for cigs, on her bike,” she muttered, turning to me, her face ashen as an elderly gnome. I came and stood beside her and together we looked towards Jackson Avenue. I could see Cam, in her yard cattycorner from our house, watching us.

Mama, I thought, no, no. Mama who took me to the bars. Mama who brought strange men home. Mama who told me daddy was crazy. Mama who I hated to love. Mama who I loved to hate, please don’t go. I squeezed Mamoo’s hand so hard she gasped.

We stood staring down the street when a figure on a three-speed Raleigh appeared in the distance. A figure wearing Bermuda shorts and a Greek captain’s hat rode up and stopped the bike right in front of Mamoo and me.

“Poots! Mother! Why how delightful to have a welcoming committee!”

I smiled bigger than I had in years. I looked across the street into the Mercy’s yard. Cam had dissolved into a puff of smoke, her bike tossed on its side.

 [The Dirty Debutantes’ Daughter]

My journey from long-winded expositional narrator to flasher reminds me of the A.A. Milne story, In Which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle, where Pooh and Piglet get lost taking the long way around a short bush.

One further plus I discovered. Flashing in public is an addictive habit that is actually good for you.

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Lucinda Kempe is a writer and memoirist.  Flash Fiction Chronicles, Fictionaut, MudJob, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and The Short Humour Site have published Lucinda’s flash. Upcoming work will be at Metazen and Referential Magazine. Lucinda loves flashing and lives to do more of it publicly.

by Erin Entrada Kelly

When you’re immersed in a slush pile and a story fails within three paragraphs, there’s no need to sit on the fence and consider its rank and file on the subjective scale used for rejections and acceptances.

Unfortunately, most of the slush isn’t that easy.

The majority of stories fall on the fence and sit there, waiting for a fiction editor to nudge it one direction or the other. Where to nudge isn’t always an easy task, considering acceptance rates are typically around 2 percent and there isn’t room for everybody—nor should there be.

When I’m dredging through the slush piles, the stories that defeat the no-nudge and get pushed in the direction of YES are those that succeed where the vast majority of fence pieces fail: Originality.

There’s a school of thought that there is no such thing as original fiction anymore. People argue that fiction—specifically, genre fiction—has fallen victim to its own formulas and has sucked the life force out of any new thoughts or ideas. Experimental writers who believe they have come up with something new blame the market’s taste for conformity when their work fails and to some extent, especially for novelists, that may be true. But short fiction and flash fiction are other beasts entirely. It is in the shorter masterpieces that writers are truly able to stretch their creative wings and find publication.

Why, then, do so many writers fail to be original?

• They see originality as the technique of a piece, rather than a quality of it. Being original doesn’t mean utilizing strange or quirky punctuation, printing on all sides of the paper a la House of Leaves, or using unusual fonts. In some cases that approach may work, but in many cases it fails because the writer doesn’t understand that originality has to live deeper within the manuscript—in its depths, as a quality of the work, not as a gimmick.
• On the surface, life stories lend themselves to conformity. You can pick up most any traditional slush pile and find a story about cancer. Death. Love. These things have touched the lives of just about every person on Earth in one way or another, so it’s no surprise that more than one person wants to write about it. Unfortunately, many writers fail to see that the power in the story isn’t the cancer. The power of the story is in the characters. I’ve read dozens of well-written cancer stories where husband and wife are in the living room or the dining room, moving through fairly solid but uninspiring dialogue about the future. Nice and touching, okay. But the story that will truly resonate is the one that happens outside of the house or the doctor’s office. It’s the story that sneaks up on you because you are in a new setting, with new and interesting characters and you don’t know what to expect, even though cancer has been written about in thousands of stories before this one.
• The characters aren’t original enough. Human beings have everything and nothing in common all at once. The reason we resonate with characters in life and fiction is because we can relate to them, but at the same rate, we are all eccentric individuals—even the most “normal” of us all. You can write about John Everyman, but we need to know what makes this John Everyman different from the others living in the slush pile.

It’s hard enough to get published. It’s even harder when you’re one of five stories that week that have the same setting and the same concept. Reading slush piles makes me a better writer because it teaches me a very important lesson: No matter how clever I think I am, there are other writers just as clever, and more so.

To stand out, you can’t blend in.

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Erin Entrada Kelly is staff editor for Flash Fiction Chronicles. Her fiction has been published widely in places like Keyhole Magazine, Monkeybicycle and the Kyoto Journal. She was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer National Fiction Prize and the Philippines Free Press Literary Award for Short Fiction. She currently has two novels under representation with the Jenks Agency and works as a freelance fiction editor, as well as assistant editor of Thrive Magazine. Read more at www.erinentradakelly.com.