Wed 4 Nov 2009
On being prolific
Posted by Oonah V. Joslin under Process, advice, every day fiction, flash, life experience, publishing
[5] Comments
The editor of Flash Fiction Chronicles asked me to write a post about my writing life and I’m happy to answer her questions, though my first response was to make a joke, but she wouldn’t take “no” for an answer so here are my responses to her insistent questions.
How do I manage to be so prolific?
I write for an audience and the audience is mostly the folks in my writer’s community. We do challenges every week and that gives me something to write about and it keeps me writing regularly. They are very short pieces of course. I’m in flash poetry forum too so I usually write one to two pieces of poetry and flash a week. That’s output!
Of course I have a few other little audiences as well – the audience at Every Day Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Static Movement and last but not least, Micro Horror. I tend to put stories together in such a way that they can be submitted to one of those magazines and I have a few others I submit to too. 10FLASH and Doorknobs and Bodypaint run regular themed challenges and I can’t resist that.
I’ve been on over-drive throughout October. The Halloween Competition at Micro Horror always inspires me. I wrote six flashes for that this year. I usually send one a month but I just love Halloween! I’ve won the competition twice and the prize is always something unique and well worth winning but I’d do it anyway. My husband says I have to lose sometime but even if I lose I win because I get read. I’m a most unusual candidate for writing horror because I don’t read horror – too scary! But my brand of horror is I think fairly traditional – more ‘chiller’ than horror. I was invited to write a story for Toe Tags because Brian Barnett and William Pauley III liked my Micro Horror work. That was great!
I love when somebody wants me to tell them a story. Being so prolific in the way that I am does have a down side. I don’t have a book out there and I’m just vain enough to think that I should. Larger projects tend to get pushed out by ‘immediate gratification’. I have a collection of poetry but it wasn’t big enough to go for the Crashaw Prize – I’d not have won anyway… I have 7 chapters of a novella, and unfinished business with some Technopolymorphs I know.
Where do I get ideas?
For a start, I write according to prescribed parameters. I mostly know the length and the theme and sometimes the genre I am going to write. After that I use whatever knowledge and experience life has thrown at me, information gleaned from internet research, conversations with my very erudite spouse, other peoples’ conversations at the pool, on the bus – anything really.
I look for a character’s name to give me an idea who I’m talking about and then I people his or her world and it seems to fall into place with the name.
How long does it take?
It’s a piece of string. Sometimes the first draft is almost the final draft. “Trip to Tangier” took me two years. “Dance” took me three. I had a poem published in Twisted Tongue that I finally got right after twenty years! “Resolution,” a favourite for many EDF readers took me just over half an hour and one revision.
Sometimes you just know when something is right. At other times it takes a clever editor’s eye to see where improvements are needed. My story “Dock,” due this month in EDF on November 15, was one of those. It just needed a tiny tweak but I needed Camille and the team to tell me that.
Well, Gay I hope that answers your questions – thanks for asking!
Oonah V. Joslin is the winner of two Micro Horror prizes and an honoree in The 2009 Binnacle Comp. Full lists of what went where available on at Oonah’s Every Day Fiction author site. She also served as judge of The Shine Poetry Competition 2008 and is managing editor of Every Day Poets. Anthologies: The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008, Toe Tags, and A Man of Few Words.
When my story
In
Sharon E. Trotter (pictured) won First Place in our 1st String-of-10 Flash Fiction Contest with her story, The Haircut, to be published in Every Day Fiction in the month of October.
Consider lightning. This phenomenon cracks open the sky, takes our breath away, but we might miss it if not for the warning of thunder. We hear the deep rumble, we look up, tension sparking the air, and wait for the flash. Thunder grabs our attention and lightning dazzles our eyes, and together they stir our hearts.
By its nature, flash fiction often captures brief moments in time, snapshots of a character’s life. These snapshots can cover a profound moment of epiphany or change in the status quo, or simply express the universal mundane. Flash is like a news story – the audience gets a condensed biography and a summary of what could be the defining moment of a human being’s life.
As the
