Flash Fiction Chronicles

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

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

By my measure, the following items are awesome:

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a previous post I talked about the limits of flash fiction — the hard ceiling of 1,000 (or sometimes less) words that force a writer to focus his energies in such a way that makes him, paradoxically, freer to explore techniques of language and narrative. In that post I talked of gardens of various sizes, and mentioned walls and fences. The walls of my analogy were the hard word limits of flash beyond which no word count could go.

But think of flash fiction — indeed, all fiction — as being surrounded not by a fence, but a window frame. When we look out the window from a fixed position we see only a slice of the world itself. Prior experience tells us there is more to the world than meets the eye, but so too do various clues in the scene itself — perhaps we only see a part of a road, or the shadow of a tree, or, indeed, neighbors moving in and out of frame. Good, evocative fiction should do this too, it should hint at a larger world.

My own domain of genre fiction demands this more so than contemporary fiction, and so as a technique I think it is more important for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and assorted other ’speculative’ or fantastical stories to seed their story with such cues to achieve a measure of believability. Set a story in the modern world dealing with modern problems and the believability is already there — both the audience and, perhaps more importantly, the author believe in that world because they live in it already.

One of my favorite things about Every Day Fiction are the comments left by such a large variety of readers. And there is always one thing I want to see in the comments section, one thing that lets me know I succeeded in my job as illusionist and world-maker, and that’s when someone tells me that the story felt like part of something larger. That means nothing more nor less than my fictional world had achieved a level of believability that persuaded the reader into thinking that there was indeed more beyond the frame of the window.

And, truth be told, there always is more beyond the frame that the reader does not see — the ideas the writer has about the world and its characters that just don’t fit in the story in explicit or elaborated-upon ways. But rarely is there a great deal, as least for my stories, as it doesn’t make sense to imagine a novel’s worth of back story to lend authenticity to a 1,000 word piece of fiction — if that were the case, one would just write the novel. No, there is a trick to it.

The first and most important aspect of doing this has to be the the writer’s own belief. You have to believe you are writing about a world and character that exists beyond the 1,000 word window frame that you are confining them to. This isn’t magical thinking on the writer’s part, rather it is a deliberate way to get into the mindset of someone writing contemporary fiction. In contemporary fiction, the author knows the world intimately because it is the one he lives in, and he is free to reference or hint at so much that we all take for granted. And that’s the second part of our approach, taking things for granted.

Robert A. Heinlein is famously held up as an example in this regard; whereas science fiction prior to him would often draw attention to the differences in the setting with descriptions of the gee-whiz gadgetry, Heinlein would cut right through it with something as simple as his character crossing from one room to another through an electronic door with the words ‘the door dilated.’ Major breakthrough in believability, because it presents an unfamiliar world as familiar, and therefore gives it a reality that exists apart from the narrative. Heinlein took the old SF fence of highlighting the differences of things and turned it into a window frame that suggested that those things you wanted to know where all there if you were to just tilt your head and look through the frame at a different angle.

Giving your audience everything on a plate is the worst way to tell a story — in fact, it’s often what’s meant by the condemnation of ‘telling’ rather than ’showing.’ The best way to paint a scene is to get your reader to imagine it for themselves — and sometimes that can be done more effectively with fewer, rather than more, words. By the same token, making a world feel real to an audience involves getting them to supply the answers to questions you carefully suggest to them. ‘The door dilated’ does this beautifully, as the reader instantly imagines for himself what a more plodding author would have begged him to believe with an extended description. Getting your reader to internalize the truth of your world by forcing them to meet you halfway on some of the speculative or unique elements within it makes such fiction essentially collaborative.

Curiously, I sometimes hear ‘this felt like something bigger, I wanted more’ as a kind of minor criticism, as if by suggesting a larger world and then not delivering it in full I’ve somehow reneged on my authorial agreement. I know how to read between the lines when I see this. When the reader might bring this up as a flaw I see it as proof positive that they had become emotionally involved in my story and believed it enough to be disappointed when they realized there was in fact a fence obscuring their view of the rest of the world where they had been certain a window frame existed. Perhaps they feel as if a trick as been pulled on them — and it has, as writing is a great deal about illusions and trickery.  Wanting to see the rest of a world that does not exist — that is, in fact, constructed almost entirely out of a few hinting references scattered here and there and made stronger by authorial conviction — and then being disappointed that you can not indeed actually see that world, must to be the greatest compliment of all. Especially in flash fiction. The point of hinting at a larger world within flash fiction is not to satiate readers, but to whet their appetites.

Bill Ward is, most probably, a figment of his own imagination. His flash has appeared at Every Day Fiction, Murky Depths, and the anthologies Dead Souls and Northern Haunts, as well as The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008. He blogs about all things genre at www.billwardwriter.com.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote exactly one novel, and most critics agree that The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is not a great novel—at least not nearly as successful as his finest short stories.  H.P. Lovecraft wrote a novel and a couple novellas, but as with the man from Nantucket, they are not as highly esteemed as the shorter works.

In their most chilling tales, Lovecraft and his gothic-horror predecessor aim to generate one specific feeling in the reader: fear. They masterfully conjure a creepy-crawly goose-fleshy atmosphere of dread, generating that special frisson of horror.

Lovecraft opens his seminal essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” He has been quoted a thousand times—some of you, like me, can probably recite it by heart. 

But a corollary to that observation, so dear to the writer of the weird tale, is that any single emotion cannot be indefinitely sustained. It is difficult—nigh on impossible—to keep a reader on that high-wire for long. A short story is meant to be read in one sitting: the tension can be wound tighter and tighter, the emotion of creeping dread built to its climax. A novel, on the other hand, gets read in chunks, with the reader in a different frame of mind each time the book is picked up.

What about the reigning king of the macabre, whose novels often run north of a thousand pages? Stephen King himself, in his 1981 overview of the horror field Danse Macabre, makes the very same point about the difficulty of maintaining stark fear for longer than a scene or a passage at a time. 

The particular kind of effect achieved by Poe or Lovecraft in their best short stories is also found in novels, but it is dished out in doses. A novelist has to pace him/herself, building to moments of horror, coming back down to some equilibrium, then building up again. King likens it to “long-distance running” (355). 

A horror novel is like a long rollercoaster—the whole ride is not a single continuous drop. A horror short story, on the other hand, is a ghost-train ride careening straight into the tunnel and scaring the daylights out of the rider right until the train emerges into the light on the other side.

In a horror novel by the likes of King, dread is but one element among many—one ingredient in a complex soup. There is suspense, mystery, character development: numerous engines driving the plot. Not so in the shortest of horror stories, which offer dread distilled to its essence. 

Which brings us to horror flash. It is possible to generate frisson in very few words. I’ll close with two examples.

• Exhibit A: “Knock” by Frederic Brown, first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories 33:2 (December 1948):

“The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.” 

• Exhibit B is supplied by Thomas Ligotti in the foreword to his short story collection Noctuary (1994):

“A man awakes in the darkness and reaches over for his eyeglasses on the nightstand. The eyeglasses are placed in his hand.”

Aside from their bare-bones brevity, these exhibits have this in common: they both tap into that oldest, strongest fear of the unknown.

(To be continued…)

Nicholas Ozment has had twenty flash stories published, twelve of them on Every Day Fiction. Credits include Weird Tales, Mythic Delirium, Dreams & Nightmares, Arkham Tales, Pseudopod, and nearly seventy other publications and contests. His work has been anthologized, podcast, and performed on radio and stage, as well as being recognized in Writer’s Digest and Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He is a co-editor of Every Day Poets. Nicholas lives in Minnesota with his wife and daughter, where he teaches college English.

Rose Metal Press has published a new book called Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field, edited by Tara L. Masih.  This short (of course!) 157 page-handbook gives beginning writers of flash fiction a place to start and continuing flashers a much-needed resource. 

In their introduction, publishers Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney discuss flash (0-1500 word range) as fiction that blends “genres and forms.”    However, in presenting the conventions of flash fiction, they wanted a book that would not “pin said inventive forms down with strict definitions.”   What they offer instead is “a book of ideas about and for flash fiction.” 

Editor Tara L. Masih has pulled together many of those ideas in twenty-five essays by writers such writers as Ron Carlson, Rusty Barnes, Kim Chinquee, Steve Almond, Vanessa Gebbie, Robert Olen Butler, Stuart Dybek, and Randall Brown.  The essays are divided into useful categories including “Freedom and Feeling in the Form,” “Beginnings and Endings,” and “Focusing and Editing,” making the book a user-friendly field guide to Flash Fiction, to be read either as it has been put together or searched through for specific help or inspiration.

“In Pursuit of the Short Short Story,”  the editor’s introduction, Ms. Masih opens with the following quotation, “Each drop encases its own separate note, the way each drop engulfs its own blue pearl of light,” from Stuart Dybek’s story “Nighthawks.”  Although this description in its original context is meant to define rain, Ms. Masih believes it is “as close to a definition of flash fiction” as she can give us.  The editor of the “Field Guide” then unfolds a history of the short short story beginning with Washington Irving and Poe to its present incarnation on the internet and in print journals dedicated to short short fiction. 

As for the essays, they offer insights into the art and craft of flash as well process.  Vanessa Gebbie writes about kidnapping the reader and using prompts in her piece called “Fireworks and Burnt Toast.”   Shouhua Qi discusses the origin of flash in China where short shorts are called Minute Stories, Pocket-Size Stories, and more familiar to the online flash reader, Smoke-Long stories.  In Robert Olen Butler’s “A Short Short Theory,” the author expands James Joyce’s one ephiphany at the end of a story to include a similar epiphany early on in the piece, “when the yearning of the character shines forth.”  Many of the essays feature flash fiction pieces written by their authors.

A useful, intelligent addition to the discussion of flash fiction, Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction manages to give readers what they want to know about flash fiction without limiting the genre with “strict definitions.”

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction:
Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field.
Edited by Tara L. Masih
ISBN: 978-0-9789848-6-1
$15.95

 Order directly from Rose Metal Press

Scott M. Sandridge is the managing editor of Fear and Trembling and the author of over a dozen short stories and 60+ reviews. His work has appeared in Anthology Builder, Every Day Fiction, Mindflights, and Ray Gun Revival as well as two “best of” anthologies (Distant Passages, Volume 1 and The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008), and was a Top Ten Finisher in the 2008 P&E Readers Poll. His podcast novel, The Silverblade Prophecy, was recently nominated for the upcoming 2009 Parsecs award. More information can be found at http://smsand.wordpress.com.

Q & A

Flash Fiction Chronicles: Scott, tell us a little about Fear and Trembling and your own involvement with the horror genre and with the e-zine.

Scott: Fear and Trembling is a magazine of Christian Horror for Double-Edged Publishing. We seek horror that has the classical feel (e.g. the Hammer horror films, Stoker, Poe, and Lovecraft) that is suitable for Christian and non-Christian readers alike.

Ironically enough, I primarily write space opera-style science fiction and heroic fantasy (although I have been told my fantasy can get pretty dark). I’ve only had two Horror flash fictions published. I was reading slush for Ray Gun Revival when John Kuhn asked me if I wanted to join F&T’s editorial team. At first I read slush for both webzines while also helping John Kuhn out with proofreading and promotion. When John Kuhn left his managing editor position, I decided to take up the reigns temporarily until a better managing editor could be found. A year and a half later, I’m still there.

FFC: When was the e-zine founded and what is its mission?

Scott: F&T went live in June of 2007, and its mission is to provide good, spine-tingling Horror that doesn’t blatantly violate Christian principles but can also be enjoyed by everyone. Sometimes, doing so can feel like walking on a razor’s edge, but so far we’ve managed to not cut ourselves too bloody with that razor.

FFC: Where does the title, “Fear and Trembling” come from?

Scott: The simple answer is I don’t know. F&T is the brainchild of John Kuhn and Taylor Kent, and I have no clue what goes on in their warped psychotic minds….

FFC: Your tagline is “We’ll Scare the Death out of You!” so it’s obvious F & T is an e-zine that focuses on the genres of horror, dark tales, and fantasy. What do you consider the basic conventions of horror fiction? What kind of conventions would separate horror from dark tales or fantasy?

Scott: Anything that scares or shocks you or both is technically horror, so horror is the one genre that can be found in almost every other genre fiction to one extent or another, so there’s really no separation, per se, but a sliding scale of degrees. I think that if the story’s primary purpose is to scare or shock you (e.g. Brian Keene’s City of the Dead) then it is Horror in the genre sense. The primary purpose for dark fantasy is not to scare or shock you; although, such elements will be found in it to one extent or another. No, dark fantasy is the anti-hero version of all the other fantasy subgenres (except perhaps sword & sorcery which is a whole other discussion entirely), for in dark fantasy the main character is often the monster (e.g. White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Clan Novel series, or Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville series) and the concept of Good Vs. Evil tends to get blurred a bit—even the usual “good guys” tend to have, well, a few personal problems.

FFC: Speaking of genres and sub-genres, I saw a reference to “splatterpunk” in one of your interviews with Ty Schwamberger, author of the novel Night School. What are “the sub-genres” in horror these days?

Scott: Dark fantasy and dark science fiction (which are more cross-genres than sub-genres), splatterpunk (the gore-fest slasher flick), classic horror (like the old-style Hammer horror films), Christian horror (which often tends to center around faith and the crisis of), zombie fiction and vampire fiction (yes, they’re so prevalent now that they’ve been made into their own subgenres), supernatural horror (e.g. Stephen King novels and movies), supernatural romance (don’t ask), dark erotica (again, don’t ask), torture porn (e.g. Saw), bizarro, and surreal fiction. I think I got it all pretty much covered…for now.

FFC: Any new trends in genre?

Scott: Zombie and vampire fiction has been on the rise again, and Carrie Vaughn has breathed new life into werewolves (and it’s about dang time, too). Surreal and bizarro fiction has been rising up from the underground, and Lovecraftian goodies (or should I say baddies?) abound.

FFC: The guidelines specify, “We want atmosphere. We want hair-raising conflict. We want to get to know characters—real, multi-dimensional people we are able to care about—who just happen to be facing horrifying realities. We want to face those realities with them, to hang on through the twists and frights of the plot and to root for them all the way.” If a writer wants to submit to F & T, is there anything beyond the general guidelines they should know?

Scott: Yeah. Send me a story that features the Dover Demon, and I’ll be your friend for life. Of all the urban myths out there, I’ve yet to see a story about that bizarre little critter. I mean, the Jersey Devil’s getting some attention (thanks to Robert Dunbar), but poor DD just keeps feelin’ left out.

Hmmm…I wonder if there’s a theme-related contest brewing in my mind…we’ll see.

FFC: Let’s talk a little about the “horror” slush pile. At what point in reading through a submission do you realize you might consider that story or not. What are the turn-offs? What makes you sit forward in your chair to read?

And you pay?

Scott: It might be different for the other slush readers (but something tells me otherwise), but for me it’s the first three sentences. If you can’t grab my attention and hold it for at least that long, don’t expect me to read the whole story. I just don’t have the time to waste. Even if my slush readers did, I don’t. Nothing personal. That’s just how picky I am. And my slush readers tend to be even picker than me.

Now, if, by the time I’m halfway through, it feels like you’re not really going anywhere and are just meandering along, you’re going to lose my interest, period. Sorry. But get ready for a rejection.

Usually, if I can manage to read all the way to the end without skipping parts, then you’ve got a very good chance of getting accepted.

And yes, we pay. It’s only $5 for now, alas, but at least it’s not FTLOI (yet).

FFC: How many stories might you get in a given month? What percentage is usable? How many do you publish?

Scott: We tend to see about 20-30 stories per month. Of those about 20-25% are good, and of the good ones we might pick half or all of them, depending on whether or not we’re already well-stocked for accepted stories.

FFC: As a lover of horror and its related genres, who do you recommend aspiring horror writers read?

Scott: Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, H.P. Lovecraft, Brian Keene, and Eugie Foster (especially her dark fairy-tale remakes). There are plenty of others, but they’re good to start with.

FFC: Anything else you’d like to add?

Scott: Yes. The Dover Demon rules!

Well, okay, the Jersey Devil is kinda cool, too.

FFC: Thanks, Scott, for taking the time to help writers better understand the horror genre.

Scott: Anytime.

Find Fear and Trembling on the net at http://www.fearandtremblingmag.com/index.html

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