Flash Fiction Chronicles

There used to be a girl who bled her emotions, ideas, thoughts and dreams into books.

She bled them and resurrected them. Again and again, until reality blurred and she no longer recognised humans of flesh and blood but saw and sought out characters from, often brittle and silver fish infested pages; slices of paper that reeked deliciously of other peoples visions.

She was a frivolous fool. At her best she was fey. The number of times she tumbled into an undignified heap for having mistaken a callow character for something from her beloved books were countless! The number of times she woke up to find herself impaled by an irate teacher who demanded to know why she was grinning or looking weepy for no reason occurred too often to be entertaining to her schoolmates.

Behind her back they called her names. She didn’t  care. She had found Hemingway,  a man who had died just before her birth and fallen in love. She didn’t understand that. Death could not be a barrier. To her, he was alive, pulsating-ly alive, like a sea god come to her room in the moonlight.

It was a strange love. And it began with The Old Man and the Sea.  Becoming progressively obsessive with each book that she read.  After her fourth reading of that novella, and the devouring of volumes of Hemingway out of which some struck her more forcefully – Snows of Kilimanjaro, Torrents of Spring, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Islands in the Stream, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not…she even went ahead and read two of his nonfiction books – Death in the Afternoon and A Moveable Feast.

After that she was no longer able to differentiate between the books. In her heart they had become one churning sea of people and situations with the narratives often intertwining and getting tangled up like spools of embroidery thread stuffed into a very small container. The spools would stay stuffed and become like one motley homogeneous mass. In later years, she felt the lump in her brain every time her muse flicked his tongue over it. It was not an unpleasant sensation; quite the contrary.

During those young years, the confusion in her head didn’t stop her from reading. Nor did it diminish her love. Hemingway often visited her in the middle of a basketball game or a maths class. Suddenly everything would become liquid celadon; her aura turning somewhat witless. She would doodle in her maths exercises book instead of writing the sums. She would snatch the ball out of her own team mates hands and toss it to the other side without thinking. She vaguely comprehended the inappropriateness of her behaviour and tried to hide them with lame smart alecky remarks that convinced no one and did nothing for her reputation.

It was not that she only read Hemingway. There were many authors who gripped her, heart, mind and soul, intensely, madly. In that sense she was not a faithful lover. But she remained loyal to Earnest Miller Hemingway in the way the Devadasis remained loyal to their Temple Gods. There were strong and lasting relationships born of her readings of other authors. But Hemingway’s bearded face always hovered over the rim of her horizon. She could never visualize any writer the way she could conjure up an image of Hemingway instantly.

Years passed and for a time the struggle of existence forbade any deep reading. She read in snatches and bits. A phase came after she married and had children when she was reading only nursery rhymes and fables and Dr. Spock. The spectre of a smiling eyed white bearded Sea God rarely rose to haunt her. By this time she had married a smooth cheeked man with a dimple on his chin, whose only exposure to hunting had been a sparrow that he had killed as a twelve year old with his air gun and had been sick for days with the horror of that knowledge. He was a good man who was never jealous of her books.

One day this good man who was her husband decided to bring home the latest book by Hemingway, even though he had been dead for more than three decades. That was another magic about Hemingway. His books continued to spring up long after he died. No wonder she never truly believed him dead in the first place. Her husband wanted to give her a birthday present that would make her eyes light up the way diamonds are supposed to light up a woman’s eyes. He went out and bought True at First Light. She was delighted and started to read straightaway.

Halfway down the book she put it down. The liquid celadon feeling receded leaving a chalky taste in her palate. An emptiness washed over her in the afternoon light. Her husband saw the shadows and felt a little annoyed that he couldn’t please her after all.

It took her some weeks. During which time she went back again and again to the book, only to put it down again. For several years she did not open another Hemingway book; she did not reread any. When at at last she went back to reading Hemingway, she began again with The Old Man and the Sea.  And this time, she did not lose herself. She went out to sea with Santiago and returned, carrying his wounds in her heart but without being possessed of either Santiago or Hemingway.

(Taken from an earlier post in Writers & Writerisms)

Rumjhum Biswas is still living in Chennai, India, but in another part where there were no mosquitoes until the rains came and all the incy wincy spiders were washed away. No she isn’t implying that spiders eat mosquitoes, but if they did she’d become a millionaire by breeding spiders and selling them all over the world, instead of being another poor writer who gets to answer the door and the phone because she is at home and that means she has a cushy life! She has a blog to prove that it’s not: http://rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com. You can also find her at times at Flash Fiction Chronicles.

It was like this for weeks, no months, on end. This disquiet of something not there. This feeling of disruption… Even as my daily routine continued, a heart that paced length to length in its serrated Boney cage…

Old relationships are hard to break; harder still to fall in love again, when you have loved that other so much, so long. But I knew I had to move on, had to love again, truly, with all my heart again. Otherwise the writing would not come. That thought killed me every night. So I began the process even before the first night of stepping in. I jerked my heart, almost squeezing it in my fist every time it turned back for another last look.

I don’t blame my heart, especially now that it has grown quite old and quite tame – there was a time when I reveled in every movement – an odd thing in a wife and mother, a woman most of all, for aren’t women supposed to be the rooted ones?

I loved it every time we moved, each time taking our home with us, dismantled and packed into neat cardboard boxes transported by truck or ship. This time too was no different. Except that we moved from one steep end of the city to another steeper extreme. This time we were closer to the sea, more away from the hub, among broader quieter avenues and cul-de-sacs, roads and lanes that were and still are strangers to me.

It’s magical that a single city can be so different in its different parts and yet be the same city, like a confluence where the waters of disparate rivers meet. But, I had grown to love my old locality and home of four years. Despite the obvious beauty of this new place, I have not yet been able to claim it for my own. As yet. I needed to own it first; the writing would not happen otherwise.
I needed to sit at a particular angle, where the sun slanted in just so. So my computer was turned around and around again; and yes the husband was exasperated. And I am still in the process of finding my G-spot of writing, so to speak.

My blog lay neglected. My implicit commitments to writers were not honoured. Drafts of poems remained in paper napkin scraps and margins of magazines. Stories raged in my head and died before they could be consecrated to paper. It did not help that for the most part, the past year had been emotionally unbearably noisy and jagged – a bad thing for my writing self anyway. Very bad. But now a new year has already begun. Now I am disciplining my heart to love again, and love true, like before…

It helps that the moon when it’s plump and full, hangs just above the Gul Mohar tree outside my terrace (and in this house I have two – one above running the length and breadth of our apartment and the other smaller but more reachable beyond my hall) shedding elfin light upon us. There are parrots and squirrels here too. And a gang of monkeys that seem to be more decently behaved than those in my children’s school. Most homes own a dog or two; I watch them and sometimes get to make friends with them. The dog I once rescued and owned briefly, but will love eternally, lives about five hundred metres away. I saw him recently and came away glad for him.

Yes. The bricks are falling into place, softly. The fire hasn’t yet warmed my hearth, but it is lit now. I can feel my heart expanding, ready to embrace this new environment. This year I hope my muse will rain. This year I hope to finally fall in love with my new surroundings, make a new beginning, deeply and meaningfully.

Adapted from a post at  Writers & Writerisms by Rumjhum Biswas.

Rumjhum Biswas is still living in Chennai, India, but in another part where there were no mosquitoes until the rains came and all the incy wincy spiders were washed away. No she isn’t implying that spiders eat mosquitoes, but if they did she’d become a millionaire by breeding spiders and selling them all over the world, instead of being another poor writer who gets to answer the door and the phone because she is at home and that means she has a cushy life! She has a blog, Writers & Writerisms, to prove that it’s not. You can also find her at times right here at Flash Fiction Chronicles.

The first fiction that I ever wrote for publication was flash fiction. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time — what I was writing was flavor text, ‘fluff’ in the parlance of the RPG and miniatures game industry, short pieces of fiction designed to bring a game world to life. My one page stories were part of thick gamebooks full of art and color photography, with my little bits of narrative sandwiched between the troop statistics and rules for combat resolution, generally with an accompanying illustration.

It was my first success as a writer, and something I’m still proud of because those books were real works of art, filled with top-shelf design elements and fabulous science fiction and fantasy imagery. As my participation in these game worlds grew so did the variety of my work, so that, from my start supplying 800 word ‘one-pagers’ I branched in all directions — from double-page stories designed to fit alongside particular illustrations and five-thousand word chunks of invented history for the game setting, to little micro-flashes, snippets 300 words or less that had to tell a story or, at least, communicate a point, and could be anything from an intercepted sub-space dispatch, the contents of a treaty, the speech of an academician, or the quotations of a famous dictator.

Despite all the permutations my work in the field was to take, it was those first stories that continued to be paramount because they had taught the best lessons: concision, movement, specificity, and writing with some definite point or climax in mind.

I landed my first writing gig on the virtue of two stories I wrote (I hate to call them ‘fanfic,’ but that’s basically what they were) that were in the six to eight thousand word range . . . so naturally the first thing I was asked to do was four pieces of fluff under 800 words! Topics were suggested to me — which is an enormous help when you are writing in someone else’s world — and, so too, was a deadline. The rest was up to me, including figuring out how to write something so short that still managed to work as a story, and not just a sketch or vignette.

I wish I could lay out a detailed recollection of the process of approaching those first flashes, but the truth is it was years ago and I wasn’t exactly taking notes. Then, too, I never had a real problem writing those pieces either, other than running to a thousand words for a few of them (which my employer was flexible enough not to mind). Some writers find it extremely difficult to dial down their output to flash fiction levels of brevity, but I took to it like a howler monkey to a foliage buffet. And I think the reason for that is I grew up reading the same sort of things as I now found myself writing.

Prior to the flash fiction ‘boom’ of the last few years — made largely possible by the internet — I don’t think I’d ever read flash outside of gamebooks and RPG magazines. I never recall seeing sub-1,000 word stories in anthologies or single author collections, or in the pages of Analog, Asimov’s, or F&SF. If they were there they were forgettable, jokey little asides used as filler, or squirreled away in back with the ads for x-ray glasses and chest-expanders. They weren’t relevant — they didn’t have the power of even the simple, commercial fiction appearing in the pages of a Dungeons & Dragons or Warhammer gamebook.

Now, I can’t swear that gaming publications were the first to take flash seriously enough to strive for a level of popular appeal, or even that everything in said publications qualifies as flash fiction, or, furthermore, that it was all of it very good. But some of it was good, and much of it memorable, and reading a great deal of it as I had done prepared me to sit down and whip out actual flash fiction on my first try — well-written, strongly themed, accessible, and layered stories complete with plot, character, and setting (at least, I thought so — and my employer seemed pleased, which was the main thing). You don’t just do that without a model, and the model I had was clearly those bits of ‘fluff’ sprinkled throughout all those gamebooks and glossy mags of my youth. And that’s one more reason I’m proud to have been able to write for those same kinds of publications once I got the chance because I was able to, in some small way, return the favor.

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.

Once upon a time, a book changed my life. I took it out of the library so much my name was on the card more than any other kid. It was the first book that appealed as much to the writer in me as it did to the reader. I was eight.

The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Edwards – pen name of Julie Andrews – is a tale of three siblings who harness the power of their imaginations with the help of a local scientist in order to reach a mythical, magical place called Whangdoodleland. I was immediately enchanted with the notion that sheer imagination could transport me to other, better places. (In retrospect, however, isn’t that what reading IS?) I began to diligently practice the major technique mentioned in the book – I paid attention.

I noted the differences in shades of the same color, I looked for the berries behind the leaves of bushes, I sat still and watched the bees and the ants and the spiders. I taught myself to listen harder, picking out specific sounds in noisy environments. I looked up a lot. I touched things to understand how they felt, I tasted new things, and tried to identify smells. I looked down a lot. I figured out how to soft-focus my eyes and see things more clearly when I refocused.

I never made it to Whangdoodleland as it was detailed in the book – or did I? Didn’t I return there every time I re-read the words? While I was reading it seemed that the Whangdoodle, the Splintercat, and Oily Prock were as real to me as the silver maple in the side yard where I sat all summer reading piles of books. And in paying attention to what was all around me, I learned how to better experience and imagine the worlds laid out before me at the library.

It was right about then that I began to understand the true power of words. I had visited countless imaginary places created by others, and now I began to think that maybe I could create and share my own worlds with other people. Heady stuff for an eight year old. Enter Mr. Simon, my fourth grade teacher who made us write a story every week using the vocabulary words on the board, and voila! The birth of a lifelong writer.

The key, I think, is the paying attention. I can never thank Ms. Andrews enough for that simple, powerful lesson. Not only did she teach her characters how to notice the small details around them, but she also included them in the world she created. Hers were not so small, since she was writing for children, but they were there. The particulars of any imaginary scene make it more real, something the reader can relate to even if it is far beyond the scope of reality.

I never stopped paying attention, I realize. My children are often impressed with how many details I can pick out of a given scene, be it in life or a movie or even a book. And because I am aware of those details in my everyday life, I am also aware of them in my writing — aware enough to include them. Not description, mind you, but details. Description is a billboard advertising the author’s presence, saying “hey, see it this way.” Details make it real, make it powerful – they are a springboard for the reader’s imagination.

I’m quite certain that my Whangdoodleland would be different from yours, but we would each imagine that land based on the details that stood out to us. Which, as I see it, is the miracle of the connection between writers and readers.

TL. Schofield is a xenophobic social butterfly, a lifetime writer finally sending her words into the world. She lives in central Georgia and dreams of the ocean. She placed two stories, Arrival and Escape, on Flash Fiction Chronicles String-of-10 Flash Fiction Contest and blogs at Blogging in the Dark.

I didn’t choose to be a writer. I write because I must. I write because if I don’t, I’ll go crazy. There must be thousands of writers who say this. I know I am not unique.

I have been writing since the age of seven, may be earlier, since the time I learnt the alphabets perhaps. During those innocent days, I did not question myself why I scribbled poems and sometimes songs in notebooks. I just knew that if I didn’t jot down whatever picture and emotion came into my mind immediately, I would feel angry and physically sick.

Once during a two hour math exam in school, I finished my paper forty five minutes early, just so I could pen the lines of a poem that were constantly coming between me and the numbers (I don’t remember how much I scored in that exam, but even if I did, I wouldn’t tell, so don’t ask!) Sister Padua, our music teacher, who was minding us, saw me mumbling to myself and scribbling on a paper after I had given up my answer sheets. She told me to stop distracting the other girls who were still writing. Disturbed, I stormed out of the room. She was shocked by my impudence. Afterwards, when I apologized to her and explained why I had become agitated, she said that she understood, but I should have trusted her enough and told her the reason instead of becoming emotional. She gently told me that she would have allowed me to leave the classroom and sit in the library and pursue my poetry in peace.

Another time, I became nearly hysterical with grief because my poetry notebooks couldn’t be found shortly after we had shifted to another house. I don’t recall this incident, so I must have been much younger than the math exam episode. Years later, my mother told me that that day she realized how much my writing meant to me. Yet, I myself didn’t know it. For a long time, too long for my own good, I neglected my writing self. I felt embarrassed to tell people about it. When I did, it usually produced strange reactions ranging from derision and mockery to irritation (“oh, don’t act intellectual with me”) to jaw dropping awe, to in one case, even titillation.

Over the years, I withdrew my writing self, until I hardly ever wrote for myself, except for the occasional poem. I had a job that entailed a large amount of creative writing, so I lulled myself into thinking that I was fulfilled. I felt stories and poems rampaging about in my head when I took a long maternity leave when my first child was born, but did nothing to capture them on paper. Foolishly I told myself that I just needed to get back to work. The inner disquiet did not go away. Life went on. And, except for the one or two stories that I wrote during lunch hour at work, I continued to ignore my writing self.

I began writing again in earnest shortly after my second child was born. Not tentatively, but furiously and angrily, hating anything that came between me, my writing and also my family. I chucked my lucrative full time advertising career; after a couple of years, I even stopped freelancing. My world revolved around my husband, my children and my writing. A couple of stories appeared in online journals. I became more and more detached from the social world. At times it felt like my head would burst if I didn’t leave everything aside to write. I wrote in my head all the time, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, at the playground with my babies, even while watching the occasional television. And, I took time off from my family and home constantly to bang away on my computer. But I still couldn’t tell people that I was a writer.

More stories and poems began to get published. I wrote more stories and poems. I wrote a novelette. I finished writing the first two drafts of my first novel. My husband got transferred and the new city we lived in gave me opportunities to touch base with writers groups. But I still couldn’t say it, when people, outside the writers’ circle, asked me what I did. The words stayed in my throat, hurting my gullet every time I swallowed them down again.

One day, my son, told me quietly that when his friends asked him what his mom did, he said that she was a writer. My daughter joined in and said that she was proud I was not a ‘normal’ mom. My husband, who has always supported my writing, said nothing. He only smiled his “I told you so” smile.

Rumjhum Biswas has a great family, and is also a writer. So it is a good thing she has a great family to start with! Some of her work – poetry and fiction – can be viewed at her blog: Writers & Writerisms And at her website.

There’s a knocking on the door that you must answer, but you are not ready to answer it. You have to put down those words circling your mind like a theme from a musical; you have to put them down immediately before they vanish. But your hands won’t move on the keyboard, because of the knocking. It must be him. You feel some relief even though you were not thinking of him, at least not with that part of your mind which always deals with the writing bug that burrowed into you with the urgency of a Japanese Bullet Train, when the children grew old enough to be sent (“packed off”, he’d said) to a boarding school. You release a long breath and get up without putting the words down.

The angry voice inside your mind reminds you that the words you ignored in order to answer the door will not return. No matter how hard you concentrate later, they will not return. The angry voice has a habit of triggering off a virtual tirade inside your head, aided by jagged pieces of memory that tell you again and again that nobody cares about your writing and your desire to be a much feted author; least of all him. You are after all just another housewife. Once upon a time you had a promising career; your upward mobility had been neck to neck with his; but that was before the babies arrived and you stepped indoors so he could soar outdoors. To be fair, he did his part by keeping you warm and up-to-date with all the latest gadgets, holiday destinations and smart-casual clothes. Nevertheless you cried often, acid tears stinging your heart.

It’s the usual story of syrupy sacrifice and martyrdom. You don’t feel special any more. Every rejection slip that drops into your inbox tells you how crowded the ocean is. Your only hope in a thousand is to get trawled up in a net among similar hundreds, to be served together in a blend of spices, consumed and then forgotten. You accepted this state of affairs years ago. But you have undying faith in your talent. You know you can do it; you know that you could have done it before. If only…

You savor the singed feeling that resentment produces inside you. It’s a flame fanned vigorously by the sense of martyrdom that has followed you like a faithful dog ever since your maternity sabbatical got stretched and stretched until it became voluntary superannuation. He knows how you feel.

He got a batch of visiting cards made, with your name and “Writer” written in sloping serif type below that, and your email and phone number and address on the reverse. You shrugged and put them away in a drawer. He bought you a pair of solitaires. You wore them. Then you told him flintily that you could have bought them yourself, if only… Later on you’d made up for it by cooking a good meal and doing nice things to him.

Sometimes, in moments of weakness, which have a habit of hitting you in the middle of a good day of writing, you feel like throwing your arms around him and telling him that he’s the best thing that happened to you and he must be patient. Oh, he must. He must, for the good day will surely arrive, and all his privations and yours too, will be gone forever. But today is not such a day. Your footsteps stamp your irritation on the floor, because you have to answer the door. And, the words are gone. He will notice your irritation and enter quietly. He will wash up and watch TV; later on he’ll ask you in a soft voice if you would like a drink before dinner, and depending on your answer, he will either fill two glasses or continue watching TV. There is buoyancy in your step as you visualize his face. You swing open the door.

There’s nobody there. You blink a couple of times in the late afternoon sunlight. You watch the watchman as he slowly ambles towards you. You hear him say in his creaky but patient voice that the courier boy didn’t wait because you took so long to open the door.

[Author’s note: This whimsical piece won honorable mention in The Verb Magazine’s “Looking at You Contest” and an excerpt was posted in the October 2007 issue of The Verb. It is pretty much my own story; one of those days when the writer within is angry!]

Rumjhum Biswas’s fiction and poetry have been published in all the five continents, in print as well as online journals and anthologies. She has won prizes for poetrry in India and was long listed in the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2006. She blogs at htt://rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com

I am an absolute newbie when it comes to writing Flash Fiction.

I used to be skeptical about Flash Fiction. I didn’t believe that it was a form that serious writers dealt with. It was more of a teeny bopper thing. The works of Anton Chekov, Borges and Franz Kafka were to be revered simply because they came from these great writers. Hemingway wrote the iconic – “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn” as a bar bet or a whimsical challenge. But then, he was Earnest Hemingway. Anybody else who wrote a piece smaller than a 1000 words was being pretentious.  As for Aesop’s Fables, they were baby stories I’d read as a baby. That’s all.

Then I found flash fiction creeping in to magazines that I read regularly on line and in print. I started to actually read the flash pieces, instead of skimming through them.  To my surprise I found that I not only enjoyed them, but many lingered on in my mind long after I had done reading them. There definitely was something here that I needed to know more about.

In a flash this form of story writing seemed similar to the précis writing exercises we used to do during English Language classes in school. I could do it, I told myself.  I plucked ideas as they floated past my mind and put them to work. Some short shorts emerged that seemed good enough to send out. I started to read flash fiction consciously, critically. I began to think about the stories that appealed to me and began questioning why they did and others didn’t. Unconsciously I began looking for that missing spell, that vital ingredient – newt’s tail and abracadabra – to make that exact magic potion needed to create a sparkling piece of flash fiction. I started to read more and more flash fiction.

The more I read, the more I realized that writing flash was definitely no cakewalk. It’s a lot harder to be concise and meaningful all at the same time. It’s tough when you fall in love with a phrase or sentence only to have to prune it, because good sense prevailed and you realized those words were after all redundant.

Writing flash fiction requires skill and that skill comes with discipline. And, the more you read the more attuned you get to the nuances. Besides, you can only write great flash fiction if you truly enjoy the genre. In other words, if you enjoy reading flash fiction, you’re more likely to write readable ones yourself!

These days I write more flash fiction than I used to. Some have found homes. But that is not the only good thing that I have gained. Writing flash fiction has, I have discovered, helped to make the prose in my longer pieces sharper. The tendency to meander is getting reigned in. I am not there yet, but I do have a sense of direction now. Taut writing acts like a tightly pulled bowstring; the arrows, or rather ideas in the case of stories, fly faster and truer.

Where exactly do I wish to go? How far do I want to travel? How much of that magic realm can I possibly traverse? My answer to these questions is simply, as much and as far as it is possible. I don’t want to know my boundaries. But I do need to understand my limitations so I can erase them or at least diminish them considerably.

Ultimately this is what I would like to achieve in all my writing, be it poetry, short stories, novels, novellas and of course flash fiction. Having said that, writing and especially my own writing, isn’t just about me; it’s true worth lies in how many people it can touch even momentarily. My writing’s ultimate worth lies in how long it can stay inside a human mind other than my own. Ultimately, that’s the kind of writer I want to be. And this is where learning to write the perfect or near perfect flash will illumine my path.

 (A slightly different version of this entry is here : http://rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com/2009/01/28/whither-do-i-go-now-with-my-flashes-in-the-pan/)

Rumjhum Biswas’s fiction and poetry have been published in all the five continents, in print as well as online journals and anthologies. She has won prizes for poetrry in India and was long listed in the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2006. She blogs at htt://rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com

Last post, I mentioned how important a tool a writers’ critiquing group can be. Today, I want to talk about another important tool that involves participation by others.

Hearing others read your writing.

My son and I wrote a screenplay — Black Rock — last year. He works for a film production company in Ohio, and so he brought a bunch of actors together to read through the script.

I’m almost three thousand miles away, in Seattle, so I wasn’t able to be there, but he filmed the get-together and promised to send me a DVD once he had it edited.

That was last July; we’ve both were busy and so I figured it would get here when it got here. It showed up in the mail one Tuesday in October. I watched it that night.

Hearing your words read aloud can be enlightening for a fiction writer; for a screenwriter, it is what it is all about. But for any writer it can jerk the mental plugs from your ears. You get to hear someone else’s interpretation of what you intended, you get to hear what flies and what falls flat, and sometimes you get to hear the unexpected.

I sat through that reading, making notes, trying to filter out my own feelings and, when a scene did fall flat, to determine whether it was the fault of what we wrote or the fault of a poor reading. That happens; it’s one of the handicaps of working with unpaid volunteers.

It was during a free-for-all discussion after the reading that the unexpected occurred. The actors were offering their thoughts on character motivation and plot weaknesses, and then one of them said, “Well, it’s all about fathers, isn’t it?”

My son was there with them, on the screen, and I was thousands of miles and months away, watching, but we both said, “What?” at the same time.

“It’s about how fathers influence the actions of their children, particularly when they’re not around,” the actor said. And then he began to tick off points on his fingers.

“Frank and his dead father; Liz and her rich and doting daddy; Bob Shavers and his retarded son. Even the surrogate father relationship between Frank and the newspaper editor. It runs all through the thing.”

What he was talking about was theme, and he was right; we just hadn’t seen it; at least not that particular theme. The theme we identified, and had woven throughout the script, was that a child grows into the adult they will become as a result of a series of situations in which they are put under pressure.

Theme is the universal truth behind a story, and it’s one of the three elements that have to be developed, as a story unfolds, if an author is to succeed. The other two, of course, are character and plot.

Of the three, theme may be the most difficult to examine. In most cases, an author comes to a short story, novel or screenplay with some idea of her characters’ identities and what it is that will happen to them. But one of the quickest ways to kill a good story is to begin it with a theme in mind. Unless you are really, really good, you run the risk of preaching; no one wants to read a sermon or a lecture.

But as a story progresses naturally, theme will show up as a conflict of values or morals. It most likely will be a strong opinion that the author holds that comes out in the mouths of her characters. And it almost always presents itself as a recurring symbol.

When I called my son, after watching the edited DVD, and asked him why he hadn’t told me about the father theme, I could hear his grin.

“I wanted you to see it for yourself,” he said. “Good thing I had the reading, huh?”

Indeed.

K. C. Ball is a retired newspaper reporter and media relations coordinator. She grew up in Ohio, with her nose in a book, and she now lives in Seattle, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound.

Her flash fiction has appeared on-line at Every Day Fiction, Boston Literary Magazine, Fear & Trembling, Residential Aliens, Every Day Weirdness, Flashshot and Moon Drenched Fables, as well as in print in Morpheus Tales, Murky Depths and the 2008 Best of Every Day Fiction anthology. Her longer stories have also appeared in on-line and print magazines.

K. C. is a staff reader for Every Day Fiction and a Finalist in the 1st Quarter 2009 Writers of the Future competition. She blogs about writing at A Moving Line and about whatever may strike her fancy at Now Playing in Seattle.

In 2006 I left teaching after 28 years.  I didn’t retire, I left.  I couldn’t work with those people any more (and I’m not talking about the children).  So a few months later, when I’d stopped crying, I found myself sitting in front of the T.V. screen at 11am watching a load of sh**.

I really wanted to go out but I was scared to.  Alarm bells rang.  I’ve never been one for watching a lot of T.V. ever since my mother got rid of the set to make me concentrate on my school work (wise woman, my mother). At that point I thought back to the little girl who wanted to be a poet. Whatever happened to her?

In Feb 2007, my husband and I went on a holiday to the Costa del Sol and took a day trip to Tangier and visited The Alhambra.  When I got back I started writing, joined www.writewords.org.uk and I haven’t stopped writing since.  

My first feedback on WW pointed out that my dialogue was ‘crap’.  It was!  I worked on that piece for months.  ‘A Trip to Tangier’ is one of my favourite pieces and it is the archive at Bewildering Stories.  The Shine Journal published my poem ‘Take Time’ about the Alhambra.  I was hooked.

After a few more poems, Pamela invited me to be a judge in The Shine Poetry Contest 2008 and that experience was one I enjoyed so much that I answered the call for an editorial position at EDP when it came.  And that has been a steep learning curve for a technophobe with low self esteem like me but scared and intimidated as I was, I’ve done it.  

Now I’ve had way over 100 pieces published, won two great prizes, been printed in 3 anthologies, selected for the past 6 BwS Quarterly Reviews and been in every EDF Issue for 18 months.  It what you’d call a start. In reality it’s more than I ever expected.

What am I most proud of?  I’m most proud that I didn’t let them destroy me.  I didn’t just curl up and die.

Oonah is a regular contributor to Every Day Fiction and managing editor of Every Day Poets.  You can see examples of Oonah’s poetry in Twisted Tongue Issues 8 and 9, The Ranfurly Review, The Shine Journal, Static Movement and Bewildering Stories.

Website: http://www.writewords.org.uk/oonah
Blog: Oonahverse