Flash Fiction Chronicles

Editor’s note: Today is Kevin Shamel’s birthday.  Happy Birthday, Kev!

Flash fiction made me a better novelist. Novella-ist? Well, anyway…

I found flash while wandering the shadowy paths of publishing short stories. It was like stumbling out of an enchanted forest and into neat rows of juicy little fruit trees. I knew I could grow some tasty stories like that. By the time I’d had my fifth or sixth flash fiction story published, I was an amateur orchard-grower. I spent a year writing lots of flash. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write. Soon enough, I was producing juice. (I later fermented it all and got everyone drunk, but that’s another story entirely.)

A majority of the writers I know—and I know more writers than I know other kinds of people—have never attempted flash fiction. Most of them haven’t thought much about it. Of the people I casually speak to about writing flash that have not done so, most really don’t think much of the art. It’s because they’ve not explored it.

The common misconception about flash fiction is that it’s an easy thing to write. It’s a thousand words or less. I can write that in ten minutes. That is true. In fact, I’ve had stories published that I wrote in ten minutes. (Keep in mind that I also write publishable novellas in under two weeks, and I’m writing one soon that will be written in three days. It’s not the “normal” way of doing it.) It’s not unheard of to whip out an amazing bit of flash in no time at all. However, it’s not uncommon to spend days, weeks, or months getting a flash story just right.

That’s because it’s an art-form. It has to be mastered. When you’ve got it figured out, it’s a skill you can draw upon for the rest of your authoring life.

By learning how to write a complete story with such a small word count, I learned to cut my story to its quick. I learned about what words are really necessary for the story. I learned that a great number of people prefer to read stories that are lean and to the point. I honed my sentences and cut out all the extras that took the story (and the reader) somewhere beyond the point of it all. I learned how to make my stories shoot straight to the heart of the reader. I learned to edit.

My year of writing flash helped me to find my true writing style. One that is fortunately in synch with the world today. I write books that can be read in the time it takes to watch a movie. People like that. In fact, they love that. How many people spend fifteen hours watching a movie? Do you push pause after watching for fifteen minutes and go to work? Are movies two hundred hours long? No. People like the idea of complete, satisfying, lasting stories that they can digest quickly. Stories like flash fiction.

Because of flash, my longer works are leaner and quicker. Because of flash, it’s easier to make a story something that people will read straight through because they don’t have a moment to stray from the story. Because of flash, I had a book published.

In the toppling forest of the publishing industry, there is new growth. I urge anyone growing giant Sequoias of novels to consider spending a year learning the art of pruning flash fiction bonsais. In no time we’ll have acres and acres of shady rows of producing trees. Then we can feed the world our fruits.

Or get them all drunk on apple cider.

Kevin Shamel lives in the Pacific Northwest in a house that was once surrounded by apple orchards. You can find his flash at Every Day Fiction. His first book, Rotten Little Animals, can be read on a long commute or on a flight to Maui (it has been done). Visit ShamelessCreations for art, words, and shameless weirdness.

So it’s November again, and that means that since it is already November 16th, many of us aspiring novelists are knee deep in NaNo.

It’s hard to believe that there are many authors out there that are at least not peripherally aware of this seminal masochistic endeavor, but for the sake of clarity, I’ll summarize: Between November 1st and November 30th an author makes a dedicated effort to hack out an entire novel of 50k. Whoa, that’s a lot of words, right? It’s quite a few, yes, but broken down that’s only 1666 words a day. Within reach for most of us, even with families and jobs.

The idea here is volume, anyway, not quality — although the rules do allow for you create notes, character bibles, plot outlines or whatever esoteric voodoo you might practice. I don’t do any of that, and don’t know anybody that does. (But hey, I live in a small world.) NaNo is really about writing on a schedule, about letting go of your preconceived ideas about what writing well means. It really is quite liberating to be excused from over-thinking every scene and every line of dialog. The end result will almost certainly be a raw and rough bit of fiction, but don’t let that stop you, with a little work you just may have something worth sending out to a lucky agent or publisher.

As a quite biased example: my 2007 run at NaNo landed me a contract with BeWrite Books, an awesome European indie press. My book should be available as a paperback before the end of the year. That book is called The Movie, and I hope everyone will buy, borrow, or beg a copy, it’s a fun story about hopes and dreams, and bad science fiction. Of course, as nearly all my stories, it’s  really about ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Okay, okay, you are saying, I’ll buy the book when it comes out, (Thanks!) but what does NaNo have to do with flash fiction of all things? Flash fiction is just the opposite of NaNo. Well, to that, I assert the definitive reply of: well, yes and no. I’ve done NaNo in 2007, 2008, and 2009. And each and every time I can recall exactly how my work with flash fiction paid off to get these manuscripts written.

2007: The Movie

This was actually the third novel manuscript I wrote, and I was terribly intimated by length, and still wasn’t really sure I could write a novel manuscript that wasn’t painful to read. So I said to myself,  Bosley you’ve written a few short stories, you know a bit about character arcs, and motivation, and conflict. Just set a goal for your protagonist and make sure he can reach it if he works hard enough. (Who likes a lazy protag?) So that’s easy enough, I said to myself … but it kind of wasn’t easy. Nope. Not for Bosley.

So I came up with the idea to put bits of a meta-story in the book, as a kind of way to refresh the readers perspective and hopefully distract myself long enough to forget I was writing a very long novel manuscript. In this case the meta-story was scenes from my protagonists fancy-pants movie script. And can you guess? Yep, those scenes are essentially flash fiction. I’m not so sure I would have finished the novel if I hadn’t been able to look forward to writing these silly little stories within the bigger story. Not only was it fun for me, it allowed me to indirectly communicate the protagonist’s thoughts at a personal level. (We are what we write, right?) If  I hadn’t taken the time to learn the craft of flash fiction, the manuscript would have had much less impact, me thinks.

2008: Americana: The Last Gleaming

I actually punted on this manuscript and finished up at 30k. So I lost the NaNo that year. But I ran out of story, and happily finished it up at its natural stopping place. This story is about Drake Carson, a detective in the final stages of dementia who is chasing the Misfit, believed to be evil incarnate. Drake is a good guy even if he is insane. This story proper is actually 6 intertwined short stories/vignettes. How were  are they intertwined, Bosley? You might ask.  Flash fiction, naturally. What all the stories have in common are a series short flashbacks and self-contained scenes that describe the Misfit’s previous crimes and evil deeds.

These bits, essentially flash fiction, are the unifying force that holds the main story arc together. I’m on the second draft at the moment, so I’m not sure how well the final manuscript will actually work. But I am certain that this is 30k I wouldn’t have written if I hadn’t been able to look forward to those the ‘breather pieces’.

2009: Sweet Lies

There is less to say about this story since I’m only about 20k into it. But the first thing I did is find some method to my madness. In this case, Howie, a young murderous sociopath, has a tendency to deflect any serious thoughts by telling bizarre and surreal stories about his past. Not only does this keep others from thinking to hard about his actions, but it keeps himself from doing the same. What sort of bizarre and surreal stories? you might ask — right! What amounts to flash fiction. Good job. :p

I might even go so far as to cite upcoming novel, Servant of the Mud with Shadowfire Press as using that same technique of embedding mini-stories in story. This an urban fantasy with some tiny chapters woven into the larger story. These chapters attempt to show the more human side of the antagonist (despite not being human). It allows the reader to feel at least some sympathy to what would otherwise might be a kind of cardboard villain. Of course, these tiny chapters bear a great deal of resemblance to flash fiction.

So while flash fiction might seem tiny and insignificant next to a novel of even 50k, if one looks carefully enough it becomes clear that flash fiction can become another ingredient in a beautiful soup of words that perhaps someday will become a published novel.

And for those of you doing NaNo this year, come join me. It’s really not too late.  You’ve got almost half a month left!  Enough time to write half a novel.  And if you are sitting this one out. No sweat, there’s one every year. And keep in mind that the Office and Letters and Light needs money to continue doing what they do. If you can spare couple of bucks, why not make a donation?

Saddly, as a postscript, I’ll say that I am a couple of days behind in NaNo, but I have a very good excuse.  His name is Luke Fredrick Dean.  We’ve taken him home on purely trial basis, but after some discussion with my wife, she seems intent on keeping him despite his prodigal efforts to eat us out of house and home.  And, I’m told the grace period for returns is a measly five days.  So it seems he will need to board with us for the next twenty odd years.

Until next post … ciao.

Bosley Gravel, eclectic hack of an author, was born in the Midwest, and came of age in Texas and southern New Mexico. He writes in a variety of genres. His fiction focuses on the absurdly tragic, and the tragically absurd. He likes good black coffee, nightmares, Billie Holiday, and that hour just before the sun comes up.  You can find links to his flash fiction, short stories, novels, and other credits and affiliations at http://www.ripcot.com.

IT IS GENERALLY ACKNOWLEDGED that writing short fiction requires a different skill set than writing longer pieces like novels. As some of us have found out, writing micro fiction, or flash, requires yet another set. Yes, it is all about telling a story, and the basic mechanics of grammar, word choice, and all the other tricks and tropes learned by hard hours at the word processer all apply, but the actual telling of a story becomes much different when constrained to 1000 words or less.

Fiction, at least the type of fiction that rewards a reader with something more than time killed, requires that the writer have something valuable to say. The story must tell some important truth or revelation about the human condition, else it lacks a heart. With so few words in a flash story, there is almost no way to hide that absence. So, even more than usual, the writer must ask the question, “Why am I writing this?” Without pages of snappy dialog and detailed description, there is not enough camouflage to hide this lack.

As always, the story is the thing. The best flash carries with it all the things that make any other story work, a beginning, middle and end, a protagonist who changes or makes their surrounding change in a meaningful way, strong dialog, vivid description, and some sort of payoff for the reader. It can be difficult to shoe-horn all of these elements into such a small word-count, but good flash fiction stories generally do.

More than any other form, the right words become vital. I am not usually one to agonize over finding the perfect way to say something, unless I am writing flash. In that case I have no choice. The least bit of rhetorical flabbiness pokes the reader in the eye. There just isn’t room for “Albrecht found himself staring out of the window, reflecting on the fact that he hadn’t seen the sun light up his garden for nearly a fortnight, and the oppressive and constant drizzle had begun to affect his mood in a way that matched the sodden turf that lined the edge of his prized and now over-watered begonias.” Depending on the amount of room available, that might become “It rained for nearly two weeks, until Albrecht’s mood was as damp as his lawn.” Or even, “Al was tired of the rain.”

Getting there can be as difficult and time consuming as writing a much larger piece. In fact, most of my flash pieces start as a larger first draft, often times as much as three times as long as the finished product. This lets me fit in all of the parts of the story I wish to tell. Then I work on making it shorter, sharper and more succinct. Thoughts and sentences are made shorter, and sometimes combined. Under the constraint of word count, passive voice is easy to lose, as are bloated constructions. Best of all, it lets me pick the best way to say something in mid-context, rather than building the story one agonizing toothpick at a time.

In the end, writing a good flash piece can be as satisfying and frustrating as any other writing endeavor, all to produce something read in the amount of time it takes for the average visit to the water closet. The SpW (Sweat per Word) factor can be astronomically high, and inversely proportionate to the financial rewards. But then, none of us ever expected to get rich and famous writing flash did we?

I am not a patient person. Never have been. And when in the past (a rolling, long-ago past) I couldn’t master something immediately, I assumed I had no talent and no skills and I gave up.

No talent. No skills.

These are two distinct attributes. Having talent is terrific and it certainly makes following your passion rewarding, but talent is only half the formula.

Having skill is absolutely necessary (watch American Idol if you don’t believe me). But getting these skills isn’t an immediate process. And if you’re talking about becoming an expert at anything, you’re talking YEARS of practice. That’s where patience comes in.

I think it was Robert McKee (the writing coach whose book STORY is an excellent resource) who said that all we can do is to “take out our little bit of talent,” push it around every day, apply our hard-earned skills and hopefully, that will result in something worthwhile. I’m sure I don’t have that quote exactly right, but you get the gist. It takes both talent and skill to become good at anything and skill takes patience.

Last night when I went to bed I was miserable. Things at the end of my current work-in-progress were not working out. The whole thing felt stupid and, heaven forbid, CORNY. In the old days, I would have felt doomed. I would have thought of quitting. I would believe to the depths of my being that my writing sucked. And I sucked.

But this morning, I remembered I have developed a skill-set to help me solve the problems in my story. Hmmmm. Imagine that!

I read about two or three pages in the middle, did a little editing, and suddenly I knew how to solve the story problem at the end. My mind was asking questions that only an “expert” would know to ask.

I moved away from the computer and started to scribble notes of what exactly had to happen for the whole story to make sense. I was so shocked at how easy it was, I started doubting it would work. But I typing the notes, I’m sure it does work. And it isn’t corny. Maybe a little corny, but I still have time to fix that. Wow, it’s working!!!

I’m not saying here that what I do is brilliant or even interesting to anyone else. But it is to me. To see that I will allow myself to make mistakes, to go on tangents, to think I suck, and then get back to work. To take out my “little bit of talent” and my years of practice, and actually be able to have answers, know what comes next, delight myself with a surprising ending, that for me, is success. And when I discover the NEXT problem, I will have skills to solve that too.

This idea of having patience–and I suppose, FAITH IN THE WRITING PROCESS–is a gift to me. A gift I’ve given myself over the years by focusing on learning the skills I need to do what I want, and letting my little bit of talent take care of itself.

I’ve gone off and expanded this topic at my blog, Words in Place.  To read more, click here.

Gay Degani has been published in two mystery anthologies, in THEMA Literary Journal and on-line at Every Day Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Tattoo Highway, and Salt River Review. “Spring Melt” was a finalist for The 2^nd Annual Micro Fiction Award and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  “Monsoon” was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s 2007 Fiction Open and “Wounded Moon” was short-listed for the 2008 Fish Short Story Prize.  Gay is the editor of EDF’s Flash Fiction Chronicles. She blogs at Words In Place.