Flash Fiction Chronicles

This isn’t really about writing, but in a way it is. It’s about a joke I heard recently and jokes are verbal stories, so the same sort of rules prevail in both.

And the notion of where a joke (or a story) comes from and how they get spread about is intriguing to consider.

So here’s my two-cents worth. (And if you think this column is just for writing tips and don’t think this is that, then just skip over it and read the next column down the pike.)

An acquaintance told me a joke the other day; it was about a fellow who asks to collect some butter from the buttercups growing wild along a farmer’s fence; the punch line is risqué, so I won’t repeat it here.

I laughed, of course, because to do otherwise would be impolite. It wasn’t that I didn’t think the joke was funny; I thought it was hilarious—the first time I heard it. That’s not a big deal, either. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one—”  is a part of our culture.

But the first time I heard the buttercup joke was fifteen years ago, and four thousand miles from Seattle, and I haven’t told it to anyone since I got here. So, how did that joke make it across all those years and miles? I’m not talking about a joke that is like one I heard. This was the exact joke, word for word.

I suppose we could go for the easy answer.

Radio and television comics have been bombarding us with humor over the air waves for the better part of a century. The internet has been doing likewise for a generation.

Even so, this particular joke is a little too racy for public broadcast, a little too sophisticated for the internet. And this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered jokes holding together for miles and years, just the longest and furthest example.

This has got to have been going on for a long time; maybe since people started telling knee-slappers to each other. So, I wonder; is there some sort of international organization that nurses jokes along, sending them back and forth to each other, slipping them into conversations all over the world?

An improvisational comedy group in Philadelphia calls itself the Ministry of Secret Jokes. Maybe these folks know something. Maybe they’re a lunatic fringe group, a militant splinter that doesn’t care if other people know their purpose.

Maybe not; if there is a clandestine group spreading laughs hither and yon, I don’t think they would advertise their purpose in such a blatant fashion. There might not be any such group.

But if there is, wouldn’t that be funny.

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K.C. Ball lives in Seattle, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound. She is an night writer, an afternoon sleeper, who works through the wee hours because there are so few interruptions and because that is when all the good air is.

Her short fiction has appeared in various online and print publications, including Flash Fiction Online, Every Day Fiction, Boston Literary Magazine, Big Pulp and Murky Depths.

Her flash fiction story, Hair of the Dog, was included in the 2008 Best of Every Day Fiction anthology and her story, Coward’s Steel, won third place in the 1st Quarter 2009 Writers of the Future competition. It will appear in the Writers of the Future XXVI anthology in August 2010.

K.C. is editor of 10Flash Quarterly, an online magazine featuring genre flash fiction, and she blogs about writing at A Moving Line.

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?