Flash Fiction Chronicles

When we think of portraits, we usually think of paintings, family trips to Sears, maybe even Henry James. But portraiture isn’t quite as simple as that.

Late last year, I was interviewed by Rebecca Givens Rolland, a grad student writing a portrait of Grub Street, a local writing center in Boston, MA. According to Rebecca, portraiture is a method developed by sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot 
to create a complex, vivid picture of a person or organization.”

The experience made me realize that portraiture can be useful in crafting a story, too. Portraiture, in this sense, is less about minute physical detail–the dust on a windowsill, the drooping dendrobium orchid losing blooms in a corner–and more about creating the essence of a person or place. Writers such as Hemingway (“A Clean  Well-Lighted Place”) and Steinbeck (“Cannery Row”) create this sort of portrait, this atmosphere, seamlessly. While we plebs might not quite be up to Hemingway’s snuff, sketching portraits of characters and places might help start us on our way.

How does creating a portrait work? During our interview, Rebecca asked me about my experience with Grub Street, starting with the big stuff.

• What was your first impression of Grub Street?
• Did you feel welcome?
• Was it your first time at a writing center?
• What did you expect?
• Would you go back?

Once we’d settled in, she moved to more detailed questions. While it may seem detailed questions would include drooping dendrobium style minutiae, it was more focused on the day-to-day workings of my classes there and things I took away from the experience.

• What were the classes like?
• Did you get on with the people? The instructor?
• How were the classes set up?
• Was anything particularly useful?
• Are you still in touch with anyone from your class?
• How do you think Grub Street affected you? Your writing?

Start out small
While getting your Steinbeck on may seem like an excellent idea, start with just one portrait. The more time you spend working out the details, the better your story will be. Don’t feel compelled to do a portrait of every character or place in your story–it might result in cluttering things up with too much detail. Weigh the work of creating the portrait against the importance of the person/place in the story, too. Don’t waste time creating a portrait of the guy who serves your main character cake at her best friend’s wedding if he’s only on-page for a few seconds.

1. Take a mental snapshot. Picture your subject (a kitchen, your main character’s ferret) and write down your first impressions. Is the kitchen homey? Are you scared of the ferret’s big bitey teeth? If it helps, collect actual pictures and tack them up near your workspace.
2. Move beyond the Polaroid. Many writers rely on visuals to convey information. Although this can work well, it often ends in what I call the Polaroid effect–the reader is drenched in useless detail (the magazine was bound with PVA, a glue commonly used in print bindings). Instead of describing the snapshot itself, describe the memories it conjures. Use scents, textures, and sounds to put your reader inside the Polaroid.

Delve deeper
Now you’ve got the easy part sorted, it’s time to dig a little deeper. Part of what makes portraiture so fascinating is its use of people–instead of recording only their impressions, a skilled portraitist uses the impressions of others to paint a more complex picture. In real life, this is a matter of interviewing and research. In fiction, it’s pretty much the same thing, except that you have to make up your interviewees.

Consider all the people who interact with your subject. Does Virginia get coffee at Bean Scene everyday? Does the coffee shop have a barista she talks to? Write down a list of everyone involved.

1. Write out a list of questions (try starting with the lists above).
2. Answer the questions. Writing in character isn’t necessary (though go right ahead if it helps)–the point is to find how your characters feel about a certain place/person and why. Does Virginia go to Bean Scene because it gets her out of the house and away from a screaming baby, because she likes the coffee, or because everybody knows her name? Why is it important everybody knows her name?
3. When all’s said and done, put everything aside for a while. Come back to it in a few days, when you’re fresh, and your mind is clear of any preconceptions.
4. Go over your notes. Look for patterns in the text, jot down common ideas and phrases. Use these to paint the broader strokes of your portrait, and go from there.

While it may not work for every story, portraiture is a useful technique for creating atmosphere and giving characters depth. Would you try a portrait? Have you interviewed your characters? How do you create atmosphere in your work? Post examples in the comments!

Peta Jinnath Andersen is a freelance writer and editor in Cambridge, MA. Her flash fiction story, The Jar, will be appearing in an upcoming issue of  Kaleidotrope . She’s currently working on her first novel.

For most of us, writing is a somewhat solitary pursuit - after all, it’s hard to actually work on a story if you’re chatting to your Mom, IM’ing your best friend, or grabbing lunch with hubby. But there comes a time in every writer’s life when a certain kind of company becomes necessary.

A certain kind of company? I know, it sounds very Eliot Spitzer-ish. But choosing who to talk to about your baby novel is a fraught process. Will they like it? Will they hate it? Will they think it’s-actually-very-funny-or-realize-I-stole-all-my-jokes-from-ten-year-old-Leno-shows?

The best way to get talking about your novel is to start with strangers (Eliot Spitzer, I know) who write. And the best place to find them? Writing classes.

Writing classes are excellent for writers at any stage in their career. They’re a safe place to talk shop, learn tips, tricks, and techniques, and commiserate over dialogue that falls flat and characters who refuse to behave.

And, of course, it’s easy to pick apart someone else’s work. But writing classes are all about tit-for-tat, I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours. So what do you do when it’s your turn to put something up for a critique?

Before you submit:

1. Polish. Spend some time ensuring your work is as polished as you can make it. This isn’t for the critiquers’ benefit–it’s for yours. If your classmates aren’t wasting time with line edits, they’re more likely to pick up plot and character issues.
2. Make a list of things you’d like your critiquers to think about. It doesn’t have to be long and detailed–even one or two points is fine. If you can, write your list on the workshop copies, or add a page about it. If you know certain people in your group have a skill set you could use, it’s okay to ask them to pay greater attention to the relevant sections (such as getting a cardiologist to help out with the details of a heart attack).

The day of:

Years after my first workshop, I still tremble when it’s my turn to get feedback. A lot of my writer friends say the same thing. What I’ve learned, though, is that the trick to getting the most out of your first workshop is two-fold:

1. Understand that you’re human, and that nobody gets everything right the first time around.
2. Understand that your classmates are human, and that nobody gets everything right the first time around.

Critiquing is an art form. There’s a fine balance to helping a writer improve their work, and tearing down everything you don’t like. It’s also a very personal thing. I may love this description:

Cathy was the sort of the person who didn’t like to slow down, who didn’t like to wait. Cathy was the sort of the person who’d skip a visit to the doctor’s even when her neck would no longer fit through the door.

Our classmate, Kathy with a K, may hate it. And that’s okay.

The point is, both Kathy with a K and I have spent time thinking about your work. Your job is to take our feedback and run with it. How? By being true to you.

When I was first writing, I’d change my manuscript at the drop of a hat. Don’t like my main character’s name? No problem, I’ll give him a new one. Think the mother is too harsh? Well, she doesn’t need to be in there anyway. And while this made my critiquers feel useful, it ruined my work. Yes, ruined–because the story was no longer mine.  Nowadays, I work by the rule of three, i.e.

1. Just one opinion? Probably no big deal.
2. Two opinions? Flag it as something to think about.
3. Three opinions? It’s a problem, and I have to make a change.

Writing classes, daunting as they are, are definitely worth the time and effort. But when all’s said and done, remember that your work is your work. Even if you, Kathy with a K, and I are all working on stories about dogs learning to fly an airplane (and who doesn’t love dog-acting-as-human tales?), they’ll never be the same. Why? Our experiences, our voices are different. And that’s just the way it should be.

Peta Jinnath Andersen is a freelance writer and editor in Cambridge, MA. Her flash fiction story, The Jar, will be appearing in an upcoming issue of  Kaleidotrope . She’s currently working on her first novel.

I would like to register a complaint. No, it’s not about this parrot what I purchased a half hour ago, he’s obviously just pining for the fjords. My complaint is about a lie.

Writing, according to what I was told growing up, is not a team sport. It requires only imagination, talent, and a willingness to practice and continue learning. I was given visions of an ivory tower somewhere, full of inspiration, where a writer could create masterpiece after masterpiece, uninterrupted by the concerns of “real” life. There would be no tests of strength or speed or agility, no performances, and certainly no public speaking. A writer was as invisible as the idea he/she cajoled out of the ether and set to blossoming on paper, which meant said writer did not need to be pretty or thin or athletic or sociable. A writer was judged on the characters he/she created, and their story – and not on how personable said writer was or wasn’t.

I believed it, with every fiber of my not-pretty not-thin not-athletic not-sociable being. I bought the whole sales pitch, and signed right up. I invested everything I had into that lie. It only took thirty years for me to figure out the painful truth, and don’t I feel dumb for not catching on sooner? A lot of time can be saved by reading the fine print.

The Ivory Tower Committee never said anything about a writer needing to have a “platform.” Not only does the writer have to craft the work and painstakingly shape it into the best representation of his/her vision, he/she must also be a public presence with a carefully cultivated fan base / network to have the best chance at publication. That was NOT in the brochure. No one said anything about Facebook or Twitter or being a teacher or a public speaker.

I am reading things now about needing a “niche,” a “body of expertise,” and an “ongoing relationship with a target audience.” (A Platform Boot Camp, article by Christina Katz, found in Writer’s Digest: Writer’s Yearbook 2010.) What fresh hell is this? I didn’t sign up for that – I would have remembered. (I would also have signed up for something like animal husbandry or forensic handwriting analysis instead of writing.)

I dug through my files, and scrounged up the deed for that Ivory Tower I bought when I was seven. Oh, oh cute, I signed it in crayon. And there is was, down at the very bottom, in letters so tiny they might have been mistaken for a decorative line: *life depicted applies to unpublished writers only.*

Of course. I can have my ivory tower, but I can’t expect anyone to know my name if I never step out the door. I can hide away and write masterpiece after masterpiece, but the stories are just going to sit in the corner and gather dust if I don’t send them into the world – that’s why I became a writer in the first place, because I wanted to share my stories – but without contacts and relationships, where will I send them?

Fair or not, in today’s industry almost no one in the book publishing business is willing to take a chance on a name no one has heard of, the name of some grown-up kid with a deed to an ivory tower and a head full of stories and a heart full of fear. Agents or publishers want much, much more than a story to sell.

So now I must set still more time aside to research and build my presence, to add to my embarrassingly small list of credentials. I’m too invested in the writing to back down now, the only thing I can do is step down out of my Ivory Tower and step up to the challenge of self-marketing and self-promotion. Which I dread.

(Writing in a Vacuum was previously posted at Blogging in the Dark on November 25th, 2009.)

To outline, or not to outline: that is the question.

And it’s a surprisingly tricky question.  I’ve always been a proponent of the Whatever Works for You School of Writing, but some people seem to have very strong feelings one way or the other when it comes to outlining.   I once saw an online discussion where someone vehemently insisted that it was impossible to write a good fantasy novel without an outline.  Not too surprisingly, others strongly disagreed.

I think the extreme views some people take on the outline vs. no outline issue stems from the fact that one writer’s idea of an outline doesn’t necessarily match another’s.  Some people have very detailed blow-by-blow breakdowns.  My outlines tend to be a loose collection of sketched-out scenes—some detailed, some no more than “Joe does something to annoy Mary.”

Also, different writers have different feelings about outlines.  I know some writers who feel they have to stick to the outline no matter what.  For some, that’s a good thing because it keeps them focused; others find it constraining and therefore don’t use outlines.  And then there are people like me for whom the outline is a very fluid, ever-changing thing.  I don’t always use an outline, but when I do, I have no qualms about changing it if the story wants to take a different direction once I start writing.

So when do I outline?  Not very often for a girl who’s writing a blog post about outlining.  I used an outline for the novel I’m currently revising, and I have outlines for two sequels to it.  Even though the first novel’s outline changed constantly, having it was extremely helpful while writing.

For short stories and flash fiction, however, I’ve found that the write-the-first-draft-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach works better for me. Sometimes I do a sort of pseudo-outline partway into a story.  I’ll start writing with no idea where I’m going, and once I figure it out, I’ll jot down some notes real quick and then get back to the draft.  Mostly, though, I need to spew out the wordage to find the story.  Then I can worry about the proper structure for it.

When I attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2007, we were encouraged to experiment with a different approach to see if helped:  try outlining if you normally didn’t use one, or vice versa.  So I tried outlining a short story first to see if worked any better.  It didn’t.  In fact, I ended up with lots of unnecessary scenes and a story that was almost twice as long as it needed to be.

While outlining a short story didn’t work for me, I think it was an experiment worth trying.  Some of my Odyssey classmates found that a different approach improved their writing, and that’s the kind of thing you’re never going to discover unless you try.  Also, it may not have helped my story, but it did help me better understand my process.

I’m a singer as well as a writer, and I realized that my short story writing isn’t all that dissimilar from how I learned to approach a song.  During my voice lessons, we’d pick songs apart to the smallest detail.  Notes, rhythms, phrasing, dynamics, tempo, breathing, interpretation—there’s a hell of a lot that goes into just one song.  But my college voice teacher always reminded me that, when it came time for performance, you couldn’t think about all those things on the same analytical level you did during practice.  Thought during performance is required, of course, but for the most part, you just had to sing and hope all the minutiae clicked.

So that’s sort of how I’ve come to view writing short stories now, except the process is reversed.  The revision and critiquing stage is when the thing gets picked apart.  The first draft is when I just write and hope that all of my previous practice clicks.

As with performing a song, if I make a mistake in the first draft, the best thing is to just keep going.  But every so often in performance, I’ve seen even professional singers get off on such a wrong foot that they have to stop, apologize to the audience, and start the song over.  The same thing sometimes happens to me with a story.  Luckily, writers generally don’t have to start over in front of an audience.

Partway through a story I was writing a few months ago, I became stuck and felt like I was flailing blindly.  The more I tried to plow forward, the worse it got.  So I started over.  The first thing I realized was that what I had written, even when slogging, wasn’t as terrible as I thought.  Better yet, I figured out why I was stuck.  By the time I reached the point in the story where I had given up and started over, everything clicked and I knew how to move forward with the rest.  That time, I got through the whole song without apologizing and starting over.

Would outlining first have helped me avoid starting over with that story?  Probably not.  While thinking about this process, I realized that outlining doesn’t necessarily keep you (or at least me) from having to start over.  For example, I ran into the same problem with the first draft of my novel a few years back.  Even though I had an outline, I got stuck somewhere around chapter 2 or 3.  I kept trying to move forward, but it was rather like bashing my head against a wall—not a pleasant feeling.  So I went back to the beginning, started revising, and voila!  I figured out what wasn’t working and was able to plow straight through the rest of the novel.

So, the lesson learned for my writerly self is this: outline or no outline, sometimes you’re better off apologizing to the audience and starting over.  If the final product’s good enough, no one will care that you screwed up the first time, and they certainly won’t care if you used a road map to get there.

Barbara A. Barnett is a 2007 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, where she learned valuable things about writing and the evil ways of chickens. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Shimmer, Hub, Every Day Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Kaleidotrope and Flash Me Magazine.  She lives with her husband in southern New Jersey, works for a theater company in Philadelphia, and frequently bursts into song. You can find her online at www.babarnett.com.

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.

I’ve noticed something about my writing lately. The less I TRY, the better the finished product is. This seems counterintuitive, so I spent some time thinking about it – while I was supposed to be editing Fear of Falling.

If I were a comic book character (Writer-Girl, saving the day with her impeccable grammar, excessive parenthetical references, and her catchy turn-of-phrase!) I would have an arch-nemesis. (That’s one of the rules. Good guys are really boring without bad guys.) Self-Sabotage would be mine, thwarting me at every turn. (Kind of like Spiderman vs. Spiderman in the black outfit. I picture Self-Sabotage looking like Writer-Girl, only dressed like one of those women in a courtroom drama with the suit and the glasses perched on their nose so it looks like they’re looking down on everyone else.)

To carry on with this analogy, the second Writer-Girl sits down at her keyboard to Write Something Important, Self-Sabotage gets a call and shows up to throw the whole arsenal at her – insecurity, fear, distraction, indecision, doubt … you name it. And sure Writer-Girl can slog through, pretending to ignore the efforts of her arch-nemesis, telling herself she can revise it later. But we all know that Self-Sabotage shows up at the revision table too.

Interestingly enough after fifteen minutes visualizing the adventures of Writer-Girl and her struggle to finally defeat Self-Sabotage, the few plot points in Fear of Falling that had been giving me trouble fell into place, and I finished the revision without difficulty.

I had an idea yesterday morning. I looked at the word-crumbs for writer-pigeons, and did my vocabulary thing. (I list the prompts, then give either a definition or a synonym or two or three out beside it. Thinking about non-traditional ways to use a prompt sometimes starts the creative process.) But then I pulled up Bejeweled 2, and started playing in Hyper mode. Self-Sabotage just smiled to herself, thinking she was so good at her job, she didn’t even need to show up anymore …

And between rounds, I made a few notes about how the prompts could tie together. But before I could get too serious about it, I went back to Bejeweled. While most of my brain was scanning for matching gems at warp five, the rest of it was thinking about the prompts and the quote.

Twenty minutes later I had the skeleton of an entire story, which I wrote with little interference, and which turned out to be pretty decent. Decent enough, in fact, to have the potential to be a real short story and not just a flash piece. (Not that there’s anything wrong with flash. Just sometimes the characters need more space to tell their tale.) In contrast, the story I tried to write last week – when I was determined to write and wouldn’t let myself do anything else until it was written – is terrible. Beyond terrible. A complete cacophony of contrived, disjointed images. I only haven’t deleted it entirely because I can’t bring myself to think it’s beyond saving. Yet.

To test the theory that sidetracking my logical mind can improve my creativity, I did the same thing again this morning with a different set of prompts. And lo, twenty minutes later I have the outline of a story that looks to be good (I was so excited that the shameless trickery worked that I had to blog before I actually wrote the piece.) I guess it’s based on the same logic that dictates you will not think of the answer to that random question while you’re thinking about it, but hours later you’ll sit straight up in bed and say “Ethyl Merman!” (or whatever the piece of information you were looking for is.)

So yeah. In case there’s anyone out there who gets super paralyzed when they sit down with the intention to write, maybe you can try not trying and see what happens. Worst case scenario: you’ll get better at Bejeweled. :p

(Reprinted from Blogging in the Dark)

TL.Schofield is an old mom and a new bride, living in central GA with a white dog and a black cat – one of which she is allergic to. Her first published piece is currently posted at 10Flash. She recently placed two stories, Arrival and Escape, in Flash Fiction Chronicles String-of-10 Flash Fiction Contest and blogs at Blogging in the Dark.

It’s not often that I find I can start a post by saying that it was inspired by hearing Irene Cara singing “Flashdance … What a Feeling” on my car radio. But it’s true, although we’ll come on to the reason for that later. What I really want to talk about is problem solving in writing, and how the most creative thing that can sometimes happen to you as a writer is to get stuck, because it’s often how you get yourself out of a tricky situation that can be the difference between a dull piece and something that’s truly inspired.

A classic example of this is in Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” As you may remember, Adams – who was possibly the most disorganized writer of all time – ended the first episode of the original radio series with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect being blasted into space with only seconds to live.  It made for a fantastic cliffhanger ending, but it presented Adams with something of a problem, because he’d painted himself into a corner.

The problem was that any way of extricating his two heroes from this situation would be so improbable that it would immediately be dismissed as an amateurish “deus ex machina.” So what Adams did was to turn the problem on its head and invent something that relied on the very improbability of the situation. The resulting concept of the infinite improbability drive is possibly one of the most inspired ideas to have come out of speculative fiction in the late twentieth century.

Here’s another example. The writers of “Back to the Future”, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, made a problem for themselves when they decided that their two key characters were going to be a schoolboy and a mad professor. But here’s the conundrum: how on earth could they establish some kind of link between these two disparate characters? The solution was that classic opening sequence where Marty McFly breaks into Doc Emmett Brown’s lab, plugs his guitar into that massive speaker, turns the volume up to 11, plays a single chord and gets thrown right across the room.

And so we come to Irene Cara. As soon as the song came on the radio, I immediately thought of that wonderful sequence in the film “The Full Monty”, where they’re sitting down to watch “Flashdance” to pick up some dancing tips, and Mark Addy’s character misses the point entirely and starts complaining about the quality of Jennifer Beals’ welding. The joke is so perfect that I started to wonder if it contained a clue as to how the entire film came about. I have no idea if this is remotely true, but what if Simon Beaufoy, the writer, happened to watch “Flashdance” one day, and thought to himself: wouldn’t it be hilarious to do a film like “Flashdance” except set in England, and about a bunch of male steelworkers who took up dancing?

So let’s look at the problems that this implausible scenario presents, and how solving them might have created the movie. First of all, why do they take up dancing? Because they’re broke. Why are they broke? Because the steel industry’s collapsed (and already we’re getting a much richer concoction). But why would anyone pay to watch them dance? Because they’re really good? Nah. Won’t work. Because they’re going to do something special? Maybe. Like what, though? Stripping? And at that point, you have the bare bones of the entire film.

Now I’m only guessing that it happened like that. But it strikes me as highly plausible. So don’t run away from problems – seek them out. The solution that you come up with to get yourself out of a hole might just be the thing that takes you to a different level.

My short story collection, In an Uncharted Country, will be published by Press 53 in early September. I’m truly excited by the thought of people holding my book in their hands and maybe even reading my stories, now that the book is finding its way into the world. Since I’m a man, I can’t and won’t use the birth metaphor, but it certainly is odd to think of this little part of me existing on its own, having a life that’s separate from mine. (Except, of course, for that mystery known as “marketing” which will keep me tied to the book for months to come, but that’s a whole other subject.)

How did I get to this point?

I wrote a novel. I thought it was great. It wasn’t. It needed and still needs a lot of work.

But in order to feel like a writer, I needed to publish something. I needed to finish things and send them to editors, and I needed to see them in print, and, most of all, I needed other people to see them in print.

So I started writing short stories. I liked the fact that I could be “done” with something. I could submit it—to several journals simultaneously, usually—and editors would read it and a magazine might actually publish it. That happened almost immediately, and continued happening as I kept writing more stories.  

I wasn’t thinking “collection” when I started, but I discovered that my process of writing stories is rather organic. That is, there is usually something in a story that serves as a seed for the next one—a minor character who needs to be explored further in his own story, for example, or a resolution to a story that suggests further conflict and another story or two. I wrote about a couple with marital problems living out in the country, and all I had to do to get the landscape right was look out my window. And all I had to do to get ideas for characters is walk down the street in the small town near where I live.

One thing led to another and I had a pile of stories that felt like a book. Because the stories were linked by overlapping characters, location, and even theme, they fit together nicely. But I thought something was missing, and I came up with the idea of a “cap-story”—a final story for the collection that tied together most of the other stories and suggested a thematic resolution, almost as if it were the end of a novel instead of a book of short stories.

So I had a finished manuscript, but story collections are notoriously hard to publish and, as a result, most agents won’t touch them unless they can be sold as part of a two-book package with a novel. The only novel I had was that manuscript that still needed a lot of work—work that I wasn’t mentally prepared to do yet—and so I didn’t have what agents wanted.

As a result, I turned my attention to small presses. For many emerging writers, small presses are the way to go, especially as the large trade publishers go after bigger and bigger blockbusters in order to maximize profits. The small presses follow a different model and many of them are willing to look at stand-alone story collections. I sent my manuscript out to a few, and Press 53 was interested. They’ve been terrific to work with, allowed me some say in the choice of cover and other design features for the book, and I’m grateful to the publisher, Kevin Watson.

Ironically, though, while I was searching for a publisher, I was working on a new book. I still couldn’t bring myself to work on the old novel, but I felt that I needed a novel to be taken seriously. But I love stories! And so I took a shot at a hybrid form—a novel in stories. Some readers may consider In an Uncharted Country to fall in this category, too, but with the new book that’s what I set out to do. The stories are even more closely linked, and there is a story arch that connects all the twelve pieces together. At this point four of those stories have been published and, somewhat to my surprise, an agent was interested in representing me for that book—I signed with her the same month I signed with Press 53 for the story collection.

I’m now working two projects. One is a novel. A real novel. And the other is a different animal altogether: a novel in flash. It’s a collection of flash fiction pieces that all deal with the same character. Although a number of those have been published, it’s too soon to tell where that one is going. But it’s been a blast to write.

My collection of linked short stories, IN AN UNCHARTED COUNTRY (Press 53, September 2009), is set in rural Virginia, where I now live. Before turning to writing fiction, I was an international lawyer and spent most of my career in Asia. I have an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. For more info: http://cliffordgarstang.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?