bwheadshot2The 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.