Here is a catalogue of posts from this past week.

Hold the burning match by Sarah Hilary.

Success, I’ve concluded, is measured in your ability to accept failure and keep moving forward. I’d go further, in fact. Failure is your friend. It gives you a line in the sand, a measure against which to work. You might think that a hundred failed entries, or failed submissions, would equate to a feeling that you’re unequal to the task you’ve set yourself. But the writers who give up, in my experience, are not the ones with a hundred rejection slips under their belts.

They’re the ones with one or two rejections or maybe none – because they didn’t ever work up the courage to put their writing out there to be judged. Perhaps they told themselves it was pointless because contests are a rip off and a crap shoot. Funnily enough it’s often not a lack of confidence that stops a writer subbing their work. It’s ego: “Of course they’d never award a prize to such innovative writing.”  More…

Let me ask you this by K. C. Ball

I believe that asking “Why?” is the single most important question a writer can employ. Why did Joe contract cancer? Why did he live alone in a small apartment? Why was his death so protracted? The answers are what keep a reader reading because they produce emotional resonance.

And once you begin asking that little question, you will have to decide when to turn off the flow of information that follows, because with each answer, more “Whys?” occur – and your story grows deeper and deeper, more emotionally complex and all of those issues that I mentioned earlier – story arc and character development and conflict – become more and more clear. More…

Flash: The Best Exercise by Bill Ward

Flash fiction affords a unique opportunity for just this kind of stepping out and doing something different. The advice may be as old as the hills — writers have forever been saying that short pieces of free-writing, character sketches, writing-prompt challenges, and other assorted short short work are great ways to work out new techniques, explore untested ideas, or just cut loose with raw experimentation — the difference is that now such work stands a real chance of being published.

 

That’s not to say, of course, that just any old tosh adds up to a publishable piece of flash, but that is to say that much of those exercises that were once private bits of amorphous self-reflection, textual doodles as it were, can now be converted into something far better. Something far more effective in honing a writer’s skills precisely because, with application, these projects can be viewed as potentially publishable. More…
Flashing Fast by Jason Rodriguez

I’m Flashing Fast right now. I’ve thrown myself into 25 different stories so far and I have 235 to go. I’m posting them to my blog every Monday through Friday for a full year. And, as an added challenge, every story is in someway inspired by the first one (although I have been using the term “loose interpretation” a  lot).

I started with a memoir, so that I can literally throw myself into the other 259 stories. I moved on to a space opera. I followed that up with an obituary. I rounded out the first week with a slasher and a to-do list. Week two was jidaigeki, steampunk, dieselpunk, cyberpunk, and biopunk. On week three I focused on form and restructured the original memoir as a crossword puzzle, excel spreadsheet, twitter feed, classified document, and PostSecret postcard.  More…

Reality Jumps the Shark by Alexander Burns

If we aren’t stealing (accidentally or otherwise) something from the real world, cleaning it up and presenting it with witty dialogue, a genre trope, and a likeable character or two, we aren’t doing our job. Perhaps a new setting puts a different shade of meaning on the events. Maybe making the hero a different gender will cast light on taboo issues. What really makes a story interesting is the spin and package that the author puts on the events. Stories are fun as a result of language and perspective as much as the facts or plot points. In flash fiction, in which there is often very few events, language and perspective may even be significantly more important.

 

Our art imitates life. And occasionally, if we are lucky, life will imitate our art. Except for the zombie outbreaks. I could do without those.  More…