Flash Fiction Chronicles

I’ve long held that any story should first and foremost be entertaining. It doesn’t matter what the story is trying to get across, what great comment on the human condition, or political figure is being skewered or whatever, if the story isn’t a joy to read. Ulysses may require eight PhDs to understand, but that doesn’t make it worth reading.

To that end, I’ve determined that a writer has learned most of what they need to know about storytelling by the age of 10 or so. After that, all that’s left is to learn how to make it good.

By my measure, the following items are awesome:

• Dinosaurs
• Robots
• Spies
• Detectives
• Cowboys
• Knights
• Guitars (drums are acceptable, but barely)
• Spaceships (really, anything that flies)
• Monsters (or other strange creatures)
• Super-powers (I suppose you could just say the metaphysical – this could be anything from telepathy to time travel to concussive eyebeams)

Your mileage may vary, and obviously there are other things that could be put on here, but basically these are my ingredients for fun. And what do they all have in common? They are all found in stories for children. Whether it’s Labyrinth, Where the Wild Things Are, Transformers, Batman, or My Little Pony, any given person will likely encounter all of these items well before they start getting distracted by the only thing that gets added to the list later in life: Sex.

We put them into stories for kids because there are certain urges, dreams, and concepts that are universal, that pretty much everyone can enjoy at a young age. This is all before social pressures force some of us to give up on the fantastic. Maybe that stuffy professor refuses to acknowledge it now, but when he was young he laughed at Plastic Man as much as the next kid, or she rocked out to Jem.

Ignoring all of this is folly. A good writer can take items from childhood and weave them into stories that are perfectly entertaining for adults (see, for example, every Pixar film ever made). Doing so taps into emotions that have existed in people for years, possibly long forgotten, and allows the writer to introduce new layers of meaning to those feelings. These items have built-in significance and metaphor, so really half the work is already done (my own story, “The Overdue Protocols,” is a good example of that).

It’s not lazy or hackery to build on what’s been done already. Just make sure that something new and fresh is added (after all, even Ulysses was based on the Odyssey). And, for all our sake, make it fun.

Alexander Burns’s most current story “With the Band” is currently available at Every Day Fiction.  He lives in Fort Worth, Texas. He writes because he doesn’t have a basement in which to build robots or time machines, and because he is terrible at math. His work has appeared at Every Day Fiction, A Thousand Faces, 10Flash, The Future Fire, and Big Pulp.

The classic image of a writer is of a loner, sitting in an office, pounding away at a keyboard, perhaps growling in dissatisfaction at an unappreciative world. There is likely a half-empty bottle of scotch on the desk.

But I think most of us churning out flash fiction on a regular basis can’t be the grumpy hermit writer (as much as we may or may not want to be). There are reasons for this:

Print is, at least for flash, pretty much dead. I’m not sure anthologies in general sell all that well, and flash anthologies full of unknown writers probably sell even less. And, really, flash is a relatively new form of writing, one that seems tailor-made for the internet, as I believe Every Day Fiction and other sites have demonstrated. It must be noted, however, that creates a situation in which the content absolutely has to be excellent – there’s no such thing as a captive online audience. If readers don’t care for the first few paragraphs of a story, they’ll probably wander away. Two ways to mitigate this potential problem:

• Be really good.
• Make people like you – not just the story, but you - enough that they’ll want to read the whole story, and seek out other stories you’ve written.

No brainers, right? But I think a lot of writers don’t put as much thought into the second scenario as they should. Building a community of readers is, in my opinion, vital to being successful at any writing an author endeavors to sell online. There’s no publishing company pimping our stories out on an endcap at Borders. Sigourney Weaver isn’t going to read your story on Selected Shorts. Creating a community around yourself can make the difference between someone reading a story you’ve written, liking it, and moving on; or reading it, liking it, and thinking, “Oh, hey, this is by that person I read before, and I should check out more.”

The best way to go about this is going to be a website/blog of your own. Post regularly, and try to be entertaining. Remember that as a writer, it is your job to generate content. You should always have something to say about something. Spread word of your blog everywhere you go. Post on message boards. Interact with other writers. Allow the readers a place to easily interact with you, be it comment fields on the blog or through a message board. Take a lesson from the webcomics industry, which has done a great job with this sort of community building.

Some point after that, you can start selling T-shirts! I kid, I kid. Mostly. (Anyone want to help me with a graphic for my “Aftershocks” shirt? The slogan should read, “I lived through the earthquake and all I got was this stupid knife in my back!”)

Alexander Burns lives in Fort Worth, Texas. He writes because he doesn’t have a basement in which to build robots or time machines. His work has appeared at Every Day Fiction, A Thousand Faces, 10Flash, and is forthcoming from The Future Fire and Big Pulp.

Recently I was invited to submit to a new market, and even given a prompt with which to work, but none of my initial attempts were panning out. Then, random perusing of the Internet gave me this interesting bit of trivia – there is a clock tower in Ireland, in Cork, which has four faces, and each face tells a different time. This inspired the thought: “What if, rather than three of those faces being wrong, all four are right?”  Breakthrough!

Wait, and somebody even wrote a poem about this clock? Get outta here! The story practically wrote itself! Seriously, I’m not sure why I showed up that day.

Research can take a number of different forms, each of which serve different purposes, and all of which are invaluable to honing the craft of writing. Here’s a few:

Reading other stories in the genre is research, as you need to see how it’s been done, learn the conventions of the genre, pick up tips, etc. Don’t put blinders on to what’s going on in your chosen field.

Names are important, so don’t just randomly grab a name from a phone book. Make sure characters have period-appropriate names, and be aware of ethnic implications (of surnames in particular). Look out for historical or pop culture significance that might color a reader’s view of a character. There are plenty of resources to check (my personal favorite is Behindthename.com). Don’t overlook the meanings of names, there’s rich material there for inspiration. I’ve jump-started stories based purely on some interesting meaning of a randomly-generated name.

History matters. It seems silly, but there it is. Even if you’re radically changing the history of a place, it’s important to know what really happened, how the people lived, how they thought. Not just the bare facts of how many people lived in what city, but what their philosophy was, what the issues of the day were, and so forth. What’s the difference between a 20^th century hero and a 16^th century brigand? How did people talk in the 1200s? Or even last year? A single bit of slang can transport the reader to an entirely different decade.

Technical vocabulary can make or break a story for some readers. Tom Clancy has legions of followers who read his work simply because he can, step by step and with all the right technical terms, describe how a nuclear reactor on board a Russian submarine can melt down. Does the gun in your narrator’s hand use shells or bullets? Was the city hit by a meteor or a meteorite? Is this cop a detective or a constable? Does this patient need blood or plasma? Some portion of the audience, maybe even most of the audience, won’t know the difference, but some will and they’ll nitpick themselves out of enjoying the story. Then they’ll post about it somewhere online.

Research is important to creating realistic and believable people and settings, and just as important in flash fiction as in a novel. Be as familiar with the subject matter as possible, because for your flash piece it needs to be summed up in a sentence, or a few words of dialogue. You won’t have the luxury of a whole chapter to explore the ideas.

Most of all, let research inspire your stories. There’s so much available in the real world that’s interesting, it would be a shame not to take advantage of the free ideas. Research is not a chore. And it gives you a good excuse to check out a lot of cool books.

Alexander Burns lives in Fort Worth, Texas. He writes because he doesn’t have a basement in which to build robots or time machines. His work has appeared at Every Day Fiction, A Thousand Faces, 10Flash, and forthcoming from The Future Fire.

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…

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…

I thought I’d take a moment and discuss that dreaded foe of flash fiction: exposition.

Whether it’s the history of a country, the origin of a hero, a family tree, or the airspeed velocity of a European swallow, exposition is the basic facts behind a story. Exposition doesn’t have to be boring; on the contrary, how King Lillybeard III came to power is likely a fascinating story. The key is understanding when to cut the exposition, and when backstory is needed, make sure the story doesn’t come to a screeching halt. A flash piece can easily become a sudden info dump, leaving the reader wondering why the heck they just read all this information about a place in which nothing apparently happens, or a person who sits around thinking about history all day instead of getting of her duff and doing something.

This seems particularly to be a problem with fantasy flash. Fantasy fiction usually requires a lot of world building and establishing rules for places and systems that have been, for the most part, simply made up by the author. Science fiction can be the same way. Authors spend an immense amount of time coming up with these worlds and fantastic systems of magic or clever gadgets and complicated new political paradigms. And this is before a single pixel gets committed to screen. All this creative flavor informs the stories written within those worlds, and is a blast to invent. But is it necessary to give the reader all that information?

Most of the time? No.

Will people want all that history and setting exploration? If you’ve done a good job, yes. Hope they do – otherwise the world you have created may not be worth their time.

Nonetheless, resist! Flash fiction needs to be focused. You’re telling a particular story, about a particular moment in time, about just a few (heck, maybe even just one or two) particular people. Flash fiction is about distilling a story down to its absolutely essential ingredients. Those ingredients need to be the most potent spices on the rack. Determine what the story is about and keep it tightly focused on the characters and elements that add to that. Everything else is distraction.

Trust me, of all the criticisms you receive, “I want this to be a novel” will not be the one that leaves you curled up on the floor, with the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Alexander Burns lives in Fort Worth, Texas. He writes because he doesn’t have a basement in which build robots or time machines. His work has appeared at Every Day Fiction and A Thousand Faces.