Flash Fiction Chronicles

Ever notice how much writing advice there is floating around out there?  Well here are some of the most common ones I’ve heard and my take on them.

Advice: Writing is re-writing.

“I don’t write, I rewrite, that’s when all the fun begins. I just get it all out in the first draft, then I spend countless hours going back and editing, editing, editing.”

Okay, revision is important. But do we really just need to throw caution to the wind when do our first drafts? I contend that, especially with flash, the answer is no. I think those hours editing, editing, editing would be far better spent studying dramatic structure, successful stories we admire, or even just day dreaming. You put good stuff in, good stuff will come out. Overworking a flash piece can ruin it by the second pass. Too much revision is far worse than not enough.

Suggestion: If it doesn’t work set it aside for a while, a couple of months. Let the ideas percolate, then rewrite it from memory.

Advice: Keep a notebook for ideas.

“I keep a little notebook that I carry everywhere and record every stray thought that pops into my head. It’s a rich goldmine of ideas.”

Yeah, I’m sure it is a rich goldmine of random ideas. But good fiction is not made out of random thoughts. Yes, you might put a seed for a good idea in there sometime.  Yes, it might turn into a story for you. My line of thought on this advice is that if the idea is not good enough to stick in your head, it’s probably not all that great of an idea. If you aren’t obsessed with the idea, it’s not worth writing about. Flash is short and sweet, most of us are quite capable of rendering the whole thing in our heads.

Suggestion: Most authors I know do keep some kind of idea file on their computer usually just a one liner or a title. There is nothing wrong with this, per se, but again, if you can’t keep the idea in your head long enough to sit down and file it, it probably is not worth saving.

Advice: Write everyday, form a habit.

“I get up every morning at the crack of dawn, and write four pages.  If not, evil gremlins will come and eat my brains!”

Would be nice to have that kind of motivation, right? Unfortunately it is impossible to do this for most people. I think most of us writing flash are not professional writers and have jobs and families, and complex ‘real-life’  lives to attend to.  One of the fun things about writing flash is it doesn’t require long term commitment. Why not dash out a flash when you have a few minutes? No need to feel guilty that you can’t always find the time.

Suggestion: To be efficient with your time, combine daydreaming with a strong understanding of the craft of fiction. It’s often easier to fit in a few minutes reading up on writing advice than to produce a draft. Better that you do something towards developing your skills than nothing. Read, develop the story in your head, watch people (your kids, coworkers, etc) for details that might be useful. Anything.

Advice: Author’s should always get paid for their work.

“I only submit to top tier magazines that pay pro rates.”

Get published much? Probably not. The fact is there are a 1000 writers who are worse than you who are getting published. And there are a 1000 writers better than you waiting in line for their slots. Writers should get paid for their work, but keep in mind that flash is a close cousin to poetry, traditionally not a very lucrative venture. Most flash ezines need the money more than you do. Most flash ezines are labors of love with the editors paying out of their pockets.

Suggestion: Donate cash payments back to the ezine or some where like Duotrope these are the places that are keeping the scene alive. They are developing the audience for you. Think of your donated flashes as advertisements for your longer works (you are writing a novel aren’t you? Or will someday.) Creating ‘branding’ for your fiction has a long term value that exceeds the professional rates. We new writers have a vested interest in keeping the scene alive, right? (Obviously I’m not saying one should never submit to top tier magazines, just that not every story you write will be top tier.)

Advice: Writing is magical, mystical and hard.

“Every word I write is gut-wrenching agony, exposing my soul to the world.”

Right. This is the worst of the lot. I’ve often thought, I must be doing this wrong. I’ve never been miserable writing;  if so I wouldn’t do it. There are some stages I like more than others, of course. But if writing is a painful experience at any level, for god-sakes, go take up needlepoint or something. Writing is a craft; writing can be used to illustrate complex philosophy, existential woe, or something as simple as a lost pet that is found. Writing is like wood working, model ship building, or painting. It takes practice and determination. If it is causing you to suffer, go do something else; the world has enough writers. Flash is a bad place to try to unleash your angst and misery, not enough room for that sort of thing.

Suggestion: Write for fun; write for yourself; write from the heart, but most of all, write your best. If you’ve done your best then you’ve succeeded. Develop your craft; develop yourself as a human being, but where the two overlap is thin and fragile and can easily wreck an otherwise perfectly good story.

Advice: Bosley has a clue, listen to him.

“Bosley Gravel is a writing genius and with his dozens of published short stories and a forthcoming novel The Movie from BeWrite Books slated for pre-Christmas release), he must know almost everything there is to know about writing.”

Ahem, while I appreciate the flattery–what a load. If there were to be a Number One Rule about writing, it would be that there are no rules.

Suggestion: Do what works for you. Trust your instincts. That’s not to say ignore all advice you get because you know best. Lots of editors and writers will offer you perfectly good advice and lots of them will not ‘get’ your writing and make some very odd suggestions. Your job is to separate the two.

Knowing what advice to take and when to trust your own instincts can be hard and confusing sometimes, but becoming an expert in any field is difficult. The bottom line is that writing is an act of individualism. Only you can write your stories and only you can make them perfect. If some advice doesn’t suit you, ignore it. It’s allowed, and I’ll even suggest it for the best. Keeps things interesting.

Don’t agree?  Want to fight about it?   Post a comment and tell us your take on these or any other bits of advice you’ve heard.

Bosley Gravel, eclectic hack writer, 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. Visit his site for links to his fiction, and contact information.

Coming soon: his debut literary novel The Movie from BeWrite Books (for pre-Christmas Release).

For the last few years I’ve been teaching a class in writing the micro fiction story at the UCLA Extension.  I had wanted to teach a flash fiction class but someone was already running one. I was very attracted to these short forms for many of the reasons that contributors to Flash FictionChronicles have put forward:  With such a small piece of literary real estate, what can you say?  What can you do?  What are the limits and boundaries of storytelling? 

In the late Jerome Stern’s Micro Fiction anthology, I found my model and the class:  250 word stories (exclusive of title) and not a word more. In my classes, I’ve come across some of the best writing I’ve ever encountered. 

But why does it work?

My conclusion is structure. Micro fiction stories don’t need any.  Let me restate.  Near the beginning, I introduce Janet Burroway’s notion of the conventional contemporary short story structured as an inverted check mark which I draw on the board.  Then I erase the conflict and the resolution portions, and leave only the crisis moment.  That’s all the structure you need.  Or I draw the check mark again and after erasure leave only conflict.

Or a third time, all that remains is resolution.  I tell the participants to use any of those possibilities as their structural element and they getit, immediately.  With a singular focus on only a portion of that conventional structure, they bring an amazing intensity and attentiveness to language as a result.  They’ve brought me stories every bit as inventive and as strong as the ones featured in the Stern anthology.

There’s one more element needed to make the pieces something other than mere anecdote.  Each writer needs to find a way to set their moment of a story within a continuum.  That is, this has happened before and it will happen again. Given that sense of continuity, the stories resonate at a muchdeeper level.  They assert their “story-ness.”

If you’re stuck for how to approach these brief stories, try the method. I think you’ll surprise yourself.

Ian Randall Wilson is the author of two story collections and the novella, Great Things Are Coming. His work has appeared in many journals including The Gettysburg Review and the North American Review.  His micro fiction stories have appeared in the Vestal Review and have been anthologized.  He is on the fiction faculty at the UCLA Extension where he teaches classes in the short story and the micro fiction story. He is writing a cell phone novel which can be found at: http://mobilenovel.blogspot.com.

Last post, I mentioned how important a tool a writers’ critiquing group can be. Today, I want to talk about another important tool that involves participation by others.

Hearing others read your writing.

My son and I wrote a screenplay — Black Rock — last year. He works for a film production company in Ohio, and so he brought a bunch of actors together to read through the script.

I’m almost three thousand miles away, in Seattle, so I wasn’t able to be there, but he filmed the get-together and promised to send me a DVD once he had it edited.

That was last July; we’ve both were busy and so I figured it would get here when it got here. It showed up in the mail one Tuesday in October. I watched it that night.

Hearing your words read aloud can be enlightening for a fiction writer; for a screenwriter, it is what it is all about. But for any writer it can jerk the mental plugs from your ears. You get to hear someone else’s interpretation of what you intended, you get to hear what flies and what falls flat, and sometimes you get to hear the unexpected.

I sat through that reading, making notes, trying to filter out my own feelings and, when a scene did fall flat, to determine whether it was the fault of what we wrote or the fault of a poor reading. That happens; it’s one of the handicaps of working with unpaid volunteers.

It was during a free-for-all discussion after the reading that the unexpected occurred. The actors were offering their thoughts on character motivation and plot weaknesses, and then one of them said, “Well, it’s all about fathers, isn’t it?”

My son was there with them, on the screen, and I was thousands of miles and months away, watching, but we both said, “What?” at the same time.

“It’s about how fathers influence the actions of their children, particularly when they’re not around,” the actor said. And then he began to tick off points on his fingers.

“Frank and his dead father; Liz and her rich and doting daddy; Bob Shavers and his retarded son. Even the surrogate father relationship between Frank and the newspaper editor. It runs all through the thing.”

What he was talking about was theme, and he was right; we just hadn’t seen it; at least not that particular theme. The theme we identified, and had woven throughout the script, was that a child grows into the adult they will become as a result of a series of situations in which they are put under pressure.

Theme is the universal truth behind a story, and it’s one of the three elements that have to be developed, as a story unfolds, if an author is to succeed. The other two, of course, are character and plot.

Of the three, theme may be the most difficult to examine. In most cases, an author comes to a short story, novel or screenplay with some idea of her characters’ identities and what it is that will happen to them. But one of the quickest ways to kill a good story is to begin it with a theme in mind. Unless you are really, really good, you run the risk of preaching; no one wants to read a sermon or a lecture.

But as a story progresses naturally, theme will show up as a conflict of values or morals. It most likely will be a strong opinion that the author holds that comes out in the mouths of her characters. And it almost always presents itself as a recurring symbol.

When I called my son, after watching the edited DVD, and asked him why he hadn’t told me about the father theme, I could hear his grin.

“I wanted you to see it for yourself,” he said. “Good thing I had the reading, huh?”

Indeed.

K. C. Ball is a retired newspaper reporter and media relations coordinator. She grew up in Ohio, with her nose in a book, and she now lives in Seattle, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound.

Her flash fiction has appeared on-line at Every Day Fiction, Boston Literary Magazine, Fear & Trembling, Residential Aliens, Every Day Weirdness, Flashshot and Moon Drenched Fables, as well as in print in Morpheus Tales, Murky Depths and the 2008 Best of Every Day Fiction anthology. Her longer stories have also appeared in on-line and print magazines.

K. C. is a staff reader for Every Day Fiction and a Finalist in the 1st Quarter 2009 Writers of the Future competition. She blogs about writing at A Moving Line and about whatever may strike her fancy at Now Playing in Seattle.