Flash Fiction Chronicles

Edgar Allan Poe wrote exactly one novel, and most critics agree that The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is not a great novel—at least not nearly as successful as his finest short stories.  H.P. Lovecraft wrote a novel and a couple novellas, but as with the man from Nantucket, they are not as highly esteemed as the shorter works.

In their most chilling tales, Lovecraft and his gothic-horror predecessor aim to generate one specific feeling in the reader: fear. They masterfully conjure a creepy-crawly goose-fleshy atmosphere of dread, generating that special frisson of horror.

Lovecraft opens his seminal essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” He has been quoted a thousand times—some of you, like me, can probably recite it by heart. 

But a corollary to that observation, so dear to the writer of the weird tale, is that any single emotion cannot be indefinitely sustained. It is difficult—nigh on impossible—to keep a reader on that high-wire for long. A short story is meant to be read in one sitting: the tension can be wound tighter and tighter, the emotion of creeping dread built to its climax. A novel, on the other hand, gets read in chunks, with the reader in a different frame of mind each time the book is picked up.

What about the reigning king of the macabre, whose novels often run north of a thousand pages? Stephen King himself, in his 1981 overview of the horror field Danse Macabre, makes the very same point about the difficulty of maintaining stark fear for longer than a scene or a passage at a time. 

The particular kind of effect achieved by Poe or Lovecraft in their best short stories is also found in novels, but it is dished out in doses. A novelist has to pace him/herself, building to moments of horror, coming back down to some equilibrium, then building up again. King likens it to “long-distance running” (355). 

A horror novel is like a long rollercoaster—the whole ride is not a single continuous drop. A horror short story, on the other hand, is a ghost-train ride careening straight into the tunnel and scaring the daylights out of the rider right until the train emerges into the light on the other side.

In a horror novel by the likes of King, dread is but one element among many—one ingredient in a complex soup. There is suspense, mystery, character development: numerous engines driving the plot. Not so in the shortest of horror stories, which offer dread distilled to its essence. 

Which brings us to horror flash. It is possible to generate frisson in very few words. I’ll close with two examples.

• Exhibit A: “Knock” by Frederic Brown, first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories 33:2 (December 1948):

“The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.” 

• Exhibit B is supplied by Thomas Ligotti in the foreword to his short story collection Noctuary (1994):

“A man awakes in the darkness and reaches over for his eyeglasses on the nightstand. The eyeglasses are placed in his hand.”

Aside from their bare-bones brevity, these exhibits have this in common: they both tap into that oldest, strongest fear of the unknown.

(To be continued…)

Nicholas Ozment has had twenty flash stories published, twelve of them on Every Day Fiction. Credits include Weird Tales, Mythic Delirium, Dreams & Nightmares, Arkham Tales, Pseudopod, and nearly seventy other publications and contests. His work has been anthologized, podcast, and performed on radio and stage, as well as being recognized in Writer’s Digest and Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He is a co-editor of Every Day Poets. Nicholas lives in Minnesota with his wife and daughter, where he teaches college English.

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).

If you touch type, try this the next time you begin a piece of flash.

Get situated at the keyboard, open a blank page in your word processor and tie a blindfold over your eyes. Sit for a minute or so, listening to the sounds around you, feel the keys beneath your fingertips, the faint vibration of the earth turning beneath you, sample the aromas carried to your nose.

Now write.

There’s nothing magical about wearing the blindfold, of course, and I’m not suggesting that you should write about the experience or even practice the trick every time you sit down to work.

It’s just a tool to get you thinking in reverse, thinking about how much poorer your life would be if sight were the only sense you had to depend upon. And how much more is going on around you that just what you see.

Of course, sight is the sense we all depend upon the most, studies have shown that over and over. It peppers our every conversation. I see what you mean. I like the look of that. I’ll keep an eye out for him.

But as a writer, if you are not talking full advantage of the marvelous scene-setting details available to you though senses other than sight, your stories will be the poorer for the loss.

Don’t overwhelm your readers with detail, of course. Remember, you’re writing flash, you’re on a word budget. But use all your senses to set the scene and draw the reader into your written world.

Season your story with sensation of all sorts: the bright yellow of a child’s sun dress; the thick snap of a broken bone: the hint of fragrance on a pillow; the taste of soured milk or the oiled feel of dirty water.

Take the time to pay attention and you can think of much better examples.

So, close your eyes and write. It will trigger your imagination, which will trigger your readers’ imaginations, for there are so many sensations that we all have in common, so much more than what we see.

K. C. Ball grew up in Ohio, with her nose in a book, and 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, Every Day Weirdness, Flashshot and Moon Drenched Fables, as well as in print in Murky Depths #8 and the 2008 Best of Every Day Fiction anthology.

Her most recent flash, At Both Ends, was published June 3rd in Flash Fiction Online in June and one of her longer pieces, Coward’s Steel, won 3rd place in the Hubbard Foundation’s 1st Quarter, 2009, Writers of the Future competition.

K. C. is a staff reader for Every Day Fiction and blogs about writing at A Moving Line or whatever may strike her fancy at Now Playing in Seattle.

I’m a lot of different people — I’m a selfish urbanite looking for a fix in a dystopian near future, and a scared middle aged employee of a junkyard that is pretty sure something unnatural is out to get him, so too am I the drunken challenger to the greatest swordsmen who ever lived, and a confused animal given artificial intelligence. What I’m not — I hope — is just a guy clacking keys on a keyboard, because if you hear those keys click-clacking over what I’m really trying to say, then I’ve failed my job as a storyteller.

Flash is the perfect vehicle for experimentation, and specifically experimentation in voice, for several reasons. Firstly, it is a medium that lends itself well to play and risk-taking because it does not require a large investment of time. Did your slangy dialect flash turn out to be an impenetrable mess? No problem, bury it in the hard drive and bring it out on rainy days for a chuckle, after all you wrote it in less than an hour. Did the 1,000 word stream-of-consciousness story meant to evoke the internal dialog of a madman come across more like a lame derivative of every other story of its kind that you’ve ever read? Hardly a big deal, no one need read it, not even you — if it’s really that bad, hit the DELETE key and admire your own ruthlessness.

Beyond the potentially disposable nature of exercises in flash fiction, you also have the delicious constraints of the medium. Of course, we know that flash has to be tightly written and as concise as possible, ideally with every word chosen for effect. Operating under such limits it would be a shame to write plainly, at least in every case, when instead one can use language to evoke mood or construct character. This is the second reason why flash rewards experimentation in voice.

However, ‘voice’ can mean many things. There is an author’s voice, his style, which mostly means the way he uses words; his quirks of diction, syntax, and punctuation, and really almost anything else about his work that lends it a recognizable quality. This is essentially unconscious and hard to change or embellish — which is reason enough not to worry all that much about it.

Instead of voice I like to think of many different voices, those tricks of style that are as different from story to story as the characters, themes, and settings of each piece. Different because they are integral, indivisible parts of the story itself, whether they are the actual words of a first person tale or the differences in cadence and inflection in a third person narrative, there is no excuse not to bring a conscious mind to the creation of these voices. Especially, as I’ve said, in flash fiction where to fail to do so is to write without one of the most powerful tools in the writer’s arsenal.

How do you do it? Well, in one sense you just do. You get in the head of your characters, you let them speak through your fingers. Such voices are very often verbal, borrowing the rhythms of speech, the informal language, the jagged construction. I want to stress that this does not just apply to obvious cases like first person stories in which the character is narrating, and sometimes literally speaking his part, but also to those of third person (and second, too, if that’s you cup of chai latte). Third person stories can be every bit as influenced by voice, just so long as they do not become the actual words of another unintended character.

All of us have models that we draw upon when writing. These of course influence our authorial style without us even knowing it, but if we want to put on that second layer, our ‘many voices,’ consciously imitating these styles is a great way to achieve a better story. Whether we take Dickens or Hemingway, A Clockwork Orange or Beowulf, as our model, mimicking these sources can lend a dramatically different feel to our writing. While we cannot really change our fundamental authorial voice (at least, not so quickly or radically as would suit a story by story readjustment), we can pay attention to the effects of voice and deploy it as deliberately as we do character, setting, and plot.

And, while it sometimes may blow up in our faces, there is no more perfect way to play with this dangerous toy than to try it out in a piece of flash and see what happens.

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.

Any writing we do is an opportunity to grow as a writer. From the largest and most complex project to a dashed-off blog post, the act of putting words on paper (or on the screen) can and should be a learning experience. Every story, article, novel, or essay we write works in subtle ways to build those mental muscles that make us better, faster, and stronger writers over time. However, real growth comes from stepping outside of our comfort zone, of addressing new challenges and setting new goals for ourselves, and of doing things with words that we have never done before.

Enter the humble flash fiction story — your perfect crash course in expanding your horizons.

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.

Why that is important — hugely so, as a matter of fact — has less to do with all the wonderful other opportunities flash affords like expanding your web presence and having your work read by more people, and more with how it can make you better, for writing towards publication is always a superior test of a writer’s skills than private, consequence-free scribbling. To publish a piece of fiction one has to craft a real story out of that character sketch or errant idea for a scene, and writing such a story to completion  and putting it in front of the world is the best way to grow as a writer.

Which means, ultimately, you can deny yourself the freedom to be lazy in your writing. It’s easy enough to try to work something out privately, it’s another thing entirely to do it in front of a roomful of strangers. Treating your experiemental, outlandish, and incedental ideas as potential fare for public consumption means you run the risk of falling on your face — precisely the most exhilirating and rewarding experience a writer can have.

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.

I had just finished a flash and read it. It seemed familiar. Then it hit me. It has the same format as many of my other stories. Going through my work I discovered I had a set outline I would use for my work. The story goes like this: 300 or so words of exposition or character description, then a character will have a 100 word speech that will be related to the theme of the story and finally about 50 or so words to finish out the tale.

I told my wife my discovery and she looked dumbfounded that it took me this long to realize it.

Those of us who write flash are easy targets of repetition. Our output are 500 or 1000 word stories, so we tend to write a lot of these little suckers. You can’t blame yourself for falling into a form that has worked before. We have a good idea, an interesting character, a cool final line, so how do you cobble it all together, with the set format. Be careful. This will lead to the characters and the situations becoming set as well.

Sometimes this set format is the perfect vehicle, but most of the times its just expediency. For me, I will use the format on the first draft, but try to shake it up on additional drafts. One of my most popular stories on Every Day Fiction is “Wing Mending.” It started out as a much longer piece that followed the pattern of many=20 of my stories. I just left it in the notebook for a year and then worked on it. I cut out everything but the last paragraph and slightly expanded it and that became the work that you can read on Every Day Fiction.

I suppose the most important thing you can do is write in the easiest and fastest method and then be critical when the draft is done. Ask yourself, is this like everything else I have done? If the answer is yes, then figure out how to change it, or alter it or just leave it in the notebook. Also, read your older work, be aware of what you have done, find the patterns in your own stories. Don’t be annoyed when you find patterns, just don’t get stuck in the rut, write yourself out of it.

Dave McPherson lives in Worcester, Ma. He is a co-editor of Ballard Street Poetry Journal. He has been published in several on line and print publication for his flash fiction, if we must call it anything. He is a former slam poet and has performed across New England.

The piece of art pictured below by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller was commissioned by Modern Art Oxford and the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. 5,000 books glued together as bricks to make a house you can step inside. The smell inside is wonderful, of starch and paper. But I wanted to take it apart and READ.

I recently wrote four pieces of short fiction, to a deadline. I’d pledged to write three pieces within three hours. All four stories were written to prompts provided by a writer’s forum. The prompts were excellent, thought-provoking and meaty. The forum was pledged to write a total of 100 stories within two days and it achieved that target. Each story was posted anonymously and then commented on by the other writers. For each story you posted you had to comment on at least three stories by others. Great discipline, because reading is a vital part of writing and critting hones skills like nothing else.

The process worked very well, smooth and seamless. It was the first time I’d taken part in a challenge at this particular forum, which includes some stellar writers, and I’ll admit I was nervous. But once I’d pledged to take part, I relaxed that part of my brain where I keep a tight lid on the voices that are always bubbling under waiting for me to pay attention to the stories they want to tell. I let three voices rise to the surface and let these three check the prompt lists until they found something that suited. Then I wrote. The fourth voice came direct from the prompt itself which was of course how I was meant to approach the whole exercise.

It was interesting to see how other writers critiqued the stories, not just mine but everyone’s. These are serious writers, many of them award-winning. They had serious comments to make about the stories posted at the forum. What interested me most was a tendency to read the stories not as tales being told to them but as tales they would have told differently. They read, in other words, as writers rather than readers. I went back and checked my own critiques. I did the same. We were nearly all of us reading in this way, seeing a story we would like to tell and nudging the author in that direction. This is not to say that the comments weren’t useful and constructive. They absolutely were. But I made a mental note to put my writer’s hat aside and read as a reader, keeping my own ego out of it. (I mean ego in the true sense rather than as vanity, although god knows I suffered some serious pen-envy reading some of those stories!)

All in all, a great day’s work. I thoroughly enjoyed the writing, the reading and the taking part. I highly recommend the exercise, to writers everyone, especially those seeking to hone flash fiction skills. 

Sarah Hilary is a frequent contributor to Every Day Fiction  (Lolita’s Lynch Mob is an all-time favorite) and on other flash sites around the web.  Check out her blog, Crawl Space, where she lists all her online writing and then check out her other brilliant FLASHES of fiction.  Pick Ugly, was one of the Commended entries to the Leaf Books Nano Fiction Contest 2009, and will be published in their anthology.

I’ve never considered myself much of a flash fiction author, but looking at my catalog of published work, I find a handful of them there, and in most cases my stories are in good company. I’ve always felt that writing good flash was a bit beyond my reach.

Truly talented authors manage to create a perfect blend of plot, detail, and emotion into something that can stay with the reader for hours, days, even years. Luckily, I was ignorant enough to think it was as easy as it looks–lucky for me, not the poor editors who might have read the attempts–because if I had realized how difficult it really is, I don’t think I would have even bothered trying.

A typical contemporary short story of about 2000-3000 words has plenty of breathing room.  Heck, you can even fit a couple of character arcs in there if you really want to. Now here’s the thing that amazes me, a skilled author can do that same thing in 500 words.

How do they do it?

Gosh, I couldn’t tell you for sure; I’m still trying to figure it all out. But I do have some suspicions based on some general observations of successful fiction.

Like any other type of creative endeavor you intend to share with an audience, the first and foremost rule is:

Be engaging.

When you engage the reader deeply enough that they read on, you’ve succeeded as author. If you don’t capture the reader’s attention, then unfortunately you have failed. Sorry, try again. That being said, engaging is a subjective thing, but majority wins. Artistically successful authors don’t pander, but they aren’t spewing out complete gibberish either, right?

The next thing I’ve noticed is flash fiction, like any fiction, must contain conflict. I think scope is important here; flash is often about capturing a brief period of time.

For example:

A picture of your dog: boring
A picture of my dog: boring
A picture of one doggy-bone: boring

A picture of your dog, my dog and one tasty doggy-bone: a flash story.

Without conflict you don’t have a story, without conflict you won’t engage the reader. It seems reasonable to to keep the scope as tight as possible. Of course you’ve got plenty of room to build some implicit meaning with dramatic symbolism; perhaps one of those dogs is a mangy old stray, and the other is frilly pampered pet.

Stated inversely, very few authors could pull off a flash fiction that encompassed the complexities of say, World War II. Then again some might be able to. Maybe you’re one of them; it’s certainly worth a try. To paraphrase Hemingway, big emotion doesn’t necessarily come from a big story. Personally, I’m not going to worry about big until I’ve mastered small.  Simple is beautiful.

After the scope of the conflict is properly sized, I think the most important thing is detail. Flash fiction is not only about capturing the perfect moments, it’s about capturing the imperfect moments as well. Imperfections make it real, imperfections make it engaging . . . does that stray have fleas? I hope so, because fleas are creepy and crawly and gross. And I like that. As a reader, minutia is what puts me in the story, it’s a form of equity the writer builds, it can carry me over the rough spots later on.

Often a good piece of flash has a punchline of sorts. Was there a third dog hiding in the bushes that bounded out and stole the bone while the first two were fighting? Yes? Good, I didn’t see that coming. Truth be told twist endings are actually much more advanced technique than they  first appear. As a lifelong bibliophile I’ve seen it all; it’s hard to surprise me. I suspect a lot of readers feel this way. As a new writer, I’m probably not really clever enough to pull this off yet, but I don’t let that stop me from trying. Practice makes perfect.

Finally, I think word choice is so much more critical in flash. Short stories have a small amount of leeway–tone and theme have a little wiggle room . . . novels even more so, but in a flash story every single word should be meticulously considered. The right word, in the right place can save you a whole sentence elsewhere. But I stress right, avoid using words you wouldn’t use in conversation with a fellow writer.  An esoteric, discommodious, multisyllabic word might leave your reader . . . annoyed. Try to avoid that.

So that’s all I know about flash fiction, and a good bit of what I know about story telling in general.  As you can see, it would easily fit into a thimble with plenty of room  to spare. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing your flash stories.

Bosley Gravel, eclectic hack writer, was born in the Midwest, and came of age in Texas and southern New Mexico.  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.  His genre fiction has been podcasted at Well Told Tales, The Dunesteef, and published at Macabre Cadaver, Reflections Edge, Tales from the Moonlit Path and many others.  He also rather shyly admits to a hacking out a few literary short stories which have appeared in Shalla Magazine, The Deepening, The Fabulist, and Every Day Fiction.  He has a gothic horror novella coming out on March 15th 2009, in ebook format produced by Shadowfire Press, and has placed a story in the upcoming Dead Bait Anthology by Severed Press.  Check his site for links to these stories and more, plus reprints released under the Creative Commons License.

But it’s the Novelists – especially the Literary Fiction Novelists – who get all the prestige.  And it’s the Commercial Fiction Novelists who get all the money.  Make no mistake – prizes and money are good.

I used to think being a writer meant pursuing the elusive Novel – that great big project that would fulfill all the requirements for legitimate writerhood and not only let the world see your massive talent and dogged perseverance, but would also, by dint of fancy cover, Kirkus review, the New York Times bestseller list, and sheer word count prove it to your mom, too.  That was a long time ago, long before I knew the simple truth that being a writer means writing. Size doesn’t matter; if you write with serious intent then you are a writer.

So where does that leave the Short Fiction Writers?

It leaves us in the center of the storm, in the thick of the action, in the middle of the mayhem. We are right there – in the past, the present, the future – in as few words as possible, with concise sentences, brilliant imagery and characters so well-defined they may be described by a single word or snippet of dialogue.

And the immediate high of writing a complete story in less than a thousand – or even five hundred – words is inexplicable to a novelist who only works in the tens of thousands. Plus, we can do it over and over again. Rewrites don’t take years, and less than perfect attempts can be ditched or set aside without an enormous investment of time and printer ink.

Who are we? We are the masters of storytelling.

We have to be—we have so many stories to tell, but we don’t have much time and we’re running out of space, too.  Get that word count down, tighten that paragraph. Use only the best words, the most effective image, the crispest dialogue. Then go back and see if there’s a single word that doesn’t push the story.

Who writes short shorts? We write short shorts!

We fill your time in bus stations, on plane rides, that time in the checkout line and all the space at the beach between the grains of sand. We’re at your side in the dentist’s office and on your nightstand every evening. We’re in your car and on your iPod and on your computer every morning.

We are the folks who bring you fairytales, one-minute murders, bedtime stories and short romances. We are some of the biggest names in fiction and newbies you don’t yet know.

Who are we? Well, every time you read a haunting short story that leaves you in tears or with a grin or with a feeling of satisfaction or anger or peace – we are you.

Kate Thornton lives in Southern California where she writes crime fiction and paints abstract oils. She has over 100 short stories in publication and is active in the Los Angeles Chapter of Sisters in Crime. Her story, Veteran’s Day, appeared in the November 2006 issue of Every Day Fiction.  You can find her blog at It Doesn’t Take A Genius.

So where do stories come from? Good question—glad you asked.

I’d like to answer that by taking you through the process of developing one particular flash. The reason why I’ve chosen this one is that the process of creation took place over a very short time span (under an hour), so I can be quite precise about what was going on at the time.

The piece in question, “Canine Mathematics”, was created as part of a charity event held every year in aid of BBC Children in Need by Alex Keegan’s Bootcamp. I’ve never been a member of Bootcamp (it’s not my kind of place), but I joined in with this as a visitor in 2007, basically because it seemed like a good opportunity to hang out with some of the cool kids in the playground. “Canine Mathematics” eventually got published in Smokebox (I wasn’t even aware of EDF back then), and you can read it here. As it happens, it was my first-ever piece published on the internet, so I’ve got a lot of affection for it.

The way the Children in Need event works is that you are sent a series of around 40 prompts every hour, and you then have an hour in which to produce a piece inspired by one or more of them. The event takes place over 30 hours, from Thursday at 6PM through to Friday midnight, with some people (sadly not including me) ploughing on right through Thursday night. There are also a couple of practice nights leading up to this, so by the time Friday evening comes along, I’m getting the idea of how it all works, and I’ve already produced one or two pieces that have worked reasonably well, although there are a whole load of others that have crashed and burned.

So at 20:00 on Friday, having eaten well and drunk a glass or two of Italian red, I scan the incoming e-mail and choose “Dog” and “Seventeen pints of lager” from the prompts offered to me. The thing about the kind of time pressure that events like this put you under is that you don’t have the luxury of planning. So you start writing with whatever the right (creative) side of your brain comes up with. And what it comes up with is that after seventeen pints of lager, you’d be in a pretty bad state. And that a dog would probably treat you with a fair amount of contempt. So here are the first couple of sentences:

The dog stared at me with what seemed to be disgust.

 

“Look at the state of you,” it said.

And I’m off. From here, the right brain is still making most of the running, and the next thing it comes up with is – literally – what you might come up with when you have drunk seventeen pints of lager (apologies if you’ve just eaten.) But the next question is what can you do that’s interesting with a pool of vomit? Well, for one thing, you can analyse its shape, and this is where my previous life as a student of mathematics unexpectedly comes into play, as it seems entirely sensible for the main character to be a mathematician himself.

All this time, the left (logical) side of the brain has been struggling to catch up – a bit like riding a tiger. But at this point, it actually manages to seize control and it starts to fill in some of the gaps. Who is the MC? Is he a student? Or is he a professor, perhaps? Why is he out getting drunk? The answers are that he’s a professor of sorts and he’s been out getting drunk because he’s in trouble with his research funding. Then the right brain chips in by suggesting that the dog can help him with this.

How?

Easy. The dog’s a mathematician too. And then the right brain pulls out its masterstroke, by remembering some long-forgotten principle of Wittgenstein (and I’m paraphrasing here) that if a lion could speak, we still would not be able to understand him. So the dog can solve the MC’s problem, but can’t communicate his solution to him.

Left brain is uneasy but has no choice but to go along with this, and fills out the narrative a bit with the arrival of a further dog and a cat who discuss the first dog’s findings, making minor corrections, and then bring the main part of the narrative to an end. I am now around 670 words in, and I have about a quarter of an hour to go to bring this to a tidy conclusion. I have no idea how I am going to do this, but I have to keep writing.

Right brain is out of ideas by now, so left brain sketches out a coda to the piece, where the MC is now sitting in his office, reflecting on the encounter. But we’re still looking for a punch line. Finally, right brain has a second wind and remembers the old joke about the man who comes across a dog who tells him all about his exploits in the CIA. He tells the owner what an amazing dog he has, but the owner merely scoffs and tells him not to believe a word the dog says. And an adaptation of that joke steers the story to its final destination.

All I did before submitting it to Smokebox was clean up a few bits of slightly mangled writing, and reduce the alcohol consumption from seventeen pints to seven or eight. Even in my student days, that was about my limit, and bad things usually started happening well before then.

So, the message? Don’t be afraid to let the right brain off the leash. Don’t wait for inspiration to strike—start writing. And if all else fails, bring on a talking animal.

Jonathan Pinnock was born in Bedfordshire, and – despite having so far visited over forty other countries – has failed to relocate any further away than the next-door and equally unexceptional county of Hertfordshire. He is married with two children, several cats and a 1961 Ami Continental jukebox. His work has won several prizes, shortlistings and longlistings, and he has been published in such diverse publications as Smokebox, Every Day Fiction and Necrotic Tissue. His unimaginatively-titled yet moderately interesting website may be found at www.jonathanpinnock.com.