Flash Fiction Chronicles

For most of us, writing is a somewhat solitary pursuit - after all, it’s hard to actually work on a story if you’re chatting to your Mom, IM’ing your best friend, or grabbing lunch with hubby. But there comes a time in every writer’s life when a certain kind of company becomes necessary.

A certain kind of company? I know, it sounds very Eliot Spitzer-ish. But choosing who to talk to about your baby novel is a fraught process. Will they like it? Will they hate it? Will they think it’s-actually-very-funny-or-realize-I-stole-all-my-jokes-from-ten-year-old-Leno-shows?

The best way to get talking about your novel is to start with strangers (Eliot Spitzer, I know) who write. And the best place to find them? Writing classes.

Writing classes are excellent for writers at any stage in their career. They’re a safe place to talk shop, learn tips, tricks, and techniques, and commiserate over dialogue that falls flat and characters who refuse to behave.

And, of course, it’s easy to pick apart someone else’s work. But writing classes are all about tit-for-tat, I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours. So what do you do when it’s your turn to put something up for a critique?

Before you submit:

1. Polish. Spend some time ensuring your work is as polished as you can make it. This isn’t for the critiquers’ benefit–it’s for yours. If your classmates aren’t wasting time with line edits, they’re more likely to pick up plot and character issues.
2. Make a list of things you’d like your critiquers to think about. It doesn’t have to be long and detailed–even one or two points is fine. If you can, write your list on the workshop copies, or add a page about it. If you know certain people in your group have a skill set you could use, it’s okay to ask them to pay greater attention to the relevant sections (such as getting a cardiologist to help out with the details of a heart attack).

The day of:

Years after my first workshop, I still tremble when it’s my turn to get feedback. A lot of my writer friends say the same thing. What I’ve learned, though, is that the trick to getting the most out of your first workshop is two-fold:

1. Understand that you’re human, and that nobody gets everything right the first time around.
2. Understand that your classmates are human, and that nobody gets everything right the first time around.

Critiquing is an art form. There’s a fine balance to helping a writer improve their work, and tearing down everything you don’t like. It’s also a very personal thing. I may love this description:

Cathy was the sort of the person who didn’t like to slow down, who didn’t like to wait. Cathy was the sort of the person who’d skip a visit to the doctor’s even when her neck would no longer fit through the door.

Our classmate, Kathy with a K, may hate it. And that’s okay.

The point is, both Kathy with a K and I have spent time thinking about your work. Your job is to take our feedback and run with it. How? By being true to you.

When I was first writing, I’d change my manuscript at the drop of a hat. Don’t like my main character’s name? No problem, I’ll give him a new one. Think the mother is too harsh? Well, she doesn’t need to be in there anyway. And while this made my critiquers feel useful, it ruined my work. Yes, ruined–because the story was no longer mine.  Nowadays, I work by the rule of three, i.e.

1. Just one opinion? Probably no big deal.
2. Two opinions? Flag it as something to think about.
3. Three opinions? It’s a problem, and I have to make a change.

Writing classes, daunting as they are, are definitely worth the time and effort. But when all’s said and done, remember that your work is your work. Even if you, Kathy with a K, and I are all working on stories about dogs learning to fly an airplane (and who doesn’t love dog-acting-as-human tales?), they’ll never be the same. Why? Our experiences, our voices are different. And that’s just the way it should be.

Peta Jinnath Andersen is a freelance writer and editor in Cambridge, MA. Her flash fiction story, The Jar, will be appearing in an upcoming issue of  Kaleidotrope . She’s currently working on her first novel.

Rose Metal Press has published a new book called Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field, edited by Tara L. Masih.  This short (of course!) 157 page-handbook gives beginning writers of flash fiction a place to start and continuing flashers a much-needed resource. 

In their introduction, publishers Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney discuss flash (0-1500 word range) as fiction that blends “genres and forms.”    However, in presenting the conventions of flash fiction, they wanted a book that would not “pin said inventive forms down with strict definitions.”   What they offer instead is “a book of ideas about and for flash fiction.” 

Editor Tara L. Masih has pulled together many of those ideas in twenty-five essays by writers such writers as Ron Carlson, Rusty Barnes, Kim Chinquee, Steve Almond, Vanessa Gebbie, Robert Olen Butler, Stuart Dybek, and Randall Brown.  The essays are divided into useful categories including “Freedom and Feeling in the Form,” “Beginnings and Endings,” and “Focusing and Editing,” making the book a user-friendly field guide to Flash Fiction, to be read either as it has been put together or searched through for specific help or inspiration.

“In Pursuit of the Short Short Story,”  the editor’s introduction, Ms. Masih opens with the following quotation, “Each drop encases its own separate note, the way each drop engulfs its own blue pearl of light,” from Stuart Dybek’s story “Nighthawks.”  Although this description in its original context is meant to define rain, Ms. Masih believes it is “as close to a definition of flash fiction” as she can give us.  The editor of the “Field Guide” then unfolds a history of the short short story beginning with Washington Irving and Poe to its present incarnation on the internet and in print journals dedicated to short short fiction. 

As for the essays, they offer insights into the art and craft of flash as well process.  Vanessa Gebbie writes about kidnapping the reader and using prompts in her piece called “Fireworks and Burnt Toast.”   Shouhua Qi discusses the origin of flash in China where short shorts are called Minute Stories, Pocket-Size Stories, and more familiar to the online flash reader, Smoke-Long stories.  In Robert Olen Butler’s “A Short Short Theory,” the author expands James Joyce’s one ephiphany at the end of a story to include a similar epiphany early on in the piece, “when the yearning of the character shines forth.”  Many of the essays feature flash fiction pieces written by their authors.

A useful, intelligent addition to the discussion of flash fiction, Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction manages to give readers what they want to know about flash fiction without limiting the genre with “strict definitions.”

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction:
Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field.
Edited by Tara L. Masih
ISBN: 978-0-9789848-6-1
$15.95

 Order directly from Rose Metal Press