Flash Fiction Chronicles

I have come to the conclusion that Ideas Are Alive.  I will explain with an anecdote.

Last night, I worked on a practice piece (from the prompt for the 25th.) I had shortened my brainstorm and actual writing time significantly, since I did want to get to bed sometime before I had to be awake. The stuff I came up with was, in a word, garbage. Regurgitated garbage, in truth, so I felt no guilt in closing the laptop when the timer went off and simply going to bed without giving the piece a second thought.

But then, something happened when the lights went out. My terrible idea began to bubble in the back of my mind, something I was only dimly aware of as I settled down. It percolated into something better as I sank into sleep, and I remember hoping that I would be able to recall the new slant for the idea when I awoke.

While I slept, the idea kept working – like yeast-leavened bread, it expanded and became something not so sticky and hard to work with, but the foundation for something delicious. I woke this morning with the story fully formed in my head, and wrote it down in an hour and a half. None of the prompt words made an appearance, but they didn’t need to. The idea did all the work. It needs tidying, of course, and several edits with breaks between before I send it out into the world. But it is there.

And all I did was sleep on it.

(reprinted from original at Blogging in the Dark)

TL.Schofield is the sum of an equation factoring in her upbringing, her love, her passions, her children, her pets, and her insatiable need to create something out of nothing. The results of this equation are often inconsistent, depending on the chameleon color of her hair, her proximity to the ocean, and her consumption of coffee and / or cheese. She is often lost in thought.

The best flashes come to me after serious hard thinking, following a prompt along its many tangents, discarding the ideas I feel have been done before or would be ‘flat’ on the screen (or page). Eventually, I’ll find a thread I think I can work with, and then I get weaving.
Of course I also get inspiration from reading other stuff, or may want to write a flash that tackles a particular idea or theme. I’ve had tremendous fun writing 250 word flashes around instances of historical crime. Researching some truly grisly or bizarre or just plain boggling crimes and teasing out a scene from in amongst the facts and the mythical stuff that accompanies stories like Lizzie Borden’s. (My flash about Lizzie won the Fish Historical-Crime Award, and will be published online in Yellow Mama, a venue specialising in crime fiction.)

The trick, for me anyway,when writing historical flash is to find a single scene and build it into something compelling enough to feel either very ‘real’ (like you’re there, watching it happen) or very moving (by which I mean it can be disturbing or sickening or pitiable or sad), while at the same time avoiding treading old ground and/or extrapolating too far beyond the evidence which exists on record. This works well for historical flash fiction because the ’story’ (as a whole) often exists in the public domain – you don’t have to build it from scratch – but the fine detail or the pathos or the resonance (the things that give a story substance) are either missing or lost in the annals. By using a title which pins the story down, I have the freedom to work within a defined space to bring the past to life. Assuming I’m lucky enough to get the words down right.

For me, flash fiction is a unique combination of discipline and freedom. I stopped writing flash briefly when I was deep into the first ms of a novel, thinking I couldn’t afford the distraction and needed to dedicate my every available writing hour to the novel. But my writing suffered for it, as did the novel. So I switched to writing a full length crime novel AND doing a flash challenge every week, and the two things were not only compatible they were positively zinging – the one from the other and back again.

Flash is a great way of flexing your writerly muscles. I can’t recommend it enough.

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.  Her most recent piece, Flood Plain, is up at Prick of the Spindle.