Flash Fiction Chronicles

If it seems I’ve been blowing my own trumpet a bit loudly of late, please let me explain. This has nothing to do with ego and everything to do with attempting to boost my confidence, a writer’s most fragile asset. Mine took a serious drubbing recently and if I’ve resorted to roll-calling every small success it’s only because I need to feel I’m making progress, no matter how minor it might seem to the rest of the world.

The real success story has been my new routine of rising at 6am to write for two hours every morning. This has meant the new novel climbed to 22,000 words in two weeks with the result that it now feels like a novel and not a series of randomly related words under a title I keep changing. I’m not saying this first draft is great or even good. I’m under no illusions about the hard graft which lies ahead. But I’ve turned a corner, got stuck into something new, started over.

Alongside this, the small successes themselves count for much in terms of my confidence; they validate my decision to pursue this craft. Perhaps they shouldn’t. Perhaps the craft ought to be enough in itself. But I can only rely on my own judgement up to a point. After that point, I need other people’s judgement. I am selective in how I respond to this. I don’t ask friends or family to pat me on the back. Nor do I hold all editors in the same high esteem, but I am getting better at telling when a judgement is sound. This too is all about confidence.

I can recall more or less precisely the moment when I put aside the textbooks on how to write and learned to trust my instinct. I had listened to enough of the right people saying enough of the right things (and sometimes enough of the wrong things) for me to know when I was on the right track. I realised that I could trust my instinct rather than the opposite.

But it doesn’t take much to knock that confidence for six, even now. I try not to molly-coddle it too much. I make sure I expose it to knocks which will test it for soundness, the way an expert in fine china will ring a bell with a flick of her fingers to be sure it isn’t hiding a hairline crack or three. I’d prefer it didn’t get whacked by a hammer, but I don’t hide it in bubble-wrap on the top shelf.

I have started to sub to big places, punching above my weight when I can, always raising the bar. But I also sub to venues I’ve come to trust and like. I hoard the small successes because they give me the confidence to keep punching higher up. Let me give you an example.

A week ago I was despondent about my writing. In a mood that was nine parts masochistic, I subbed a story in anticipation of a rejection. It hit. And another, which also hit. I took my courage in both hands and pitched an idea to the editor of a magazine. It was a cold pitch. I sent him a sample of my writing, the non-fiction piece about my mother’s childhood in a prison camp. The editor loved it, asked permission to publish it. And now I’m going to have a headline feature in a respected print magazine with a wide readership in my new city where I’m trying to make my name as a writer. I won’t say any more than that until it’s published, and I do realise I’ve come full circle back to my own trumpet, but the point I’m trying to make is that confidence begets confidence. Hoard ye small successes while you may, if I can say that without sounding all hey nonny and a bit insane.

Reprinted from Crawl Space by Sarah Hilary, Confidence and the Writer, published September 2, 2009

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 including Burial of the Bells at Every Day Fiction and A Shanty for Dawdust and Cotton at LITnIMAGE, Check out her blog, Crawl Space, where she lists all her online writing and then check out her other brilliant FLASHES of fiction.

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…

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.