Flash Fiction Chronicles

The worst thing about writing groups is their tendency to become “reading groups.”  It starts with someone saying, “Here’s a piece I wrote in college,”  or “One I dusted off so I’d have something to read.” 

“NO!”  I’ve been shouting at our group of  ten or a dozen writers who show up.  “Read the things you want critiqued.  They’re being criticized so you can submit.  And you submit for fame, money or simple self-validation.  But no desk-drawer crap!”

 The best thing to come out of these groups is solid commentary, insights into what you’ve just read, and “gotchas” for those damn typos that creep in.  (The aural experience may also lead a writer to clasp fist to forehead and realize the words are hollow exercises in periphrastic verbosity.)  Educationally, the group can provide information on multiple submissions, markets, querying, confusion over editorial style and on and on.

Suggestions:

• First,  the value can be ramped up if members will share copies of their writing.  (Copies can be printed cheaply in draft quality mode.) 
• Second, someone needs to lead the group to keep order.  (The group I began facilitating was floundering and leaderless.) 
• Third, set the ground rules: No one delivers a recitation about what they’re going to read in a few minutes, the critiques must be constructive, and the reader should keep quiet until the comments are all in. 
• Fourth, “someone” should recap in an e-mail who read what, encourage members, mention successful sales or book signings, provide links to sites like Wordtrip and Duotrope, and maintaintain an all-members mailing list.  
• Fifth, send out the occasional news release that your group will be meeting at the library or local bookstore—and invite all interested writers.

 Those are just my opinions, but early on, our members–some 27 in all–asked to begin meeting twice a month.  So, how are you guys doing with your writing groups?  Are they useful?  Any tips to add?

Walter Giersbach’s fiction has appeared Bewildering Stories, Big Pulp, Every Day Fiction, Everyday Weirdness, Lunch Hour Stories, Mouth Full of Bullets, Mystery Authors, OG Short Fiction, Northwoods Journal, Paradigm Journal, Short Fiction World, Southern Fried Weirdness, The Short Humour Site and Written Word.  Two volumes of short stories, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue, have been published by Wild Child (www.wildchildpublishing.com).  He also served for three decades as director of communications for Fortune 500 companies.

Dramatic structure in flash fiction is an interesting beast, isn’t it? On one hand, the most satisfying flash stories are going to be basically be very, very short stories. On the other hand, it’s such a teeny, tiny amount of room.

Take for example this complete story, A Little Fable by Franz Kafka. It weighs in at a hefty 92 words counting the title and byline:

A Little Fable
by Franz Kafka

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.”

“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

Okay, as an author my interest is piqued. This story has two characters, two lines of dialog, and a good bit of philosophy. Dramatic irony, and a twist ending, all wrapped up in a neat little package of less than 95 words.

Roll up your sleeves, put on your latex gloves and hand me a scalpel right out of my little black bag. We’re going to do some exploratory surgery . . . what? You can’t find the scalpels, only the Three Act Structure and The Hero’s Journey? Those will have to do. I guess we can make a big a mess out of this patient with those as we can with knives …

“But Bosley,” I can hear you saying, “The three act structure is for plays, and movies. Not my beautiful whimsical flash.”

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit applying structure in this way is more an exercise in creative thinking than it is true analyses. But heck, I’ve never let the facts get in the way.

What is the three act structure?

Act 1: Introduce the protagonist, the premise and a get the conflict rolling

Act II: The protagonist should try to fix the problem, and make things even worse in the process (or at least things should get worse). Change will most likely be instigated by an outside force.

Act III: Things are resolved with a climax, the premise is addressed in a meaningful way. Loose ends are tied up.

Okay, so let’s apply it . . .

“Alas,” said the mouse,

Main Character: We are introduced to the mouse, and we see immediately he is bemoaning his situation.

“the whole world is growing smaller every day.

Dramatic Premise: He explains that his world is changing there is an implicit question here: How will he handle this change?

At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left,

Dramatic situation/Obstacles/rising action: this answers the implicit question, how does the mouse try to deal with it? Running. Well what can stop him? Will he succeed in his escape? There is even a bit of irony worked in there … he previously feared the largeness of his world.

but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already,

First Culmination: No, he can’t run away and solve the problem, in fact it’s made things much worse.

and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.”

Midpoint: Can’t do this alone, at the very least . . . maybe that cat will have some advice.

“You only need to change your direction,”

Climax: Ah, it is all so clear now, the answer is so very simple.

said the cat, and ate it up.

Denouement: and how is this new information used? As it turns out this is a bit of a tragedy, the mouse is far worse off than he was at the beginning Also, a bit of a trick ending.

“I guess that makes sense,” I can hear you saying, “If one is to squint just right, and play very loosely with definitions . . . but what is this hero’s journey thing about?”

The short answer is that the hero’s journey is a 12 part structure that defines what a Hero Archetype must go through to complete his goal. Take a peek here, I’ll wait.

Okay, so here’s my attempt to put A Little Fable in this structure:

Mouse’s Journey

The mouse describes his ORDINARY WORLD by saying it is ‘growing smaller’ there is an IMPLICIT CALL TO ADVENTURE in this, if his world is changing what will he d? He REFUSES THE CALL by ‘running and running’, he then CROSSES THE THRESHOLD by declaring he is in the ‘last chamber’. Here is the TEST, the trap, what will he do as he approaches the INNERMOST CAVE and suddenly he is face to face with the cat who appears to be a MENTOR but is really a SHAPE SHIFTER, the cat gives some advice about the ROAD BACK …

… okay so it’s lacking RESURRECTION I think, but the ELIXIR is ultimately given to us as the reader in the advice that ‘You only need to change direction,’ and while it is too late for the mouse, we have his wisdom.

So that was a little more tricky, I think. And as you can see not all the steps are really met. That’s often the case, even with works meant to fit into the structure, as this one surely was not consciously meant to.

As you can see, with some mental acrobatics  and pretentious assumptions even the shortest bit of finely crafted fiction can be brutally bludgeoned with these crude tools. Now the really interesting post would be on what this story actually means . . . any volunteers?

Bosley Gravel writes  all manner of nonsense.  Check out his two latest traditional length stories “The Courtship of Lady Boo-Boo” and “Paid in Full“, both containing a full three acts of heros, journeys, whimsy.   His first novel, “The Movie” is scheduled for released late 2009.

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.