Dear Reader

[Sarah Hilary]

I'm hoping for lots of questions about my writing! These can be as awkward as you like - I promise not to duck or dive. Without readers, I wouldn't be a writer; I'd be someone scratching at an itch. So please use this forum to let me know the good, bad and ugly of what I'm trying to achieve with stories such as those found here:

http://www.everydayfiction.com/authors/authors.php?author=Sarah+Hilary

I'm looking forward to getting started.



Sarah

[Jordan Lapp]

And I'm looking forward to getting involved in the discussion! The forum looks great Sarah!

[djbarber]

Hey Sarah,
I like your voice. I sometimes get an idea like a small thread that grows--other times a whole story just blossums at once. And sometimes only a part of the story comes to me, leaves me hanging on a limb waiting for inspiration. Do ideas flow out like that for you?--or, like another writer I know do you build a story like a wall--one syllable at a time?

[Sarah Hilary]

Hi DJ, and thanks for dropping by. Great question! With short stories (and novels) it's the 'one brick at a time' hard slog you describe so well. But with flash, I participate in a weekly challenge over at an online writing site which throws me the bone of a prompt, either a single word or a handful, with a maximum word count attached. That's how nearly all my flashes started life. It's a great discipline, writing something fresh and new every week.

The best flashes come to me after serious hard thinking, following the 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 want to write a flash that tackles a particular idea or theme. Just now I'm having 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.

The trick 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 sort of thing works well for 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, if I'm lucky enough to get the words down right.

This is why I love flash fiction so much. It's the 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. Now I'm writing a full length crime novel AND doing a flash challenge every week, and the two things are not only compatible they are 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.

[Camille Gooderham Campbell]

I love the idea of using flash challenges to energize your novel-writing.  Are you setting your own challenges, or getting your prompts from somewhere?

Great start to your forum, by the way... less than twenty-four hours in and you've already got a good discussion going!

love, Camille xox

[Sarah Hilary]

Thanks, Camille! I get my flash challenges over at WriteWords, in a closed forum which means that any stories developed there aren't in the public domain so I can sub the best ones to places like EDF. There's quite a few EDF authors over at the same forum which is a tight-run ship with great support and peer reviewing. The perfect online companion, in many ways, to EDF.

[Gay Degani]

Sarah,
I love the idea that you use a prompt on a weekly basis, all while working on your crime novel.  It's good for your writing and for your growing (and outstanding) portfolio!  Can I share something similar with you and your readers?

A while back a friend and I did something similar.  For about six months, we set aside one half hour every weekday to write with a prompt. 

Here's how it worked:  We took turns calling each other at precisely 6:30 AM.  The person who made the call had a prompt ready.  These could be anything from "a fallen leaf" to "a horse-trailer stuck on a one-way bridge" to "a woman has her fiftieth birthday."  You see, they didn't need to be clever. 

Once the prompt was given we would hang up and write for a half hour using Natalie Goldberg's rule of keeping fingers on the keys, no editing, just go.  The goal was to get words on paper and to let whatever came to mind COME to mind.  Since it was first thing in the am, we were closer to our "unfettered selves" and it was often amazing. 

Whoever gave the prompt would then call around 7:00ish and we'd read what we'd written or talked about it depending on how we felt.  If we liked something, we could work on it on our own time.  If not, we'd get a new chance the next day.

The next day at six-thirty we'd do it again. 

[Sarah Hilary]

Wow, Gay, 6.30am?! You must have been VERY good friends; not sure I could take a phone call at that hour without cussing. *g*

Seriously, I think the prompting idea is a great discipline. And writers need discipline. I know there's a lot of people who advocate only writing when you're in the mood, or when inspiration strikes, but that's no way to get anything done. I forget who said, 'I write when I'm inspired. And I make sure I'm inspired at 9am every morning,' but that's exactly true. 'Getting black on white' is what makes a writer. That's why I have little patience for people who throw out lines like, 'Oh I'm going to write a book one day.' Yes? Let's see it then!

Thanks for dropping in and helping to get things moving and grooving.

[Gay Degani]

It's not my 6:30 discipline but my husband's.  He's up at five and I get up a little before six to make the coffee, we have our morning half hour, then after he leaves, I'm awake so I might as well work.  Lucky for me my friend Trish had to be at work by 8:30 so she was up too. 

I too am an advocate of the seat of the pants in the seat of the chair.  The only trick is to avoid using the computer for time-wasting and instead, make myself actually open a document and get reading, writing, and editing.

[djbarber]

Sarah,
What a great idea, flash is a great medium for scratching itchy little ideas. And, like you, I wrote a lot of short stuff in and around writing a novel. How do you handle distractions when you write?--I find it maddening when the phone keeps jangling and such. But I'd rather not be a hermit. Any advice?