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Why Flash Fiction?

Photo of a kittywampus (kittywumpus) game
Flash fiction often relies on the odd and unexpected to jumpstart the story.
I’m doing my Flash Fiction workshop soon and so I’m prompted to talk about some of my motivation in giving the class and why I think it’s a useful one for writers.

What is flash fiction? As the name would imply, it’s short. Short, short, short. It’s sometimes called short-short stories for that reason. People define that length in varying numbers: the Florida Review used to award $100 and a crate of oranges to the winner of their short-short story competition, while 10 Flash Quarterly‘s editor/publisher K.C. Ball says it’s got to clock in at a 1000, and others have stretched it as far as 2000 words (which to my mind wanders into actual short story territory).

Others go much shorter, pointing to Hemingway’s famous six word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” There’s twitter fiction magazines, like Thaumatrope, Nanoism, and 140 Characters (which last posted in March, alas). I actually fall in this camp, but to explain why, I need to explain the appeal that flash fiction holds for me.

Flash fiction is concentrated fiction, undiluted by digression or subplot. A flash story is an arrow thrilling in the reader’s heart, something that hits dead on. It uses the story structure in miniature and gets at the heart of what a story must do: something must change. In traditional stories, and in many of their flash counterparts, the change occurs in the main/viewpoint character. In the best ones, there is often an internal as well as external change: In conquering her fear of spiders, Polly defeats the Squids From Beyond. Because flash is short, often that’s not met and the change is one or the other. Other kinds of change might involve the setting, or some other major factor within the confines of the story.

But there is another kind of change that can occur, and that is in the reader, either emotionally or in terms of their expectations. That’s what happens in the Hemingway story. We begin with what is surely an exemplar of cuteness, because who doesn’t like baby shoes? And then we are abruptly moved away in the next two words – they’re for sale, we think, and immediately ask why? And then the hammer of tragedy: the shoes have never been used, and we supply the rest. Dead baby. Our understanding, our expectations, our emotions, all can be shifted by a piece of flash fiction. We are changed. Good fiction, or at least fiction that falls within a particular definition of “good”, changes us.

Not every flash piece does this. Flash lends itself well to humor, to the shaggy dog story, to the punchline at the end (another change in the reader, as we are moved from the expectant moment of story beginning to the ultimate laugh or groan) and it’s a good length for it. The longer the story gets, the better that punchline needs to be, or else a reader feels they’ve wasted their time. You’ll listen more readily to the office storyteller’s cleverly shaped anecdote than you will Kim from accounting, who can’t seem to stick to the point when she’s recounting the story of how the office copier got broken at the holiday party.

Sometimes flash fiction slides over into prose poetry territory. I’ll talk about that more some other time, particularly as the time approaches for the workshop I’m giving on literary and speculative fiction for Clarion West next spring.

At any rate, writing flash fiction is a useful exercise for writers. Anything that makes us practice writing is surely a good thing, and sitting down to write a flash piece fulfills that. Beyond that, it’s very satisfying to rise from the desk knowing you’ve written something in its entirety, as opposed to the tiresome nature of a novel, which swallows hours and hours of writing while swelling as slowly as ice accreting.

You can use flash to try out new techniques. One of the exercises I’m going to try tonight, in fact, draws on a piece I heard Gra Linnaea read at World Fantasy Con, written all in future tense, which I’m going to read to the class before challenging them to write their own pieces in future tense. Another draws on Randy Henderson’s most excellent THE MOST EPICLY AWESOMEST STORY! EVER!!, which I’ll use to challenge the class to think about bad writing vs. good.

Many new writers are hungry for publications, and writing flash is a good strategy for garnering some. Flash markets, by their nature, consume a lot of pieces, and where a market that publishes one story each month is buying only that one story, a flash market is buying a much larger number. Every Day Fiction, for example, runs a flash piece each day. The shorter a piece is, the easier it is on an editor’s budget.

Some resources for people who want to read flash: I used Sudden Fiction and Sudden Fiction International in a flash writing class I taught at Hopkins. For some terrific examples of the form, try Russell Edson’s work.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

4 Responses

  1. Thanks for posting this. I struggle to write anything under five thousand words at all, so hopefully the prompts in your other post and the examples linked to here will give me a feel for how it’s possible to convey a story in such a tight space.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

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Explaining Things In Fiction

Image of a sledgehammer
Sometimes what feels like a sledgehammer blow of information to the writer may be just a gentle tap for the reader.
One of the things we spend some time on in the Writing F&SF class is how to explain things to the reader. As part of this, I usually give them the Expository Lump exercise from Ursula LeGuin’s excellent book on writing, Steering the Craft.

Many of us know the term “infodump,” where a whooooole bunch of information necessary for understanding the story gets thrown at the reader, sometimes in the form of dialogue, sometimes outright chunks of books, or some other form. We want to avoid these because they’re usually dry and a little boring, and because they put readers off.

But at the same time, there is information we -need- for readers to know. And sometimes we may not realize it. If we don’t give it, then events may seem unlikely or heavy-handed or even incomprehensible.

I’ve been reworking a novel for the final time, and one thing I’ve realized in doing it is that the progression of scenes in the last section is not clear. I needed to spend more time being clear that the characters were moving from one place to another so readers could understand where they ended up. And I’d been coy about it, to the point where the reader just wasn’t getting that information.

This is where getting someone else to read a piece is crucial. Because that progression is so clear in the writer’s head that we cannot perceive what’s missing for the reader. One of the most important questions you can ask a reader is “What questions did this leave you with?” or “What didn’t you understand?” Because it’s just as easy to be too subtle — perhaps even easier — than to be overt, since what feels very obvious to you may not be a fraction as apparent to your reader.

And holy cow, how is it that in this version, which I had sent out to my agent already, that I found this on one page: “(insert description later)”? ARGH.

...

Retreat, Day 4

buttonshellWords achieved today: 3045 (letting myself get away with less because it’s a teaching day, but maybe I’ll get in a few more tonight)
Current Hearts of Tabat wordcount: 87687
Total word count for the week: 13067
Total word count for this retreat: 13067
Worked on Hearts of Tabat, Exiles of Tabat, short story (“You Remind Me of Summer”)
Time spent on SFWA email, discussion boards, other stuff: 30 minutes, plus whatever I do tonight
Other stuff: Taught the first section of “Writing Your Way Into Your Novel”, prepped for Sunday’s class
Steps: 6410

From Hearts of Tabat:

Adelina paused by Serafina’s desk. She studied the secretary, who looked up. She wore her usual plainly cut clothes, one of the signs of a worshipper of the Moon Temples. That was, as far as Adelina could, Serafina’s only similarity with Eloquence, but most of what Adelina had ever known of the temples previously had been via the instruction or example of her secretary.

She asked now, “Serafina, how does the Temple handle marriages?”

“The priests arrange them, when people are ready,” Serafina said.

“How does the priest know when they are ready?”

“They come and ask the priest to find them someone, and they prove in conversation that they are ready to be with someone in that way, and to begin to raise a family.”

“Is that the point of the alliance, the family?” Adelina said, intrigued. “Are there Triad marriages, as there are among the merchants?”

She felt foolish as Serafina eyed her. I am treating her as though she were some sort of menagerie creature, she thought, and that is unkind. Shame twitched at her even harder when Serafina patiently said, “No, our marriages are not about economic alliances in the way that merchant marriages are. Such alliances would be reckoned a little sinful because they are apart from the norm, truth be told.”

“What is their purpose then?”

“To create children, who will spread the faith.”

“Should the faith not spread it, if it is good enough?” Adelina asked, fascinated, and realized her misstep when she saw Serafina’s frown. “I beg your pardon,” she said quickly. “It is only that”¦”

“It is only that the Moon Temples are not much regarded among the merchants and the nobles because it is a religion of the poor,” Serafina said frankly. “To speak of things that are not reckoned in profit or loss is thought a little shameful among the merchants, and the nobles do not like talk of doing good for its own sake.”

That startled a laugh out of Adelina, who had never heard her clerk be so cynical. “What has flushed all this truth from you, then?”

“You should not pay attention to Eloquence Seaborn,” Serafina said severely. “It is not a match the Temples would approve of, and he is a fine young man, with a good future in them ahead of him.”

“Is he to become a priest?”

Serafina shook her head, then nodded. “A layman’s priest, someone who does not live in the Temples and do as the Priests do, but lives among other people and acts as a go between and an example. That is a special role, and it is the one that has been prepared for Eloquence.”

It occurred to Adelina that the Temples were a relatively small gathering and so Serafina had known Eloquence and his family all her life. She said, “I am thinking of taking an apprentice, one of Eloquence’s sisters.”

“That,” Serafina said slowly, “could be a good or bad notion, depending on which you mean to do so with.”

“The youngest one. Perseverance.”

“Ah.” Serafina’s frown cleared a little. “She gets picked on by the rest of them, I think. To be out from under all of that would be a good thing for her, let her shine a little and come into her own. But I thought she was apprenticed to the tanner?”

“She is, but she says she hates it. I found her crying over it.”

Serafina pursed her lips. “It is not for the child to determine her own apprenticeship. That is for her elders to do, with the Temples’ advice, in order to place her where she will be best prepared for life.”

“But at the time she was apprenticed to the tanner, this opportunity was not available to her for the Temples or her elders to know about,” Adelina pointed out.

“That is true.” Serafina wavered. “You should consult her brother,” she said finally.

“I will,” Adelina said. She did not mention her earlier conversation with Perseverance or the fact that she had already promised the girl an apprenticeship. There was no need for Serafina to know the exact timeline.

...

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