Retreat, Day 20

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.

I’m finishing up the year by trying to wrap up writing the on-demand version of my Moving from Idea to Draft class. This is a tough translation, because the live class depends heavily on what the students have brought: I try to help them go deeper into the idea each has brought to class and show them ways of fleshing it out.

For the on-demand version, what I’m doing is looking at each of the various ways I’ve seen stories develop and doing a section on each, looking at what it is, what it gives you to help with fleshing out the story, possible trouble spots, some ways to proceed with it, and then two or three exercises to refine skills with that, each with a basic and then an overachiever version, a model I used with the Description and Delivering Information class. There’s twenty-three sections altogether, but here’s the section on starting with a plot, minus the exercises.

What It Is:

Some stories begin with a plot. This is a complete story: you know the problem, some basics of the characters and what will happen. Perhaps it’s something you’ve generated or taken from elsewhere. Perhaps it arrives pre-made in your head (and you should glory in it when it does, in my opinion), so all you need to do is sit down at the keyboard and write it out.

If you can describe in a few sentences what will happen in a story, you know the plot. For example:

• A little girl takes cookies to her grandmother and encounters a wolf along the way. When she gets to her grandmother’s house, the wolf is waiting to attack. A nearby woodsman comes and kills the wolf. (Little Red Riding Hood)
• A man steals the defense plan for a planet that is immensely wealthy. When he tries to use it, he finds out that the defense is constructed out of (because this is a spoiler of an excellent story, you should go read it) and meets a terrible fate. (Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons, by Cordwainer Smith)

What it gives you:

You know the overall flow of the action: this happens so this happens so this happens and then it ends this way. You know the basic story pattern: that tension increases until the climax, and then rapidly falls. You know the source of the tension and usually the basic conflict: how the wants of two or more entities are collide in some fashion.

You have some sense of where it begins and a stronger sense of where it ends (although the reverse is not impossible).”‹ Connie Willis says to begin at the moment when the problem becomes a crisis. I don’t know that I agree that you should always do that, but it’s certainly better, in terms of story tension, to start with a moment where the problem is already taking place than to start with an idyllic landscape that slowly goes bad.

You may or may not know the characters involved, but you have some broad basics, and know some of the things about the character that affect it most for you, which will probably include gender and approximate age.

Similarly you have some broad basics of the setting, the overall world of the story, although you may need to think of specifics pertaining to scene locations.

More importantly, often you have an impalpable feel for the story, a sense of the overall tone and emotion that will help you shape the words as you write. To make the most of that, spend a couple of moments thinking about the atmosphere of the story. What movies or books might you compare it to? What is the overall emotion, both yours in writing it and what you want readers to take away?

What you need to think about:

What do you bring to the story that makes it unique? There are only so many plots (opinions of the actual number differ, with some saying seven, others numbers like 3 or 36, but the fact of the matter is that at a certain level you will not be able to do anything genuinely new unless you are more of a genius than I, and so you should look at what you bring to the table: the unique details of your life and experiences, your emotions and understandings, and your sensibilities. What instances of this plot have you witnessed being played out in your own life, perhaps as actor, perhaps as audience, and what of that experience can you draw upon?

Specifics of the action may be lacking in your broad overview, in which case you will need to flesh them out. Your burglar steals something – what? Who owns it and what defenses against thieves do they have? Your bounty hunter is chasing her prey, but what crime has that prey committed? Specifics of the location are something that you may well need to flesh out, in which case try to think of aspects that are particularly engaging and use those as interesting backgrounds to add interest to a scene: make that important conversation take place while the two are racing on ice skates through a city’s lower levels or at a party whose main entertainment are levitating performers who are half-dragon, half-human. What can you use?

Things to watch out for:

Sometimes when you go to put these stories down on paper, they are not the well-fleshed entities we hoped, but incomplete things, hints of lines that don’t tell us the entire picture, whispers instead of words, a sense of brushing up against one side of the story in the dark rather than holding it in its entirety. In such cases, I usually build a mind-map, writing down the details that I know and expanding from that. I’ll build on how to do that in the next section, Possible Next Steps.

Be careful of the generic. We all have a set of flimsy and unconvincing stage sets in our heads that, when examined with care, can probably be traced back to specific television shows or movies. My desert island will always have Gilligan lurking in the underbrush, for example, and any Victorian London scenes have to be forcibly wrenched out of the black and white of the old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies.

Possible next steps:

Take your two or three sentence description and expand on it, stretching it to five hundred words by expanding on generic details with specifics and figuring out the overall timeline.

Write out list of scenes then develop the basics of what happens in each scene: they go to the movies, see a clue in the opening, and try to rush out of the theater only to find a bunch of lamias in the parking lot ready to brawl; they fight with the lamias and defeat them by throwing soap bombs at them, but Ellen’s arm gets broken in the process. You will probably tell it in chronological order, but it’s not too early to think about mixing it up if you think it would accomplish something in the story, like provide additional pleasure for the reader by allowing them to assemble the pieces of the puzzle.

Curious about this class?

• Here’s the on-demand class with a 25% off discount!
• Here’s the e-book.
• Here’s the physical book.