Managing the Basics: a Flash Fiction Primer

What makes good flash fiction?

Basic skills make for good flash fiction. The mightiest story can be brought low by ignoring the basics.

Good, clear writing is a big part. And not just grammar, but sense. Without it, people are going to have to stop and start, they're going to have to re-read it whether they want to or not. (The goal is to get them to enjoy reading it, and make them want to re-read it.) Ambiguity is a great tool, but far too easily used for the purposes of evil. (evil, in our case, meaning 'bad storytelling')

Remember, you know what's happening, the reader needs your help.

Characters are pretty essential. But that's another statement so broad you could sink an empire in it. You can describe a society or an environment, but the reader is going to associate all the better with someone they can get involved with. There's an argument for the environment or society being a character in their own right, and if you can pull that off then fair play to you, but it isn't easy.

And don't crowd it. Too many characters in a small piece and people will get confused. Characters need to be more than a name, you don't have the space in flash fiction to individualise lots of characters and tell your story.

Get stuck in. Details are key. And this goes side-by-side with character details. Broad strokes are OK for story pitches or book blurbs, but they don't leave a lasting impression. Get involved, get the reader involved. You don't have to describe everything about a person, but one or two distinct features or mannerisms go a long way. State the species of tree, the make and model of car, the building material... 'oak', 'willow' or 'pine' takes no more words, no more space, than 'tree' but does so much more work.

Remember too, that people have more senses than just sight.

The meaning of plot is debatable. I've seen it argued that plot is more apparent in genre flash fiction than literary. Especially plot twists. Personally I see no reason for this to be the case. An interesting character is an interesting character whether they be in the living room or the bridge of a starship. Plot twists are perhaps more easy in a dramatic genre sense, especially horror, but a well-crafted, less-than-obvious plot twist is welcome anywhere. (read some Roald Dahl short stories)

I think the key to plot is movement. In a basic sense, movement of time, but also movement (or change) in character, in the reader's perception. Does your story end up in a different place to where it began?

Genre deserves a mention, but is so personal there is no right or wrong. Flash fiction gives you the chance to experiment, to try genres you might not consider 'your own', or mash-up several genres. The piece is short enough that depending how heavily it sits within that genre it might be readable and enjoyable by someone who wouldn't normally read that genre too, they get to try something different.

If the basics are right, if you have a well-crafted piece of fiction, then the genre doesn't necessarily matter. The setting doesn't matter as long as it feels real. The character can be human, or not, and that shouldn't matter if your writing is clear.

And finally, edit. Most of my stories sit for a few months unread before I go back to them and edit them with fresh eyes. If you have someone to critique for you (and be 100% honest), all the better. Don't be too precious, if that awesome line just doesn't fit, get rid of it.

Of course... I am talking basics. Maybe you want to abuse the system for specific effect, and that can be done really well. Stripping detail out and purposefully simplifying your story can give it a more fairytale feel, for example. Being ambiguous and confused can create a dream-like (or nightmarish) feel. But master the basics first, learn how to tell a story, practice, then start playing, with form and style, with genre, with the reader. =)

If you've read this far, please comment, I'm still learning myself. This is what makes sense to me, this is what I think about as I write. Discussion of process can only improve us all.

I hope this has been helpful to you. If it has, please feel free to share it (but please, credit and link me ;) )

Shaking Things Up

It's 2011, a week and a half gone by already, and a new year means a new look at things. It's an excuse to talk that way anyway. All those things you've been putting off because you were waiting for the new year, well you'd better be doing them now... ;)

So what's new in the Xeroverse? Well, 101 has now officially launched with the charming little story: Geek. It's a quick read, that's the point. Not only is the one hundred word limit an experiment and a challenge in form (forms, really, as I shall be trying to see just how far I can experiment within those hundred words), but it's short. In an effort to get attention on the internet, not only do you have to be good, but you have to allow for people's browsing attention spans.

I hope I'm good, I think I'm good. But it's difficult to get noticed on the internet. Because everybody is trying to get noticed on the internet. Now I'm not saying that people no longer have the attention span to read a longer short story or a novel, that blatantly isn't true, but when they're in internet mode most people will be flicking from page to page, and if there is no picture (and let's face it, the internet is a very visual medium) you have to work hard to keep hold of someone. I think if they can see the end of the story without having to scroll down then they might just read the whole thing, and if it's good, maybe another, and if they like that, than maybe they'll go on to read something longer. I hope.

Which kind of leads me nicely to my next new thing... At the bottom of my most recent Missing Piece: The Dull Sky Shook, I've linked to a piece of micro-fiction written by someone else. Someone I don't know. It's something I should have been doing all along. It's called 'recommended reading', and that's just what it is. Something I've read, that I've liked reading, that I think you will too.

I would love someone to read my work and like it enough to point people in this direction, so I should be doing exactly that for other people. I'll try and include a recommendation every week, but obviously that is somewhat dependant on me reading something that I want to recommend.

While I was browsing through micro/ flash fiction sites I came across someone talking about how they had loved the community they found; how they were so impressed with how much it was about 'go check this person out, they're awesome, first and oh, please read my work too, second.' It pains me that I can't find the original source now (stupid, stupid internets), but I think it was while I was browsing around the new Matter Press site.

So this is me going 'check this piece out, it's awesome'. It's about getting noticed, but it's about getting everyone noticed. Because I would love a larger audience, but so would other writers, and I'm no more deserving than them. It's not just about me, it's about micro/flash fiction, it's about storytelling; more importantly, it's about good storytelling and sharing that with as many people as possible... whether it be my story or yours.

Round and round and round and smash.

One of the things I love about writing is that it's never doing the same thing again and again and again. OK, so there is the editing process, and for This Merry Go Round I spent some time moving individual lines up and down in an attempt to get the flow of information, the build and the pace right. But most of writing is about thinking of new things, creating new things exploring new situations, or exploring old situations in new ways.

This is especially so with micro-fiction, of course. I mean look at me, at least 52 new stories in a year. 104 if my other planned project goes ahead. Plus other odds and ends.

I recently wrote two pieces for a micro horror competition, on microhorror.com. You can read both of them here. They haven't announced the winners yet and since this is the first year I've entered I don't know if having been posted means I'm out of the running or whether they post all of the entries before announcing. There's some really stiff competition, some really creepy stuff. It's been really good just keeping an eye on the site and reading everything else that's been posted. =)

Memories and Empty Spaces

The older I get the more my memory becomes full of empty spaces...

Space is an interesting concept. Particularly empty space. Whether that be outer space or not. You can fill empty space with all kinds of things. But you can also just tell people something is there and let them fill it with their worst fears. Some of the best monster films hardly show the monster at all.

But what if all the space out there that is reassuringly full of stuff became suddenly empty?

I wrote This Empty Space months ago, as I did with all of these 'lost and found' pieces, so it's very odd that it happened to come up for posting the same weekend as the deadline for a micro-horror competition with the theme of 'space'... (Although I actually bumped it off Halloween Sunday for cowboys and zombies)

You can see a little experimental style coming in with This Empty Space, with the two longer paragraphs focussing on a character each. It feels a little odd to have such big paragraphs in such a small piece, but I think it works ok. The more I think about the story, the more I think it is quietly terrifying. Never my intention, and not because everything has disappeared, but because the last humans (under the best intentions) are just left drifting forever in cryo-sleep (or suspended animation, whatever), never to wake again, never to die but never to live.

We go to sleep every night relatively assured that we will wake up the next morning. I should think if they ever invent some kind of suspended animation then it will become a genuine phobia for some people in not knowing if they will be awoken on time. A sort of existential fear of re-awakening well past your due-date. (covered in various SF films/ books already, I know)

One of the interesting things about the advancement of technology is that we fit more and more into less and less space. Particularly when it comes to data and data storage. The inspiration behind These Memories.

It's a story, or at least the kernel of a story, a key piece in the jigsaw. It's about so much being so little, and whether worth should be judged by size. It is less than one hundred words. Ninety-seven to be precise, or ninety-nine with the title.

Is there a term for a story in just a hundred, or do I lump it in with all the other stories of less than two thousand? Why do I even say ‘less than two thousand’. That’s an odd number isn’t it? Most of the Missing Pieces are less than a thousand. But since micro-fiction, as I see it, should be ‘about a thousand words’, that sometimes means more than a thousand... Micro-fiction or flash fiction or nano fiction or whatever nomenclature you choose (and it is your choice).

Is it a discipline to write to a specific word count? Certainly I could have tweaked this to hit exactly one hundred words.

If you’re writing to a specific word count, it can be restrictive. I write 100 word book reviews for a magazine... and as you might guess from my longer reviews on Space-Time Industries it's often a difficult task to cut it down so much, you definitely lose a lot. But then for the purposes of the magazine it's needs to be that short. From my experience stories have a natural size. Trying to bulk a story up often results in it being dry and too slow, trying to cut it back can make it seem too choppy and disjointed.

Obviously there are times when editing up or down is necessary, when you want those kinds of effects, when the word length interferes with the pace or tone. I’m talking about editing purely for the sake of word count though, and I don’t think it’s so much a discipline as an affliction, or an excuse. If you can, through harsh editing, keep all your stories below a thousand words, is that a good thing? If you get it to a thousand words, spot on, does that mean it's finished and as good as it can be?

I don’t think so. If the story is better for it, then great, it needed that editing anyway. But if you’re cutting some vital flourish, some depth, purely for the sake of word count, then maybe you’ve just pruned the life out of it.

One thousand and three great words is better than a story missing three words that it needs.

A Stranger Shade of Pale

At the time I wrote This Pale Stranger I was judging a micro-fiction competition. Open to anybody, any subject, the only restriction the word count. In the first ten stories there were two about vampires... I began to despair.

And then I wrote my own vampire story.

There is nothing wrong with writing a vampire story, of course, but it's difficult to do it well and be original these days. But it can be done. Park Chan-Wook's film Thirst is a great example, the lead character a devout priest learning to deal with vampirism and the new urges it brings, superb stuff. Let the Right One In, again, an excellent approach to the subject. Both of these go into the psychology of the vampire and find fertile ground for story-telling there.

I will not claim mine has any of that depth, it's a bit of fun, the undead in the wild west, and I like it. I'm not sure why I went with the Nosferatu style of teeth, maybe just for something different.

This was going to be longer. In my head the stranger saves the sheriff, then they spend the night clearing the town, burning the bodies and the stranger says his final line as he rides away, not into the sunrise because, well...

But, all that would have been filler. For the sake of micro-fiction it would have to have been so much tell and not enough show (again with the show and tell!). It would have been a few paragraphs of sweeping events, the whorehouse; Jed’s mother, maybe; the superstitious, drunk native; blood and guts and gore. To justify itself beyond the punch line it would need human drama and characterisation, it would need to be fully humanised – a longer short story, not just a missing piece.

I like this idea of a racial war between the undead; the zombies and the vampires. They are both so similar in some ways, the hunger and the undeath. But the vampires have thought...

One day it may become a longer piece. A larger part of the puzzle.

Loving the Madness

*gasp*

A change in title format?!

And so a change in identity, if not purpose. Because this blog is not just about the Missing Pieces commentary, it is about more. Sure, blogging commentaries for my weekly Xeroverse posts is a good excuse to make me post here weekly too, but that's always just been a springboard for me to talk about other aspects of writing. As the subtitle says: Thoughts about stories. Ramblings on writing. Comments about my own fiction.

Which I re-ordered to prioritise the fact that mostly I just want to talk about the greatest passion in my life... stories. Over on Missing Pieces I publish a new story every week. That's 52 stories a year that take 5 minutes (at most) to read. 52 more stories a year in your life for almost no extra effort.

One of the reasons I love comics is that in a minimal amount of time I can cram a whole bunch of new story - new plot, new character, new twists. Books can take longer, more of a commitment, but it's a different experience, it's purer in some ways, for me, the written word. Films are good hits. Computer games can have great story-telling, and can be so immersive with the right gameplay.

Now I don't read a lot of literary fiction, which seems to me as often about astute observation of the human condition as it is about storytelling. I've commented before that I feel sometimes I might enjoy a story more if it was only set on a spaceship. That's both tongue-in-cheek and very serious. I like an element of the fantastical to spark my imagination, I'm not saying I don't like character studies and philosophical conundrums in my reading, but only if they're riding the back of an exciting, bucking plot.

I can even easily forgive weak characterisation if there's a cracking story to go with it, the more imagination slopped over it the better, and the more scope to use my own imagination... better still.

With This Beloved Madness I try and harness your imagination. I start out slowly, obviously. Hopefully in a few lines I set up a fairly clichéd image of the character in your mind. You know exactly what I'm describing. Then I throw in this idea of some kind of tragedy, blowing your imagination wide open. Go wild, it could be anything at this point. Then I narrow it down to my idea. But it's still got that degree of ambiguity, that bit of wiggle room for the imagination.

(actually, that's a whole lot of wiggle room. That's a whole story that fits in that gap. In less than five hundred words, I've (hopefully) created a story shape in your head. And one that will be different in different heads.)

I think this is my favourite Missing Piece so far.

Author's Commentary: This Tall Tale

This Tall Tale

John Harley is one of my longest running characters. I think originally he was an embodiment of my youthful fantasies, a little bit of wishful thinking from me, a lot of Indy and a large helping of random occult. The name is my name (obviously) with added 'Harley', as in the bike: masculine, hard and cool. Like I say, youthful fantasies.

I like him though. I can't find the original story right now, but it was one of my favorites, I might have a hunt for it, to see if it has stood the test of time. It has been on the internets, but is not so easily found now, apparently.

I was going to write a trilogy of shorts back then, but I think I only got as far as planning number two. Later on he appeared on Hidden Tracks, in a mildly disturbing little piece called Zombiegasm. I'm pretty sure I've written more, but I can't recall them right now. One day he will have his own book.

This isn't really the next in the 'This is micro-fiction' series. I've skipped the Christmas one. I'm saving that piece of unsettling yuletide disturbia for nearer the big day. You lucky people.