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| Happy Halloween from Halen |
Here is the paper I'll be giving (or summing up, given the time constraints.) A bibliography is below as well...
Also find pics of my new nephew, young Strawberry, whether you want them or not.
The Very Very Short Story: An Editor’s View
As an editor working at cream city review, few things produced
more joy and relief than clicking on a submission file and finding a story of
less than 1000 words. Editors place word limits on fiction submissions because
most are pressed for time, and the commitment devoted to the 25 and even 30-page
stories that roll in feels like too much. I can tell you that I gave any story
five pages to seduce me before rejecting it. However, if a story was four pages
or less, I would not only finish reading it, but if it was at all passable, it
went into the slush pile – just in case we had extra pages for fiction. Teensy
stories like these not only represent a softer time commitment, but a cheaper
printing price as well. These are the lower-order considerations that often
take over in the frantic mind of an editor – another reason why you shouldn’t
take rejection so seriously.
But there are less merely pragmatic
reasons the teensy story is sought after and appreciated. Flash fiction is an
emerging form in the literary community. It represents a boundary between poem
and short story in an age when literary journals are increasingly seeking work
that not only represents emerging forms, but blurs the lines of existing
genres. It’s also ideally suited for online formats when most literary
magazines are publishing online components. Indeed, if a microfiction, flash,
or short-short doesn’t make it to print with a journal, it is still likely to be
chosen for the online version because of its length. And I would argue that
while print gets all the prestige, the online content is more likely to
actually be read.
Besides, length is not indicator or
literary merit. Keeping a story on the short side, I would argue, is more
challenging than working in longer forms. To establish conflict and resolution
in such a small space, not to mention carry the burden of completeness that
comes with narrative prose, is difficult, and many fiction writers are
intimidated by it. But there are certain rules that a shorter length allows a
writer to break. For instance, many of the best short-shorts don’t name their
characters – and character development is minimal. It seems that fully fleshing
out a character – their past experiences, the origins of their present
situation, relationships with other people – becomes less crucial when the
space devoted to the character is so small. Readers who aren’t asked to spend
20 pages on a character, don’t need to know the character’s life story. What
they need is the kind of detail that does not take up space. Their favorite
flavor popsicle, their crooked skirt, their allergy to flannel – that sort of
thing. Concrete images that do the work of many words. In fact, the
expectations of flash resemble those of poetry. Gaps in sequence of events and fragmented
sentence structure work well in flash, as they would in poetry. This is not to
say that there are no constraints in flash. In fact, writing a good piece of
flash is almost entirely about setting certain limitations on the story – other
than length.
Building the Story in
Miniature: Some Exercises
One:
Work Under a Strict Algorithm (Set of constraints that programs the work.) Take
for example Michael Martone’s “Diagnostic Drift,” which is made up of a short
paragraph for each miscarriage experienced by the narrator as his wife. Then
there’s Gordon Lish’s “Fear: Four Examples” which contains four very short
episodes in which a father experiences fear. In Opal Palmer Adisa’s “Fruit
Series,” very short paragraphs are headed with the name of the fruit, and an
emotion, realization, or brief action occur in which each fruit plays a
role. My favorite algorithm though is
used in Robert Olen Butler’s “Seven Pieces of Severance.” There are seven
paragraphs, each describing the narrator’s experience of being beheaded, each
reflecting the amount of time a person is said to remain conscious after having
their head severed. You can use numbers to guide your prose (bible verses,
numbers in nature, athletic jersey numbers), or propose of alliterative formula
for language (include all words with a certain letter combination, or
completely avoid certain consonants, follow the sound patterns reflected in
someone’s name…what have you.)
Two: Focus on a particular image or
set of images. (Recall the “lint” of memory.)
Ann
Beattie’s “Snow” is just a collection of images she remembers from a particular
winter. Even the actions, that which “happens,” are told as moments of imagery.
Yasunari Kawabata’s “The White Horse” is the story of a young man’s obsession
with an image associated with a childhood love. Instead of a chronological
account of their relationship, which was fleeting, we get this white horse who
occasionally enters the protagonist’s mind’s eye, telling us just enough that
we are moved. You might also simply describe a photograph as in Paul Lisicky’s
“Snapshot, Harvey Cedars:1948,” in which a single image contains an entire
tragic story.
Three: Focus on an object. (A thing
is the star of the show.)
In “The Paring Knife” by Michael Oppenheimer,
a couple shares a moment of remembrance over a piece of silverware that ends up
being all that we need to see the unfolding of their current love for each
other. Tim O’Brien’s “Stockings” and “The Sock” by Lydia Davis are able to
create the same amount of depth of character with those objects. Objects
sometimes contain for us a huge amount of memory. Flash can do the same by
devoting that small space to an object that has that meaning.
Four: Make a list. (Verbs or nouns.)
“Girl”
by Jamaica Kincaid for instance is a list of commands reflecting a daughter’s
place in Caribbean culture. There’s also a story called “How to Set a House on
Fire” by Stace Budzko, also written in second person as a set of instructions. “Subtotals”
by Greg Burnham is structured as a kind of inventory that lists meaningful
items and events and totals them, so that a numeral is part of each sentences.
So it need not be a “to-do” kind of list. It can be a list of moments, of
contents, of items in someone’s room, a receipt – there are a lot of
possibilities. I think fiction writers naturally list things anyway as they are
working up a story – at least I do.
Five: Create a fraudulent artifact.
(Using constraints of common forms.)
One
way to experiment with form while usefully constraining a short-short story is
to write in the form of common everyday textual forms, like obituaries, crime
notes, recipes, playbooks, invitations, letters (like “Letter to a Funeral
Parlor” by Lydia Davis), acknowledgements (Contributor’s Note” by Michael
Martone), diaries, notes left on the fridge, advertisements, fan mail,
newspaper articles. One of my favorites is “Class Notes” by Lucas Cooper, which
is essentially a newsletter for a class reunion, in which an entire class of
people and their lives in brief are listed in both ordinary and unexpected
ways.
Six: Write only what happens in a short
time period. (Story of an hour or less.)
In
Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” for instance, we get exactly that – one
hour after a woman learns of her husband’s death. Michael Martone’s long-titled
story, “The Mayor of the Sister City Speaks to the Chamber of Commerce in
Klamath Falls Oregon, on a Night in December 1976,” covers the amount of time
between the beginning of the mayor’s speech and the moment the narrator stops
listening just one sentence in. In Robert Kelly’s “Rosary,” we get the
momentary and fleeting exchange between a man sitting by a window and the woman
he sees outside as she walks past. If you not only leave out the character’s
past, remaining in the present, but also cover only those events which occur in
a single moment, you might surprise yourself with what you can do. Focus on
images and emotions and let them do the work of story for you.
Repurposing Old Stories
as Flash: Some Methods
If you have a story or stories that you’ve
been hanging onto that haven’t found a place anywhere, you might consider
melting them down until the core of the story, or the most memorable moment (in
my student’s papers, I call it the Dragon’s Egg.) Often, we begin to write
around a particular scene or moment that first entered our minds. We supply
that moment with background, give lives to the characters involved, and then
place the moment somewhere within a narrative arc that includes other scenes
which came before and/or after it.
If the story doesn’t place, consider
returning the story to that moment and that moment alone. See what it looks
like if you take out all the flesh from the fruit of the story and let the seed
be the story. You may also find the Dragon’s Egg came after the original
inspiration, but either way, if you can make that moment stand alone, it may
become a perfectly acceptable piece of flash. When I read stories in lit
journals now, I often find myself zeroing in on a scene that I think could or
even should stand alone.
Example: “Bad Girl” by
Leslie Pietrzyk in River Styx vol. 94
The
beginning is a little cryptic, but we know enough to appreciate the very
descriptive scene that follows. You can see too, that the line at the end of
this excerpt works well as the kind of tah-dah ending that flash tends to
privilege.
If you’re at a loss as far as what might
go and what might stay in your story, there’s an idea that is similar to a
suggestion made by Michael Martone in the Rose
Metal Press Field Guide to Flash Fiction. Martone, a speaker at this
conference, is famous for titles that are almost as long as his stories. He
suggests taking lines from a story and turning them into titles, then writing a
paragraph-long story for each and every line, producing a huge pile of flash
pieces instead of one long story.
What I would suggest is comparable, but
it’s more a method inspired by the way in which flash resembles poetry and much
as fiction. I would even admit that the difference between prose poetry and
flash sometimes seem completely negligible to me. Again, when I read work in
lit journals, I find myself imagining what a poem would be like in paragraph
form, or what a paragraph would look like divided into line breaks.
Try
this:
First,
turn the story into a poem by inserting a line break after each period and/or
comma in the story. Then, trim off as much as you can so that it looks like a
poem (removing abstract or unspecific verbiage, “to be” verbs and the like).
You might even consider imposing a kind of meter or form: making it into a
ghazal or sestina by repeating certain language, or making an abecedarian, or a
series of sonnets out of it. Remove anything that does not fit the form or that
does not represent strong, specific, vivid imagery. Embrace the sentence
fragment! Finally, return the periods and/or commas to what’s left and rebuild
the paragraphs. What you’re left with may read like a poem to you; so does most
flash. When I tried this with a piece of mine that I’ve had trouble placing, I
reduced a story that was already only four pages to a two-page story. What I
found was that I was able to identify those moments where I had cluttered the
text with unnecessary words and phrases. I could also easily see parts of the
story that didn’t lend as much power as others – character details that were
distracting or extraneous – that the story simply didn’t need to be effective.
Now that I’ve cut the story in half, my chances of getting it placed have
likely doubled.
Bibliography
Bausch,
Richard and R.V. Cassill. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction 8th
Ed. New York:
Norton, 2015.
Masih,
Tara Ed. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide
to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers,
and Writers in the Field. Brookline: Rose Metal, 2009.
Pietrzyk,
Leslie. “Bad Girl.” River Styx.
94(2015).
Shapard,
Robert and James Thomas. Flash Fiction
Forward: 80 Very Short Stories. London:
Norton, 2006.
-
New
Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from American and Beyond. New
York: Norton, 2007.
-
Sudden
Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. Salt Lake City:
Peregrine Smith, 1986.
Shields,
David and Matthew Vollmer. Fakes: An
Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux
Lectures,
Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. New
York:
Norton,
2012.
Stern,
Jerome. Microfiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories. New York: Norton, 1996.
Thomas,
James, Denise Thomas and Tom Hazuka. Flash
Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories. New
York: Norton, 1992.
Flash Fiction Markets:
Smokelong Quarterly:
www.smokelong.com
Postcard Poems and Prose:
postcardpoemsandprose.wordpress.com
Glimmer Train
Very Short Fiction Award: glimmertrain.stores.yahoo.net/veryshort.html
Fiction Southeast
Ernest Hemingway Flash Fiction Prize: fictionsoutheast.org/ernest-hemingway-flash-fiction-award/
Monkeybicycle: monkeybicycle.net
River Styx
Schlafly Beer Micro-Brew Micro-Fiction Contest: www.riverstyx.org/contests/index.php
I came across this blog while looking for ideas on how to teach my students flash fiction. This is very helpful to me not only as a teacher, but also, as I'm currently also working on getting my MFA, I love the list at the end of markets.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading!
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