Writing Flash Fiction
A Brief History of Writing
Last November, this guy involved with this writing website I haunt, Litreactor, which evolved out of the Chuck Palahniuk website (which used to be full of writing forums and through which I published my forsaken story, Zombie Whorehouse, in the Burnt Tongues Anthology) tweeted the following:
I had this great idea for a story and got a solid draft going, but I missed the deadline. So I decided to lengthen my story and send it to friends as a Christmas gift. Then Christmas came and went. The book came out (I enjoyed it!), but I never finished my story.
And then the publisher of the “Hallmark Holidays” started a monthly flash fiction contest. Which - 1500 words? I needed a push to write regularly and a monthly prompt for a limited word count proved perfect.
Are you also inspired? Try it yourself:
But short short fiction isn’t easy to write! It’s hard to fit a Freytag pyramid in 1500 words or less.
So, I revisited two of my favorites, both pillars of short fiction: Jorges Luis Borges and Donald Barthelme.
Borges’ story, The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, inspired the form of my short story Anatomy of a Killer. Borges wrote a fake book review. I wrote a fake movie review. To quote Borges’ own introduction to his collection, The Garden of Forking Paths:
It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.
Meanwhile, his short story, In Memoriam, J.F.K., showed me how a powerful object in a story can elevate the briefest passage to something epic.
Meanwhile, Barthelme’s playfulness with format has inspired a handful of my short pieces. I was inspired by the escalating deaths from his often anthologized story, The School, into writing a love-story involving escalating murders in my story, Love is a Mystery. Barthelme also has a number of stories that are only dialogue; I tried something similar with my Lovecraftian story, Without You Everything Falls Apart, about two brothers who meet again a year after participating in a failed summoning.
I was able to edit another couple hundred words out of Anatomy of a Killer and submit it to a different flash fiction contest, this time with Crystal Lake Publishing.
Going forward, I’m hoping that between the two contests, I’ll be writing a couple pieces of short fiction a month.
So far, off the prompts of the Cemetery Gates contest, I have written six pieces of flash fiction. I probably labor too much. Spend a few days thinking up an idea. Spend a few more days thinking up a better idea. Write the story. Wait a day. Read the story, edit. Share with a couple generous friends. Keep editing. Receive friend feedback. Final edits. Submit and hope.
A few of the stories I think are perfect. A few I want to expand (add more setting, characters, scent and taste details, etc.)
And my hope has been fulfilled. I am writing more. In addition to the flash fiction, I’ve written two new longer pieces - one (Monster Squad) about a bunch of classic monsters on their latest treacherous mission; the other (Best Werewolf Transformation Footage I’d Ever Seen. Who Wouldn’t Swipe It?) about an aspiring filmmaker who unwittingly finds himself at a werewolf party in his honor.