FlashFiction.Net

Thank you for making an exception! You know, it's lucky for me that I didn't know. I remember Li-Young Lee once saying he was grateful he didn't know that writing about roses was a cliche or he never would have written what I think is his finest book of poetry, Rose. But there is something so powerful and vulnerable about a woman in a bar, and something so intimate and sacred about two women in a bathroom: a closed world within a closed world. I wanted to paint both of those small universes.

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From Smoking With Robin Slick

Any chance you were influenced by the Beats? Your work has that “go, go, go” quality of the best beat writing. 

Oh wow, what a compliment. I grew up with the Beats. No, seriously, my dad was a jazz musician and that was the only life I knew. I don’t want to name names but when I was a young girl, our house was a revolving door of celebrities from the art/music world. But a funny story, I can remember being about ten years old and this is how hip my mother was. She’s reading a poetry book by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and she says “Hey, Rob, listen to this: ‘Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass. Kids chase him’…hahahaha – isn’t that great?” And even back then, I remember thinking, Oh wow, my mom is so cool, other moms are telling their kids not to say “ass” and go play with their Barbie dolls but my mom is actually reading this to me and telling me how great it is. I am so lucky! As far as the author who influenced me most, I know this is a cliché, but when I read Catcher in the Rye, that’s when I knew I wanted to be a writer. I can probably recite that entire book to you verbatim. Damn, I wish I could capture that voice in the worst way and I still work on it daily.

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From Smoking With Ellen Parker

If you could give one piece of advice to the novice writer trying flash fiction for the first time, what would it be?

Please, please write something that makes you feel. Write something that strips you to the bone. After you’ve written a flash, you should put your head in your hands and think, Oh my god.

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From Smoking With Sherrie Flick

"Shadows" opens with this: "The sun refuses to begin." Wow, that's good. How do you find (1) the openings for your flash fiction and (2) the "defamiliarized" phrasings such as this one. Do you naturally see the world in such a unique, poetic, fresh way? Where did this opening and flash originate?

Oftentimes, especially with this kind of short-short, I'm trying to support a concept with my language, trying to maintain an idea through language choice. Here, of course, I wanted to suggest a sense of loss, a kind of tension that runs through these two characters lives that has almost become a third character in their day to day movements. I wanted the language to be tense and because of that, because of my mindset, my word choice was affected too. I knew when I started this piece that the couple would drive down a hill, that it would be a cold day, and that there would be butternut squashes. I live on a steep hill on the south side of Pittsburgh and if I'm driving or walking or taking the bus for that matter, I must always go steeply down before I do anything else. The sensation of having to "enter" my life is an interesting one—coming down off the mountain in order to interact with humanity. I think it's unique and wanted to capture a sense of that in the opening of this story.

That said, the story itself was inspired by a photograph by Luke Swank. I wrote it while teaching a creative writing workshop as part of a retrospective show at Carnegie Museum of Art. I write along with my class, and I know in this workshop I focused a great deal on interior versus exterior lives. The photographs explore this and I wanted my students to think about it too. Swank came from or was part of the modernist tradition, and his work has a kind of closed up quality—an essential tension to it—that nearly everyone in the class picked up on. I became obsessed with this one image that featured shadows and butternut squash. I was trying to capture the tone of the photograph through the tension between my two characters.

"The sun refuses to begin" is a sentence that comes from revision. I'm guessing my initial sentence was something like: The sun was refusing to begin. Or, The sun wasn't up yet. Or, more likely, some other sentence in that first paragraph that got moved or deleted. Something (bad) that was a placeholder with the evil word "was" in there until I could refine the sentence to be interesting and accurate. I love revising sentences and will often try out 10-20 different incarnations before I "finish" one.

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From Smoking With Steve Almond

126 words. That’s brevity. 126 words and a complete story! That’s genius. Tell us the secret to becoming a genius. Just kidding. But truly, are there any tricks to achieving succinctness of language without losing the essence of story?

The only trick is to write a shitty poem, then convert into a somewhat-less shitty story. That's where virtually all my short shorts come from: failed poems. Poems force you to cut away every single word that's inessential. It's an instantaneous medium. No throating clearing. No table setting. Just life in extremis.

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From Smoking With Dan Chaon

First time you called yourself a writer, first publication, first check. Those sorts of things. So, dish. What is your most memorable writing first?

To me, the most exciting thing has always been the idea that a stranger would actually read my story and remember it. That's my most memorable "first": the first time that someone I didn't know came up to me and said, "I read your book." Wow, that was an amazing feeling.

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From Smoking With Stuart Dybek

First time you called yourself a writer, first publication, first check. Those sorts of things. So, dish. What is your most memorable writing first?

There are so many ways in which to answer this question—and I can see that you are well aware of that by how you've posed the question. So, I'll simply choose one of several options because it relates to the question you asked about the blank page. When I was in my mid-twenties I took a summer off from my job as a caseworker and tried to give myself more writing time. I wrote a story that summer called "The Palatski Man." It wouldn't be published for two or three years and when it was, it appeared in a sci-fi and fantasy magazine, not a lit mag. But that story took off in a direction that as the cliché goes "I couldn't have imagined" (even though I apparently did) when I sat down to write. If I can credit myself with anything it was in allowing it to just go off on its own and following along rather than trying to exert some discipline over it.

Looking back I think that in trying to exert control over a story—which naturally is something that a writer who is still learning the craft is trying to do—I was following my models too closely, juxtaposing their voices over my own material as if that would give my stuff form. The price I was paying for trying to exert control, was not arriving at my own voice. Maybe on some nearly unconscious level I was beginning to realize that. Writing "The Palatski Man" had a liberating effect in that rather than trying to exert control, I was able to surrender to the story. It was a border I had to cross and it was also something I had to learn to do by allowing myself to do it. To exert control had required that I copy other writers. When I was finished writing "The Palatski Man," I realized the story had taken me to a place I could have never gotten to without writing it. That's the first I still feel the most indebted to.

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From Smoking With Nance Knauer

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I don't think it's a question of want. I tried everything else I could think of, and nothing else held the complex twist of pain and excitement that writing brings to my life. I think I've always wanted to "be" a writer, but only recently have I begun to write.

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From Smoking With Kathy Fish 

Begin this answer with the words, "I write." Complete the sentence. Then, write as many sentences as you'd like, each one beginning with that "I write...."

I write to try to get to the other side of things that worry or hurt and amaze me in this world. I think there must be a greater understanding and empathy there, on the other side and I want to get there, very much! So I keep writing stories and scenes and people who go through similiar things that I have, feel similar hurts and disappointments and befuddlements, and they're always, always struggling in the stories I write.

I write to get myself to that other side, that point where I can say, oh, see! Things are never as clear cut as you think they are and maybe in this awful and amazing and worrisome thing you can find some transcendence and humor and grace.