FlashFiction.Net

After a break of a few days, we're back (yay us!) and ready to talk some flash. I'm currently teaching a flash fiction worskhop as part of Rosemont College's MFA program, and we've been enjoying the essays in theThe Rose Metal Press Field Guide To Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field , the exercises in Anne Bernays's & Pamela Painter's What If?, and the shorts in Jerome Stern's Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories. I've also been relentlessly reading craft books lately.

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So today is random note day. Some thoughts and notes I've jotted down from this immersion into the world of flash craft, the in-progress drafts, the finished work, the discussions about how to make our pieces brilliant.

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"It's helpful to say to yourself that dialogue in a story is not like dialogue in real life. Real life dialogue wanders, loops, stops, digresses and picks up subjects from a hundred other conversations. You can't do that in a story. Dialogue in a story is highly organized, it's a form of action, and, as such, it must contain drama and conflict and motivation." — Douglas Glover

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"If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don't have to know what before you begin. In fact it may be better if don't know what before you begin. You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will." — Flannery O'Connor

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"[Begin with] situations that are already under way—situations that are starting to unravel because of, or in spite of, the desires and actions of the beleaguered characters." — What If?

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"The great one-page fiction is intensely compressed, every line weighted precisely, every image firing on multiple levels. Good one-page fictions have a spiral construction: the words circle out from a dense, packed core, and the spiral moves through the words, past the boundary of the page…like a ghost self. The words of the last line should create a silence, a white space in which the reader breathes. The story enters that breath, and continues." — Jayne Anne Phillips,"How I Taught Myself to Write," from the Rose Metal Press Field Guide

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"Literature is a way of thinking in which you think by pushing your characters through a set of actions (testing that character in a series of scenes which involve the same conflict)."— Douglas Glover

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"POV is the 'central intelligence'...[and] operates as eyes, ears, memory, and understanding through which the narrative makes its progress— What If?

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Jung: "Pathology comes from a story untold."

Philip Stevick: "Life does not contain plots."

— both quoted in the introduction to The Rose Metal Press Field Guide

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"The title is as close [the prose writer] will get to writing poetry. The poem loves to play close, in the valence of individual words and their multiple meanings, sometimes contradictory, meanings the words embody as well as the lubricated surfaces of several such words rubbing up against one another." — "Titled: The Title: A Short Short Story's Own Short Short Story," The Rose Metal Press Field Guide

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"My half sister is shrieking in the front seat of the car while her husband—a gambler like our father—races through the mountains at top speed." — the opening line of Roberta Allen's "Daydream" in Micro Fiction.

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"He sits in the front row, large, a large man with large hands and large ears, dry lips, fresh-cut hair, pink skin, clear eyes that don't blink, a nice man, calm, that's the impression he gives.... — the opening of Molly Giles's "The Poet's Husband" in Micro Fiction

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"...writers who have found ways to play upon a very small field..." — from Jerome Stern's introduction to Micro Fiction