FlashFiction.Net

Yesterday, I came across Laura Ellen Scott's VIPs on vsf, a blog devoted to "collecting very short thoughts about very short fiction" from some very important people, including (to date) Robert Swartwood (Norton Hint Anthology Editor), Roxanne Gay (PANK), Sean Lovelace (Rose Metal Press Chapbook Winner), Scott Garson (wigleaf ), Ellen Parker (FRiGG), and numerous other luminaries.

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from Roxane Gay Rules Are Meant To Be Broken

Rule 1

There are no rules. And yet there are. And my rules will be different from
his rules will be different from her rules will be different from your rules.

So begins Roxanne's contribution to VIPs on vsf, and any talk about rules in (very) short fiction always captures my attention, especially when it comes from a writer and editor I admire. This post captures that odd relationship flash writers and editors have with rules, that simultaneous desire to follow and break them. Roxanne's advice that flash writers should "experiment with purpose" might also apply to the application of rules and non-rules, and one gets the sense that the rule-breaking comes out of a need to express something that cannot be contained by the boundaries of what has come before. A great post. Excellent.

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from Barry Graham

Fuck flash fiction. It doesn’t exist. Get it out of your head. As writers,
it’s easy for us to define ourselves and our writing by genre.

I'm a big fan of Barry's writing and editing (Dogzplot). Again, I sense that need to break out, and I find it interesting that writers turn to these very condensed, tiny forms to find the space for their words and the form(s) they might take. It's also interesting how many "flash fiction" editors reject the idea of an easy label for this form. I find that especially reassuring.

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from Ellen Parker

With all due respect to those writers who say they revise each flash piece
again and again--and when they say this I assume they mean they write a
draft and then take it out sometime later and look at it and revise it and
put it away and take it out again, over and over during the course of an
extended period of time--I have to admit that I do not always work that way.

Ellen Parker attacks flash fiction with the same kind of intensity she attacks most things, and that's cool, this search for the surprise that sometimes happens in flashes, sometimes not. Fixity is a term I've heard for the search for the perfect word in the perfect slot, and fixity might have another meaning, having to do with the something wrong that, once realized and corrected, makes the whole thing work. Another enlightening post, and I enjoyed its focus on the process that (sometimes) leads to a product.

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Reading the writing of these quite fine editors and writers reminds me what first attracted me to the form: there's no room for the wishy-washy. I doubt that I share the same fearlessness as these VIPs, but it's something I yearn for. And that same yearning is what will bring me back to this site again and again, in search of the unexpected, in search of the tiny thing that changes everything.

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