Wednesday Writing Therapy: All Is Well in Roman’s Flash Fiction World

One group of writers I dearly admire is comic books writers.
I think these guys tend to get a bad wrap for writing superheroes. I know I
used to treat them this way. I started
reading them as a guilty pleasure a few years back and when my college offered
a graphic novel course, I thought, “Sweet! Easy A, here I come.” And it turned
out to be one of the hardest writing courses of my career. I learned a lot in
that course—pacing, describing things in very few words—things very similar to
flash, and was introduced to a huge variety of fiction I was not even aware of.
And, oh yes, there is graphic flash fiction. Stay tuned for
GraphicFlashFiction.Net (just kidding).

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I thought it would be an interesting job to work for DC or
Marvel, writing a series. And as I looked at the writers I admired (and still
do) I started to think…how the hell do they come up with stories month after
month, year after year? One writer, Chris Claremont, wrote for the
X-Men series for seventeen years and
is still writing comics. How do they
generate so many stories? I thought, “What if I actually did start writing a
series and the well ran dry?” That then led to the thought, “What if my well
runs dry period?” Comics, novels, poems—what would I do if I woke up and couldn’t
think of a single creative thought? Sure, not every idea is going to be a great
idea, but at least it’s something, right? A bad story is better than no story
at all. Some mediums don’t have to worry as much as the others. Novelists and
film directors can have a few years between each project. Poets…poets can live
in whatever world they want. But I think there is more demand on the flash
fiction and comic book writer to always have something new, one right after the
next. Both genres have one big thing in common: NOW!

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NOW! Like a single issue of a comic book, flash fiction can
be read in one sitting and at more leisure than a novel or even a longer short
story.  And there is probably even more
pressure on the flash writer than the comic book writer because after you read
a comic, to get another one (legally) by the same author, you might have to get
up and go to a store to do so. For flash, you can Google that author and see
everything he’s ever posted on any online journal, which flash is becoming the
king of. So, a person reads my ONE flash fiction published so far, says (hopefully) “that’s cool,” searches my name and finds…zilch (for now). Maybe he or she will search every so often, but what if I truly have nothing more to write?
What if the well runs dry?

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I was worrying about this when I started my flash fiction
course, and it began to appear that almost every week we would have to produce a
new story. Not to mention my other courses that demand creative output. I can
honestly say that I began this semester with only one story in mind—my thesis—that I have been working on since June, so that doesn’t count. So, for this
flash course, we’ve had to write three stories so far in five weeks. I haven’t
missed a week yet, and for my other class (my own independent study on the
graphic novel) I’ve come up with stories to tell. And sure, I still feel
sometimes that the well is running dry, but every time I think it’s empty and
toss the bucket down, something still comes up (sometimes it’s a bit muddy
though).

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But then there’s this other thing about the well—what if you
fall in? What if you can’t get out? Surrounded by too many stories, so many
that you can’t write fast enough to hold onto them?  Don’t ask me. I haven’t figured that out yet.

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About the Author

Roman Colombo is an MFA student at Rosemont College and received his bachelor's degree in English-Creative Writing from the University of South Florida in 2008. He tries to write in as many genres as possible but loves prose, stage, and graphic novel the most. He has completed one novella, Trading Saints for Sinners (which can be found in the USF library), a Noir-play, Tampa Burning, and is now working on a military heist novel called Izzy's War as well as three graphic novels. He is exhausted.