Ran­dall had a flash prompt talk­ing about the movie The Usu­al Sus­pects and how the vil­lain cre­ates an entire sto­ry using what he sees on a board in a police head­quar­ters. It was a neat trick and a cool end­ing, telling us a lot about who Keyser Söze is. And what Keyser Söze is, essen­tial­ly, is a prick.

David Wrob­lews­ki came to Rose­mont Col­lege to talk to the grad­u­ate pub­lish­ing, lit­er­a­ture, and cre­ative writ­ing stu­dents and fac­ul­ty about the book, the book tour, writ­ing, and what’s next. He was gen­er­ous, insight­ful, thought­ful, and all-togeth­er ter­rif­ic.

Mary L. Tabor was Rose­mont College’s Woodrow Wil­son Vis­it­ing Fel­low last week. She is the author of The Woman Who Nev­er Cooked , win­ner Mid-List Press First Series Award, and she is writ­ing a “live” mem­oir at http://www.maryltabor.blogspot.com. Each entry is a piece of flash mem­oir.

Bran­di Wells has writ­ing forth­com­ing from McSweeney’s, Improb­a­ble Object, Apt, Smoke­Long Quar­ter­ly, and Bust down the door and eat all the chick­ens. She has a chap­book forth­com­ing as part the chap­book col­lec­tive Fox Force 5, which is being released by Paper Hero Press. She blogs at http://brandiwells.blogspot.com/ .

I first encoun­tered Chad Prevost’s work at a read­ing dur­ing the Meacham Writ­ers’ Work­shop. He began with the piece below. 

ar-old. We’ve start­ed writ­ing togeth­er, and she’s very inter­est­ed in the amount of words on the page. She counts each word on the screen and says “He’s done it.” He’s writ­ten a sto­ry under 100 words. Our favorite Young piece is called “Girl”

I spent part of an hour or so search­ing “how to write flash fic­tion” and read­ing over the top hits. I dis­cov­ered some inter­est­ing “facts” about flash fic­tion. High­lights below.

Write a flash that is “hard” for you to write, one that (1) uses a strong, tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive dri­ve to (2) con­front some­thing that you (as writer) are try­ing to fig­ure out (3) so that you are forced to face some deep­er, dark­er emo­tion­al truths (4) by putting your POV char­ac­ter through a series of actions (5) lead­ing to (for writer, read­er, char­ac­ter) an end­ing with emo­tion­al res­o­nance

When it came time to do a read­ing, I had often thought that, because I wrote very short fic­tions, I had it easy. I didn’t have to read part of a nov­el, part of a short sto­ry, or piece togeth­er tiny parts of a longer piece. A lis­ten­er could eas­i­ly leave a read­ing of a longer piece unsat­is­fied, and it seemed (at times) that the author was more con­cerned with fill­ing lis­ten­ers with the desire to buy the book (and see how the sto­ry ends) than with sat­is­fy­ing lis­ten­ers’ desires for stories.I’ve come to grasp (and this thought might be part of the larg­er issue of self-doubt) that flash can be a very unsat­is­fy­ing lis­ten, maybe an espe­cial­ly unsat­is­fy­ing one.

I’ve just fin­ished read­ing Ste­fanie Freele’s Feed­ing Strays for the sec­ond time, and I’ve got hun­dreds of things to talk about, but what’s on my mind now is this: her begin­nings astound me.