Play these songs when writ­ing has got you down, and you’ll be up and writ­ing in no time. Be sure to sug­gest a tenth song for the list in the com­ments. Enjoy.   K’naan, “Wav­ing Flag” Kooks, “Ooh La” Her­cules & Love Affair, “Blind” Mach­ester Orches­tra, “The Only One” Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “The […]

In short, the short short engages in its own trag­ic bat­tle against the restric­tions of form–of the require­ments that demand clo­sure, of the reader’s need for cer­tain­ty and mean­ing. In the mod­ernist world of Freud, one probed beneath the sur­face cer­tain to find some sub­merged, deep­er mean­ing; in the post­mod­ern world, such a jour­ney leads one to the real­iza­tion that the world no longer has the pow­er to pro­vide such cer­tain­ty and answers–and all we can do is fig­ure out the right ques­tions to ask.

The issue of mis­un­der­stand­ing and then try­ing to make sense of what is mis­un­der­stood may well be the dom­i­nant theme of mod­ern lit­er­ary fic­tion. Lucky us, to live in such an age, to take for grant­ed the good for­tune of hav­ing our needs so amply pro­vid­ed. Free from the drea­ry and exhaust­ing and often icky tasks nec­es­sary for sur­vival, released from wor­ries of crop-swarm­ing locusts and man-eat­ing bears, our bel­lies sat­ed and then some, we turn our atten­tion inward.

The ques­tion too often asked of flash fic­tion is “Can you deliv­er a sto­ry in so few words” It’s an okay ques­tion, if that’s what you want to do with flash fiction�deliver sto­ries. As the word count lessens and the space con­stricts, the ques­tion seems to remain con­stant (for some). Even when it gets Twit­ter­sized, peo­ple focus on the chal­lenge of deliv­er­ing a sto­ry with so few words. Per­son­al­ly, as either a writer or read­er, I don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly want 140-char­ac­ter sto­ries. I want some­thing else, some­thing unique­ly suit­ed for 140-char­ac­ters, some­thing the world (per­haps) has yet to see. 

I came across, a num­ber of years ago, Joanne Avallon’s “All This” in Micro Fic­tion: An Anthol­o­gy of Real­ly Short Sto­ries, and recent­ly found her on Face­book, intro­duc­ing myself, I think, with “Are you the Joanne Aval­lon who wrote that amaz­ing sto­ry in that micro fic­tion anthol­o­gy?” She was the Joanne Aval­lon. Today, Joanne talks about the story’s mean­ing to her as a writer and I talk about about the sto­ry from my per­spec­tive as its read­er. But first, the ever-amaz­ing “All This.”

Think long and hard about why you avoid this sub­ject. Then write about that sub­ject, so that your search is the character’s search, both of you search­ing for the same answer. Make sure you don’t know the exact rea­sons for your avoid­ance. See what you and your char­ac­ter dis­cov­er togeth­er.

Plot, Peter Brooks argues in Read­ing for the Plot, is a “form of desire that car­ries us [read­ers] for­ward, onward, through the text” (37). In oth­er words, for plot to work, both read­ers and char­ac­ters must be “stim­u­lat­ed from qui­es­cence into a…tension, a kind of irri­ta­tion, which demands nar­ra­tion.” If plot, as Brooks argues, occurs in both the text and the read­ers, then the writer must be con­cerned, not only with inspir­ing with­in the char­ac­ter the desire to do some­thing, but also with arous­ing with­in the read­er the inten­tion to read. Both char­ac­ter and read­er sit qui­et­ly, yes, but also poised for some­thing to hap­pen. The known world doesn’t do it for them any­more. A dead­ness per­vades the every­day. They’re ready for some­thing to happen–and some­thing does, the incit­ing inci­dent that demands a sto­ry.

The doc­tor is out today (prob­a­bly golf­ing), and that means that today’s ther­a­py ses­sion takes you back to a fea­tures arti­cle I did for Smoke­Long Quar­ter­ly, “To Write or Not to Write?”.

In Vic­to­ria Redel’s Already the World (Kent State Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1995), there are many won­ders, this but one of them, “Talk­ing Angel.”

Here’s what Camp­bell did. Begin­ning around 1930, he broke his day into four four-hour peri­ods, of which in three of the four-hour peri­ods, he would be read­ing sto­ries from all cul­tures and times. He stud­ied San­skrit, French, Ger­man, Japan­ese, Old French, Carl Jung, James Joyce, myths, and rites of pas­sage. But main­ly he read, hun­dreds and hun­dreds of sto­ries, from ancient to mod­ern. In the 1940’s, when he began to write about his decades of read­ing, you’d think he’d release “Campbell’s 101 Ways to Write a Sto­ry.” But he doesn’t. Instead he dis­cov­ers the Mon­o­myth. The Sin­gle Myth. The Lone Way. The One.