FlashFiction.Net

So, for this Wednesday's Therapy session, in my humble opinion, writers should just flat-out say what it is they are comfortable saying without the attached "not really." It makes perfect sense, at the beginning of an article on flash, to establish one's credentials, as it makes similar sense to promote something (your self or a journal or an MFA program or an award or a press) in the bio. (continue reading)

You have these—don't you?—those days when writing has you whupped, when writing (both as process and product) has you remove your gloves: "No más. No más." (continue reading)

I recently asked an illustrious group of writers, "What do you find within yourself when you write? Is it something that you find at other times?—or is it something that you find only through writing?" Because I don't have permission to write their answers here, I'll talk instead about what arose in me reading their answers, that sense of community, the feeling that I've found my people. It might be too much to say that I wept reading what they confronted & experienced when writing, but I felt that building of pressure behind the eyes that my therapist tells me is what other people call "emotion," but I have no word for. (continue reading)

My problem (well one of many) is an inability to tolerate uncertainty--and of course the world's full of uncertainty, so life is, to put it mildly, a bit of an adventure. Uncertainty creates anxiety and anxiety creates the desire to relieve it, and the way to do that is to make the thing creating the anxiety end as soon as possible. And that desire (for things to end quickly) might not be a great characteristic for a lover, but, as one might guess, it's a pretty darn good one for the writer of flash fiction. (continue reading)

If you write it, (eventually) they will come (the acceptances, that is), and then what will you do. You might dream of more important, more prestigious places, and even those might very well come. For the flash writer, there's the possibility of going really big with a "novel-in-flashes," but more likely it will be a collection/chapbook from a smaller press and that too might be in your future. What will you do with all these acceptances? How will you ever recover? (continue reading)

Using a dream as a writing prompt could lead to something beautiful. (continue reading)

When Lady GaGa sings "got my flash on," I think to myself, "That's the way I roll, too." (continue reading)

I started writing flash fiction before I found it in the world—and I'm still full of wonder when I encounter it. Surely not a definitive list, here, in no particular order, are nine (9) things I'm thankful for in the world of flash fiction. (continue reading)

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. (continue reading)

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. (continue reading)

Jürgen Fauth at Fictionaut has created Writing Spaces, "a series dedicated to the desks, cafes, libraries and retreats where Fictionaut writers work, providing a window to the physical places where some of the stories on the site originated." (continue reading)

Try writing flash as therapy (not for Reader or Character but) for yourself, to figure something out that needs to be figured out. It doesn't require the traditional form of thwarted action, thwarted action, thwarted action, resolution. (continue reading)

I had a great time this weekend as a participant in Philadelphia Stories Push To Publish Workshop. As part of a panel on "Submitting Your Short Story," I found myself saying, "I totally grant the possibility that a story I sent out sucks, and I do give rejections and comments the power (eventually) to let me know such a thing. But I would never grant them the power to determine whether I'm a writer or not. No one gets to decide that but me." (continue reading)

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? (continue reading)

I’m new to the world of flash fiction. I’ll gladly admit it usually takes me upwards of 50,000 words to tell a story. Why? I like complicated plots with numerous characters. But I have to admit that there is something about flash fiction that intrigues me. A better way to put it might be that flash fiction challenges me in a way than novel-length does not—brevity. (continue reading)

Is it already a week ago that I wondered about form rejections? What's on my mind today is getting better as a writer of (short) short fiction. That is the question of the day. How does one get better. One answer is to listen to this song while writing.






But that's not a real answer, is it? What's your answer?

Google alerts me when I am mentioned in a blog. I love that. Maybe two months ago, I received the alert, clicked on the link, and found that a form rejection I'd sent as the SmokeLong Quarterly Lead Editor had been posted on a blog with the heading: Untitled, by Randall Brown.

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I didn't know what to make of it, seeing it there, untitled (the impersonal) attached to my name (the personal). I'd learned early on not to take rejections personally (as a writer) and came (as a writer) to love the impersonality of the rejection note, a reminder that whatever led to the rejection had (very) little to do with me.

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When people search my name on Google, an event that happens perhaps too infrequently to worry about, this link will come up and they will find this form rejection. They might think of the form rejection's opposite—the personal rejection—and think of me as that kind of opposite, someone who took an impersonal interest in not only this submission but in many submissions. Or maybe they won't think that at all.

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I've spoken before here about what I think rejections mean (that someone at the journal didn't love a story enough to publish it). My own use of the form rejection as an editor over other forms has to do with (1) the recognition of the subjectivity at work in these accept/reject decisions and (2) the rejection of the notion that my opinion should in any way matter in the evolution of this piece. In other words, I've always thought the form rejection kind of speaks for itself, and I'd come to love that about it, its refusal to engage writers in what someone thinks or doesn't think of a story.

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But seeing that form letter I had sent (one doesn't write form letters; one sends them) made me feel sad. Oddly so. I don't know. It still has me a bit unloosened. A writer works on a story, puts something personal and meaningful into it, labors on it, chooses me to send it to and I send back a form letter. In that light, seeing it there, made me feel not so great about it all. Of course, feelings such as these are ever-changing, and I might see it all quite differently in the days and weeks to come. But that was my initial feeling: Yikes, I thought. Is that what it is like to send work to me? And should it be something other? And what might the alternatives be? "Jeez," I thought. "What have I have been doing?" I guess that's good in a way, to see things anew, but it's unsettling. And so, I guess, that's today's therapy session and maybe it ends with a question, "What (as writers and/or editors) are we to make of the form rejection letter?"

Today's my birthday (44!), so I took a break from the normal Thursday craft entry to tell everyone that I love The Kooks. Listen to them today and be inspired. (continue reading)

I do love that about writing and find myself missing that aspect of it, being in that room, with just me and my writing. (continue reading)

My grandfather had always carried in his wallet a poem I'd written him, and he'd stop people on the street to read it to them. That he did such a thing maybe has more with my being a writer today than anything else. At the time, few people believed in me. (continue reading)

Just as blogs get defined by the number of visitors, page views, hits, so too, I've begun to fear, do virtual writers. In other words, my fear is that quantity (the number of stories published) has become a defining feature of one's "value" as a writer. Writers, as do most of us, now exist both virtually and really—and one hears of literary agents immediately doing internet searches of writers to see if they truly exist. Perhaps that's a bit of exaggeration, but I've gotten more than a few publications and editors interested me mainly through my appearing often enough during their searches for them to assume I must matter in the tiny world of flash. (continue reading)

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.

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?". (continue reading)

Each rejection says to me, "We didn't love your story enough." The danger for writers is replacing the [your story] with [you], so that each rejection says, "We didn't love you enough." That has never been the case for me as part of an editorial staff. (continue reading)

I did this exercise with a blog publishing class. We wrote what we loved about our chosen niche—mine was Flash Fiction, as you might imagine—and we wrote in that free association way my high school teachers knew would lead to my discovering truth and becoming a better writer. I wrote this about flash fiction:

Flash fiction is small, really small, and I like that about it, that it begins, for the readers, writer, and characters, almost as soon as it begins. Its condensed nature reminds me of something innocent, something small in the world that is trying to matter among "bigger things." I guess it is like a child in that way, and people view it as a child, as if it were the child of the adult forms—novels or short stories. Like all small things, it could easily vanish and must find ways to last given its nature. It doesn't take long to write or read (comparatively) and that gives it a sense of urgency and rawness. It isn't wishy-washy, unlike me.

Robert Frost wrote, at the end of "The Oven Bird," "The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing." A story's dramatic imperative, a term the writer Xu Xi used during my workshops at Vermont College of Fine Arts, asks the question, "Why does this moment, of all the moments in the world, get a story?" Why, of all the stories in the world I could've gotten, do I get the one in which I am a flash fiction writer?

Looking over what I've written, I notice how many times size is mentioned: small, condensed, child, diminished. What would things be if they weren't set next to other things? Would the world be "diminished" if we didn't set it against "Eden"?—against what might've been?

Next to nothing, flash becomes something else, something other than a diminishment, other than what it might've been had you sat in front of the computer a bit longer. What does flash become beside itself? Can the same thing be asked of all of us? What might we be if we weren't compared to each other?

An entry today full of more questions, it would seem, than answers. Flash appeals to me deeply, the way poems always have. If I listed my favorite writers, so many of them would be poets: Frost, Sexton, Whitman, Plath, and so on. If I grasped line breaks, had any sense of musicality, I might've answered Frost's question What to make of a diminished thing? with "A poem!" I see some kind of answer just now, and when I see such a thing, the writing ends. I realize, for me, it is indeed the world that is diminished, and it is that—the world's diminishment—I've set myself and flash against. To think of flash as small, for me, is to see it all wrong. It is the world that is very small—and it is flash, of all things, that enlarges it.

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—'My Heart Laid Bare.' But—this little book must be true to its title.

— Edgar Allen Poe

Let me tell you about Writer, his desire to know if he is good, if everyone's been lying or been truthful, his need to get to the heart of it all. He wants this truth, be it, as Thoreau once divided it, mean or surreal. He requests, or maybe demands, you be honest with him. He reads the truth into comments on stories, rejections and acceptances, the feedback you give him, the things you say or never do. Am I really a writer? Am I good? How good? He cannot say to himself with any certainty that he is "good," because that would mean something horrible, yet it is the thing he wants more than anything for you to say. Even if he doesn't believe it. In short, Writer wishes to know if he is good and that drives himself and stories into existence. (He wonders, writing this, about you, if a part of you asks the same questions of yourself or if he is alone and crazy).

This Wednesday's insight is the realization that he is involved in a wishing ritual, the wish to know what can never be known, and like all rituals it's coded in the desire for certainty, attached to a deeply held desire since childhood: to know beyond all doubt his worth and value. And way leads onto way, down other paths, the dark kind, the ugly and brutal kind, with things that sting your eyes and scratch at your skin and make you either lose your way or find another one. In other words, less writerly ones, that insight leads to other insights, but it starts with his wanting needing to know if he is a good writer— and his wanting needing you to tell him, in that truthful, no holds barred way.

He tries to get to the core belief, to fill in the missing condition: If I am good at writing, then what? If I am not good at writing, then what? What's at stake? Isn't that at the heart of stories, what makes them matter? What's at stake, he asks himself, when he writes? And the answer comes, a bit oddly, as no surprise: his existence. And what consequences come from that?—this need to know if he is good & the writing to be good, above all things it might otherwise be?

All or nothing. Either Writer is good or he is nothing. That's all there is, and so he's set his writing against some deep-felt sense of his own worthlessness. Thus, he needs to be all-good or else he's all-nothing.

Laziness. This need to be good creates a mixture of arrogance and fear, the arrogance driven by the belief "I must be good or I don't matter," the fear driven by the ever-present question, "What if I'm wrong about being good?" The arrogance makes Writer feel he doesn't need craft books, workshops, rules, prescriptions, advice, feedback, and the like. The fear leads him to avoid such things, because all they can do is confirm his fears, that he doesn't belong, isn't good enough, doesn't matter.

Competitiveness. Every other writer takes away his chance of mattering, and so he must stay away from them or focus upon his perceived weaknesses in their writing. Each writer who becomes "good" lessens his own chance of attaining worth.

One good. There is one good that satisfies all. One universal sense of good, like gravity and death and all the other things the gods & goddesses have given us. It resides in the heavens or in Plato's cave. It resides in truth, in each reader laying his or her own heart bare and saying what each one thinks of Writer's writing. It is all or nothing. They can say he is good and then he must have agreement from the next one, and the next one, and so on. Or they can say he is not good, and then they will conform his deep doubt and what will arise is something of life, of that little kid in that kind of ugly childhood who set himself against it and said, "I'll show you!"

There must, he is sure, be some other way of writing. He imagines this desire to be good lies at the heart of this distorted belief. It is what has made him search elsewhere for his "okay-ness," and now his value has become conditional rather than absolute. It resides in Reader rather than Writing (and thus in being read rather in writing). It has become something passive. It does not see the sense of evolution, of writing as process with challenges and successes along the way.

He is involved, he has decided, in a wishing ritual, the wish to know for certain if he is good at writing and (by extension) of value in the world. There must've been a time when he did not question his value, when he did not write to get it. And what, if he does not ask from Readers to give him his self, should he ask for instead? He cannot imagine anything else. Can you?