Out of this quote comes Ron Carlson’s “Grief,” a micro fic­tion piece from The Mis­sis­sip­pi Review that is one of my all-time favorites. Your task today is write a piece around 250 words that do what Carl­son did with a famous quote about some aspect of the (short) short. Have at it, and let us know how it goes.

So, by inter­view­ing the inter­net, I’ve learned that the rule “show, don’t tell” doesn’t quite work as an all-encom­pass­ing rule. There must be some times when we should “tell, don’t show.” Yes?

As a fol­low-up to Thursday’s craft dis­cus­sion on image pat­terns, here’s a sug­ges­tion I received from my MFA advi­sor at Ver­mont Col­lege, Abby Frucht.
Cre­ate a list of words unique to a spe­cif­ic field–such as words from cooking–and then use these through­out a piece (sub­tly of course) in a way that both com­ple­ments and cre­ates meaning(s). Music, med­i­cine, art, hors­es, and on and on. Pick your field and begin the plant­i­ng.

Image pat­terns play a par­tic­u­lar­ly strong role in sup­port­ing the plot of flash fic­tion. For exam­ple, as I draft­ed a flash piece about a germa­pho­bic woman con­fronting a work­er who has crapped on her lawn, the image of dirt, of waste, a brown­ness popped up here and there, like a sym­bol of a wast­ed land. 

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.

I remem­ber want­i­ng to writ­ing like Jeff Lan­don, real­iz­ing I nev­er would quite get there, and that being okay, then real­iz­ing lat­er it was a sil­ly thing to want to write like, or be as good as, some­one else, but that first desire to be like Jeff drove my first flash nar­ra­tives into exis­tence, to fly as Jeff did in that first Quick Fic­tion tale I came to again and again.

In Saturday’s inter­view, Ramon Collins dis­cussed his entry into the world of micro fic­tion through car­toon­ing: I was a pret­ty fair men’s room news­pa­per staff artist and car­toon­ist in Seat­tle before I start­ed to lose small-mus­cle con­trol in my hands. To stay involved with the cre­ative act, I start­ed study­ing, and writ­ing, fic­tion in 1997. […]

Collins’s sto­ries have appeared in print and online. He lives on the NE edge of the Mojave Desert with his Irish wife, Nicky, and Lefty, their dog. Collins used to have a pet desert tor­toise named Fluffy. FlashFiction.Net: What sparked your inter­est in micro fic­tion as both a read­er and a writer? Moth­er Nature stag­gered […]

Dry stone is a build­ing method by which struc­tures are con­struct­ed from stones with­out any mor­tar to bind them togeth­er. In New Eng­land, dry-stone walls (rock fences) are com­mon. Boul­der walls are a type of sin­gle wall in which the wall con­sists pri­mar­i­ly of large boul­ders, around which small­er stones are placed. Sin­gle walls work […]

Nar­ra­tive-based flash pieces tell a sto­ry. The basic struc­ture of such a nar­ra­tive might go some­thing like this: (1) some­thing cre­ates a very strong desire in the char­ac­ter, a desire which cre­ates the need for (2) some kind of action(s) to ful­fill this desire, lead­ing ulti­mate­ly to (3) a resolution/revelation.