Writing

I’m doing my Flash Fiction workshop soon and so I’m prompted to talk about some of my motivation in giving the class and why I think it’s a useful one for writers.

What is flash fiction? As the name would imply, it’s short. Short, short, short. It’s sometimes called short-short stories for that reason. People define that length in varying numbers: the Florida Review used to award $100 and a crate of oranges to the winner of their short-short story competition, while 10 Flash Quarterly‘s editor/publisher K.C. Ball says it’s got to clock in at a 1000, and others have stretched it as far as 2000 words (which to my mind wanders into actual short story territory).

Others go much shorter, pointing to Hemingway’s famous six word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” There’s twitter fiction magazines, like Thaumatrope, Nanoism, and 140 Characters (which last posted in March, alas). I actually fall in this camp, but to explain why, I need to explain the appeal that flash fiction holds for me.

I’ve got a sick cat that I’m anxious about at the vet today so it’s hard to write. I’ve been picking away at what I can and started jotting down some stuff for a piece of the trilogy that’s excerpts from a guidebook to Tabat. I’d realized something about the morphology of the name when I was on the bus and I was riffing on it, including quotations from fictitious historical accounts, when it came to me that one of the more important historical characters that I’d thought in my head was male should be female instead.

Weird little things happen like this when you’re working on something big. It’s like a lens clicks into place and you perceive a section better. And that perception spreads out, affects the view you have of the overall piece, the unruly profusion of plot lines, each with its flowers of action scenes and climatic moments, that will become the lavish bouquet of the book’s world.

So, to the very few of you who know what I’m talking about: Verranzo’s shadow twin is female. All the shadow twins are the opposite gender of their counterpart. Why? I don’t know. It just makes better sense in my head that way and lets me do some additional interesting things.

One of the things we spend some time on in the Writing F&SF class is how to explain things to the reader. As part of this, I usually give them the Expository Lump exercise from Ursula LeGuin’s excellent book on writing, Steering the Craft.

Many of us know the term “infodump,” where a whooooole bunch of information necessary for understanding the story gets thrown at the reader, sometimes in the form of dialogue, sometimes outright chunks of books, or some other form. We want to avoid these because they’re usually dry and a little boring, and because they put readers off.

But at the same time, there is information we -need- for readers to know. And sometimes we may not realize it. If we don’t give it, then events may seem unlikely or heavy-handed or even incomprehensible.

I’ve been reworking a novel for the final time, and one thing I’ve realized in doing it is that the progression of scenes in the last section is not clear. I needed to spend more time being clear that the characters were moving from one place to another so readers could understand where they ended up. And I’d been coy about it, to the point where the reader just wasn’t getting that information.

This is where getting someone else to read a piece is crucial. Because that progression is so clear in the writer’s head that we cannot perceive what’s missing for the reader. One of the most important questions you can ask a reader is “What questions did this leave you with?” or “What didn’t you understand?” Because it’s just as easy to be too subtle — perhaps even easier — than to be overt, since what feels very obvious to you may not be a fraction as apparent to your reader.

And holy cow, how is it that in this version, which I had sent out to my agent already, that I found this on one page: “(insert description later)”? ARGH.

Here’s your story prompt for the day. What if the creature depicted in this picture were sentient?

Someone asked me about the pictures I use in this blog. The majority of them are taken from my own photos. I like taking pictures for my own amusement. While some are from my cell phone, I’ve started carrying a digital camera around on a regular basis for freelancing work. I figured I might as well put them to use making the blog look more attractive. My plan is to keep doing prompts on Wednesdays, and as always, I’d love to see a snippet of what you produce if you use one of these.

Here’s another example of using a Stumbleupon-discovered post to spur a rewrite.

The story I just finished, whose working title is “Villa Encantada,” is one whose beginning I wrote over a year ago. I picked it up last summer and added a couple of scenes, but something about it has felt wrong and it’s been just lumpy scenes stuffed full of description of a balcony garden. I was pretty sure it didn’t begin where it was supposed to, and also pretty sure that the best thing to do would be to start it again from scratch, write it, then mine the previous efforts to see what should get folded into it.

So when I read this post on plotting out stories, I decided to use it to plot out mine. All you do, according to the oridinal webpage, is complete the sentences. I’ve thought about the story and its theme and know it about halfway well enough, I think.

1. Once upon a time . . . there was a woman who could not forgive herself.

2. Every day . . . she tried to kill herself in the very smallest of ways, cigarettes and high heels on stairways.

3. Until this . . . she meets a new neighbor, who is bossy and ominous and presumptuous.

4. Because of this . . . she tries to make friends and allies in the rest of the apartment complex.

5. Because of this . . . The bitchy neighbor, who is a witch, attacks her in increasingly powerful ways, leading up to a third neighbor’s death.

6. Until finally . . . the protagonist is pissed off enough to stop feeling guilty and react in a way that saves herself.

7. For every day . . . I’m not sure what to do with this last, but I’ll wrap the story up with some gesture that shows that her forgiveness of herself is a lasting and life-changing thing.

Okay. That let me start thinking about it in terms of scenes, once I had the overall arc in my head. From there I did start from scratch and write the story from my head. In the process I found myself adding a frame story. Once I finally had that draft I could go through the first version and fold in passages that I wanted to keep. I’m still not happy with the end, but at least I have a complete story now that I can tinker with.

I finished up “Villa Encantada”, a short story with a frame clocking in at 4500 words yesterday. It’s urban fantasy, the same world as the novel I just sent off to beta readers.

The story’s set in a fantasy version of the complex I live in, which has been FRAUGHT with HO meeting woes that I will not get into here. It’s the result of sitting at many meetings thinking about how much more interesting it would be to live in Villa Encantada, a similar condo complex filled with witches, retired gods, defunct oracles, and even a centaur. Hopefully there will be more set in the same setting.

The story’s also dependent on a secondary frame story,, which I’m not sure about. Here’s the beginning:

The cats were telling stories, from their spaces in the Game, scattered around the sun-baked parking lot of the Villa Encantada complex.

A grizzled Siamese had grabbed control of the telling. He licked his haunches and said, Once upon a time there was a woman who could not forgive herself. Every day she tried to kill herself in the smallest of ways, with cigarettes and lack of sleep and careless driving. She punished herself for a crime she couldn’t name, burning cups of coffee uncushioned by food, high-strung nights of crap television, unsatisfying and numbing all at once.

A tortoise shell spoke from her perch on the arm of a weathered Adirondack chair, a second-story balcony overlooking the way. That’s not how it was.

He blinked, a gesture as majestic as an ice shelf, kilometers high, sliding into the sea.

The tortoiseshell remained undaunted. She continued.

This is how it was.

There’s pieces from the frame used in the actual story itself, which I think makes it feel less superfluous, but I’m also always wary about devices like that. When they work, they’re beautiful – when they don’t, they’re awkward and distracting. So what makes one frame “work” where the next one doesn’t?

Some writers don’t rewrite; others do. I’m among the latter – by the time a story goes out, it’s passed beneath my eyes at least four or five times, often significantly more, and at least one of those passes has been a read-aloud. If that’s not your style, perhaps you’ll prefer this story prompt, this post on three things that end a story well, or the always popular Rambo Cat. If you’re with me in a preference for the polished, though, here’s some techniques for fine-tuning prose.

Towards the end of working on something, you often get weary. You’ve looked at that sentence so many times it’s become meaningless. Perhaps you reach the point of the final polish and think, “Well, it’s good enough already.” It’s not. Give it one last gloss, one last rub of the magic word-rag to bring its surface up to such a mirror-bright sheen that the editor can see their humanity reflected in it.

Talking to a friend, I compared this to going over each paragraph looking for zits, words or phrases that are little ugly clots marring the sentence. Groom the prose like a show pony, trimming dead-ends of lifeless conjunctions or combing sentences into parallel structure in order to bring them to a glossy shine.

The Internet may be a sometimes maddening easy way to lose track of time, but it’s also the source of a lot of useful tools for rewriting, making it possible to justify a little time spent poking at it. I love tools for finding random things that I can inject into my writing. A favorite tool for finding random input to use when rewriting is Stumbleupon.

For example, that’s how I found this marvelous tool, the N+7 Machine. It describes itself thusly:

The N+7 procedure, invented by Jean Lescure of Oulipo, involves replacing each noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary. Here you can enter an English text and 15 alternative texts will be generated, from N+1, which replaces each noun with the next one in the dictionary, to N+15, which takes the 15th noun following.

I have a story, “The Ghost Eater,” that’s been sitting for a while that I need to return to, so to whack myself on the side of the head and inspire an interesting rewrite, I ran the first two paragraphs through it, in the hopes that looking at them might spark some new ideas that I could use in mapping out my strategy for the rewrite.

Here’s your challenge – write either a beginning or ending inspired by this image that invokes at least three senses – and doesn’t take place in a museum. Feel free to share in the comments!