Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Flash Away!

Sent off a submission, finally. I hope Jordan and the other folks over at Every Day Fiction are nice to me (but not too nice). My thanks to Oso for pushing me forward in a better direction.

I thought flash fiction would be easier, but somehow it's not. If anything can be said to be "easy" about the form, it's the fact that word limitations force me (the wordy) to get to the point, advance the plot, and round out characters as much as possible in fewer words. These are NOT simple matters, obviously, but at least the form encourages me to make these things happen economically.

As an exercise, it teaches a useful lesson: if you don't know where the story is going, you can't get there. I'm considering writing "flash drafts" of longer pieces that are not coming together well.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Glad to help out.

I agree with the "if you don't know where the story is going..." bit. I'm having that problem myself right now with a longer tale. I'm afraid I'll have to walk away for a few days.

Flash is tough. No question. The best thing about it is that the process is quicker, write-read-revise. Still, each word is a big piece of the story.

Good luck with EDF. I've got two stories there in their queue, waiting for word. Here;s hoping your word is "yes".

Trace Yulie said...

Thanks! I probably would still be fooling around with it, but for your assist.