Welcome to this week’s installment of The Never-ending FAQ, the constantly evolving adjunct to our Submission Guidelines and general-purpose unfocused Q&A session. If you have a question you’d like to ask about Stupefying Stories or Rampant Loon Press, feel free to post it as a comment here or to email it to our submissions address. I can’t guarantee we’ll post a public answer, but can promise every question we receive will be read and considered.
Before we get to today’s questions, I want to remind you that Pete Wood Challenge #36, “Pick Two,” is still open for submissions until Tuesday, December 10th. If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at writing flash fiction, this is a great way to start. As an author, Pete has written and sold—actually, I don’t know how many stories, but as an editor, he’s read and published hundreds of flash fiction stories. He knows his stuff.
For more information, mash this somewhat button-like image:
I want to stress again that Pete has (almost) sole control of The Pete Wood Challenge: we just publish the results. However, Pete and I do talk about the PWC a great deal behind the scenes, and thus most of today’s questions have come out of those conversations. Turning the mic over to Pete, here are some questions writers keep asking him.
Q: I have this great idea for a flash piece, but the word limit is too constraining. Can I make it just a little longer?
A: Sorry, that’s a firm no. If your story idea can’t fit into the word limit, perhaps it shouldn’t be a flash story.
Q: But it’s a really great idea, a big idea, an epic idea. How about if my story is about the big idea and its effect on the world?
A: A summary of a story, now matter how great the story, is not a story. No one would be satisfied with reading the elevator pitch for The Stand.
Q: But it’s a big sweeping narrative—
A: The problem with big sweeping narratives is they give the characters short shrift. “The day the aliens came the Earth changed forever. They enslaved the world, but the resistance fought on…”
Okay, maybe this might make a great novel, but there is no way to end this well within a few hundred words. Yet, writers keep thinking a great idea will carry their flash piece.
It won’t.
I’d rather read a 200-word story with a mundane premise and great characters than one with paint-by-numbers characters and a great premise. I have zero interest in reading a sweeping flash piece about how the world changed if there are no characters.
The Bible has two creation stories. One is a sweeping narrative about what God did in seven days. The other has great characters. Which one really grabs you? Which inspired a lot of really great music and literature?
Q: You’re really painting me into a corner here…
A: Flash is not for wimps. If you still want to focus on the big idea, tell it from the perspective of one memorable character. Hint at the big idea and focus on the character’s realistic reaction. Don’t focus on the idea and hint at the character.
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Taking the mic back from Pete, I want to add a few things to what he said. First off, Pete is much too modest to bring this up himself, but here is a great example of a story that begins with a mundane idea but develops into something interesting through deft use of characterization.
At a thousand words it’s more of a short-short than a flash piece, but if this link works for you, you should read it. The link may not work. It’s on the old SHOWCASE site, which is scheduled for demolition on January 1st, precisely because of the insoluble problems with the site certificate and the web site host.
Second, I want to stress that flash is not easy to write. A lot of writers seem to have this idea that they can just belch out a hundred or so words and that’s good enough; it doesn’t need to have a beginning, middle, end, or point. A good flash story is not a scene, a vignette, or a captured moment of mood frozen in prose. Like all narrative fiction, it needs to be self-contained and have an ending.
That’s not easy to do in a few hundred words, which is why I personally don’t even try to do it.
Third…
Never mind, I’m out of time. We’ll continue this conversation later.
See you next Wednesday,
Bruce Bethke
Editor, Stupefying Stories
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