GCC CRW WorkshopSaturday, September 13, 2014

Agenda• Welcome, Intros and Announcements

• Flash Fiction• Definitions

• Extended Definitions• Flash Fiction Myths (to Dispel)• “Rules”• Characteristics

• Analysis: Three to Five Stories• Sequence

• Read Flash Fiction (out loud)• Discuss each story per “How To Get More” Questions• Apply “Lessons Learned” to Your Writing (~5 min)

• Six-Word Novels

• Q&A

Flash Fiction Stories:• “August Night”• “How To Touch A Bleeding Dog”• “Sandy”• “The Stones”• “Chapter VII”

Upcoming EventsFree Association Open Mic Poetry Series• Featuring Jenna Duncan & Shawnte Orion• Wednesday September 17th

• Glendale Community College• FREE and open to the public• Open mic starts at 7pm• Hosted by Jared Duran• Student Union room 104)

Midnight Metaphors• Open to all GCC students interested in writing

• Share your work with other writers• Get feedback on your writing and ideas.• Discover new material and styles and hang for awhile with other writers• Appreciate great writers and writing and investigate a variety of techniques

• 1st and 3rd Wednesdays•FIRST MEETING WED SEPT 17 2:30 – 3:30 Rm 05-142 (ENG Faculty Bldg)

Where can you keep up with all that’s happening?!?!? www.gccazcrw.wordpress.com

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Size Matters:Flash Fiction Rules!

GCC Creative Writing Second Saturday Series

September 13, 2014

Gary LawrenceInstructor, English/CRW

Glendale Community CollegeGary.Lawrence@gccaz.edu

A Rose By Any Other Name…

“Smoke-Long”

Nanofiction

Flash Fiction

PostcardFiction

Miniatures

Sudden Fiction

Short Shorts

Palm-Sized

ShortShort Story

MicroFiction

MicroNarrative

Micro-Story

Micr-OFiction

(Oprah – July 2006)

Flash Fiction Defined• “a style of fictional literature of extreme brevity” (Wikipedia)

• “…a story that will fit on two facing pages of a digest-sized literary-magazine” (James Thomas, Editor, Flash Fiction: Seventy-Two Very Short Stories)

• …a story that is finished before the reader has time to finish smoking a cigarette (Chinese)

• “…trying to tell a story with the absolute minimum of words” (Wikipedia)

• “Flash fiction is a form that…adheres more than any other narrative form to Hemingway’s famous iceberg dictum: Only show the top 10 percent of your story, and leave the other 90 percent below water to be conjured.” – Grant Faulkner, executive director of National Novel Writing Month

• “[A] form [of fiction that] speaks to the singularity of stray moments by calling attention to the spectral blank spaces around them” – G. Faulkner

• “a complete…[but] compressed short story” – Catherine Sustana, About.com

Most often, flash fiction = a story that’s 1000 words or less; or, the generic name for that brief short fiction form

Flash Fiction:Re-Defined

"My idea of a career is never to write a phony line, never fake, never cheat, never be sucked into the y.m.c.a. movements of the moment, and to give them as much literature in a book as any son of a bitch has ever gotten into the same number of words.”

-- Ernest Hemingway

Where Does Flash Fiction “Fit”on the Literary Spectrum?

Poetry(1+)

ShortStory

(3-20K)

Novel(30-40K+)

Nanofiction,Micro-Fiction

(1-300)

Short ShortStory

(1K-3K)

Novella(10-30K)

Length in W

ords

ProsePoems(1 - ??)

A story that’s 1000 words or less.

“FlashFiction”(generic)

Vignette

Reflection

Flash Fiction(>1K)

Six-WordStories/Novels

Where Does Flash Fiction “Fit”on the Literary Spectrum?

Poetry

“A Very Short Story”Hemingway

(750)

Novel(30-40K+)

Length in W

ords

Complete, Brief, Intense, With a Sense of Urgency and a Twist

“A&P”Updike(2835)

“The Lottery”Jackson(3300)

“Indian Camp”Hemingway

(1459)

“Hands”Anderson

(2355)

“The Gettysburg Address”Lincoln(271)

“Declaration of Independence”

Jefferson(1338)

“The Lady With theDog”

Chekhov(6731)

“Chapter VII”In Our TimeHemingway

(135)

“A Good Man IsHard to Find””

O’Connor(6472)

“Preamble to US Constitution”

(52)

“Art of Composition”

Poe(4609)

“Allegory ofThe Cave”

Plato(1950)

Myths About Flash Fiction

• No one comes to a workshop on Flash Fiction.

• Flash fiction is not popular.

• Flash fiction is for beginners.

• Flash fiction is easier to write than longer stories.

• Flash fiction is easier to analyze than a “regular” short story.

• Flash fiction can’t address the complex issues other stories can.

• You shouldn’t read flash fiction if you write short stories, poems, novels or creative nonfiction.

• You can’t learn anything about writing by studying and writing flash fiction.

What are the “Rules” for Writing Short Stories?

1.  Start in the middle of things; start in motion.

2.  Stay in motion by not letting the summary intrude.

3.  Never explain too much – a story loses its suspense the moment everything is explained.

4.  Stay out of your story; pick a point of view and stick with it. Nobody has less right in your story than yourself.

5.  Don't show off in your style. The writing should match the characters and the situation, not you. 

6.  Nothing is to be gained, except a breaking of the dramatic illusion, by attempts to find substitutes for the word "said" in dialogue tags.  "Said" is a colorless word that disappears; elegant variations show up.

7.  Stopping a story is as hard as saying goodnight.  Learn to do it cleanly.

8. Revise! Revise! Revise! 

Stegner. On Teaching and Writing Fiction. Adapted. pp. 94-95.

Flash Fiction = Stories = All These Rules, on Steroids

Characteristics of Flash Fiction

• Beginning, middle and end – complete

• Emphasis on plot

• Brevity – (very) compressed

• Twist or surprise ending (often)

• Intensity – “minimal and rapid trajectory”• part of the appeal and challenge

• Total unified singular effect

Fiction That Matters

“Like all fiction that matters…the success {of flash fiction stories}

depends not on their length but on their depth,

their clarity of vision, their human significance –

the extent to which the reader is able to recognize in them the real stuff of real life.”

– James Thomas

Exploring Flash Fiction• Read each story (at least three):

• “August Night” – Joyce Carol Oates (702 words)• “How To Touch A Bleeding Dog” – Rod Kessler (749)• “Sandy” – Brian Doyle (709)• “The Stones” – Richard Shelton (389)• “Chapter VII” – Ernest Hemingway (135)• The Six Word Novel – Hemingway and others

• Analyze each story (10 questions)• Define who, what, when, where (save “how” and “why” for later).• Which character changed the most? From what to what?• Who tells the story?• What words or images are repeated?• What ideas are suggested in the opening? In the close? In both?• Is the story in chronological order or not? • Describe the writing style. Does this style add or detract? How?• What sticks with you most from this story?• How did this story make you feel?• How does this story compare to other stories you’ve read?

• What writing technique(s) can you “take away” and use in your own writing?

We may touch on “What’s this story about?” – but we’re more interestedn how the writer did what they did and how each story element supports the others.

William Faulkner famously said that a novelist is a failed short story writer, and a short story writer is a failed poet.

Hemingway, the story goes, once challenged his drinking buddies to come up with the shortest novel they could. His creation set the standard for the six-word story:

For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.—Ernest Hemingway

Authors are still trying to meet or beat Hemingway’s intensity. Here are a few more:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.—Margaret Atwood

Without thinking, I made two cups.—Alistair Daniel

Revenge is living well, without you.—Joyce Carol Oates

Narrative Magazine has a regular “six-word story” contest an features.

Six-Word Stories

For six-word nonfiction, Smith Magazine is well known for its six-word memoir collections, most notably Not Quite What I Was Planning. -- Sustana

References/More Info“Going long. Going short.” Grant Faulkner. NYT. 9/30/2013. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/going-long-going-short/ Narrative. www.narrativemagazine.com/ NPR. Three-Minute Fiction Contest. (600 words). Listen and read. www.npr.org/series/105660765/three-minute-fiction “Short and Sweet: Reading and Writing Flash Fiction.” Amanda Kristy Brown and Katherine Shulten. Oct 3, 2013. NYT blog.http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/short-and-sweet-reading-and-writing-flash-fiction/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 Sustana, Catherine. “What is Flash Fiction? Little Stories that Pack a Big Punch.” About.com. Short Stories.http://shortstories.about.com/od/Flash/a/What-Is-Flash-Fiction.htm O’Toole, Garson. “For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Used.” The Quote Investigator: Exploring the Origins of Quotations. January 28, 2013.http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/28/baby-shoes/ 

Questions?

Answers?

What Can We Learn from Flash Fiction?

ReadBetter

“Read like a writer.”

WriteBetter

“Write for the reader.”

Writing something short that is good is harder than writing something long.

Complete(Unto Itself)

Intense;“Sense ofUrgency”

Questions to Explore

• How short can a short story be and still truly be a story?

The “minimal and rapid trajectory” of flash fiction is part of its appeal and challenge.

• What can we learn from reading and writing flash fiction?

The times were good. Also bad. “A Tale of Two Cities”Kids sneak around, get married, die. “Romeo and Juliet”Desperate, noble poor get shafted. Repeatedly. ”The Grapes of Wrath”

Characteristics (Sustana)Brevity. Regardless of the specific word count, flash fiction attempts to condense a story into the fewest words possible. To look at it another way, flash fiction tries to tell the biggest, richest, most complex story possible within a certain word limit. A beginning, middle, and end. In contrast to a vignette or reflection, most flash fiction tends to emphasize plot. While there are certainly exceptions to this rule, telling a complete story is part of the excitement of working in this condensed form. A twist or surprise at the end. Again, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, but setting up expectations and then turning them upside down in a short space is one hallmark of successful flash fiction.

What Is A “Story”?• “Beginning, middle, and end” – Aristotle, Poetics

• “Able to be read in one sitting…for the intended totality, or unified, effect.” – Edgar Allen Poe, The Art of Composition (1846)

• “utterly real” – Max Perkins

• “an attempt…to recapture the exact feeling of a moment in time and space exemplified by people rather than things…” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

• “In a short story, you have only so much money to buy just one costume. Not the parts of many. One mistake in the shoes or tie, and you’re gone.” --- Fitzgerald

• “Prose fiction is, in essence, the realization of an elusive abstract vision in elaborate and painstaking construction, sentence by sentence, word by word.” – Joyce Carol Oates

• “The short story is closer in spirit to the poem than to the novel.”   Rick DeMarinis, The Art and Craft of the Short Story

• “This is [my confession]: I don’t know how to write a short story…but I can tell you how a short story can go wrong.” -- DeMarinis

• “Every story makes its own rules.” -- DeMarinis

Flash fiction = first and foremost, a story

Shortest Novel

“a six -word novel” (“For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.”

O’Toole, Garson. “For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Used.” The Quote Investigator: Exploring the Origins of Quotations. January 28, 2013.http://shortstories.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=shortstories&cdn=entertainment&tm=24&f=00&su=p284.13.342.ip_&tt=65&bt=4&bts=4&zu=http%3A//quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/28/baby-shoes/

What is a Story?

• A beginning, middle, and an end” – Aristotle, Poetics

• Able to be read in one sitting…for a total, unified effect.” -- Poe, •Philosophy of Composition