What Is Flash Fiction?

This is usually the first question my students and I tackle when I'm teaching a course in flash fiction. I'm ambivalent about answering it because I never feel it's helpful to get too hung up on definitions or try to put creative work into boxes. But people do wonder: What is a short-short? What is flash fiction? What is a prose poem? What is the difference between all of them? What do magazines and reviews mean when they say they publish any one of these?

Here are the best answers I can give:

"Flash fiction" and "short-short story" are used pretty much interchangeably. They refer to short stories that are extremely short. People define how short they actually are differently. Some anthologies, like the Sudden Fiction ones, are pretty loose and will publish stories that are up to five or six pages. I have to say that even though I don't, as I said, like to sort creative work into boxes, I don't think stories like that quite qualify as short-shorts -- in my opinion, they're just relatively brief short stories. To my mind, flash fiction (that is, short-shorts) are anywhere from a few lines to, say, three pages, maybe four. Kafka wrote a lot of these -- if you look at his collected works, you'll see that The Metamorphosis and The Trial are in fact some of the longest things he ever wrote. If you're into flash fiction, you'll love some of this other stuff.

And of course, when you're writing things that short, there are other qualities the stories will often have: a compactness; a lean, streamlined focus. (But not always!)

Prose poems are usually defined either as a short-short that has the richness of language and some of the techniques (internal rhythm and rhyme, allegory and metaphor, etc.) typical of poetry; or sometimes more simply as a poem without the line breaks. That is, the poem is just written like normal prose on the page.

But again, these definitions definitely overlap. For example, my own Halloween-vegetable-men inspired stuff posted earlier -- what the heck is that? Well, I was trying for a richness of language, anyway, and some of them started out as poems, but they seem like stories a bit, so are they prose poems or flash fiction or what? Who knows? Who cares?

Well! I hope that's of interest to y'all. And incidentally, if you've read the excerpt I had here from my novel Mercutio (which is definitely not flash fiction), I put a new excerpt up on that page, if you'd like to see it. Same link, over there at the right.

New Flash Fiction: "Coroner"

Coroner

Call up a coroner at three in the morning and ask what’s going on over there.
“It’s dead as a door nail,” they’ll say everytime.
“Anything new?” you say, because you are on the overnight shift at the Daily News and it’s your job to call the coroner every few hours to see if anything new has happened. You are not at Halloween parties with your friends tonight, you have a career to get on with.
“No. It’s dead here,” they’ll say. Every time. Absolute deadpan.
“Not even a floater?” you’ll say, because you want a good story and a byline and to get on with your life and uncover something like Watergate and get off the Daily News which is the second-rate paper in town and maybe even be on TV with all the world watching your lively, pretty face.
Sometimes there is a floater. We’ve got a floater, he’ll say, the young coroner on duty most nights, without a trace of irony in his warm mollases voice, the very opposite of a cold steel table. A voice like maple syrup bubbling up out of the earth.
He must be from the south.
“Now isn’t that a killer!” he’ll say. They never change. Although sometimes there’s a crack in his deadpan and he tries not to laugh.
But there’s no body in the Bay. Not tonight.
And you picture this guy on the phone, the young coroner, whom you have never seen but you have talked to a million times, this human on the overnight shift, just like you. Surrounded by the white sheeted carcasses, like you are by the humming computers, turned off for now but ever ready to be resurrected.
“Any ID on that body from the dumpster two days ago?”
“No, nothing there but a dead end.”
Your conversations always go like this. But tonight is the night when the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest. And outside are the revelers, the ghosts walking the streets, the candy, the orgy, the city, and you wonder if he can hear them too.
“Any vampires tonight?”
Young coroner pauses.
“Just me,” he says, and you hear him swallow.
And suddenly he’s in your mind, and you don’t care so much about the world watching your face, and you let yourself feel how lonely it is on the overnight shifta.
“You want to go get a drink?” you say, thinking of red wine.
And you finally get a rise out of him.
“They’re the same as us, you know,” he says. “Just like you and me. Nothing but crystals and atoms, dust and blood.”
No, no drink tonight. And he hangs up, embarrassed, there at the other end of the line, to have been so lonely and said so much, in front of the crowd of the dead.

Tip: The Checking-Acknowledgments-For-Agent-Names Trick

This is a good one. Again, it's got to do with researching the industry and finding people who are likely to represent and buy the kind of writing that you do.

Zero in on a few known writers whose work you feel yours resembles. Go to the bookstore and look at the Acknowledgments pages of their books. Often, writers will thank their agents here. Write down what you find. You can usually find the addresses of these agents and agencies online or in Writer's Market.

Because these agents have had success (that is, sales) with these writers, they are more likely to take on similar writing to represent -- also, it's a sign that they simply like that type of writing. And, when you write your query letter to the agent in question, you can mention that your work is influenced by, or similar to, that of the writer in question. Agents find this flattering.

When I get a chance, I'll pull together examples of query letters that have worked here. Probably next month when I'm back from France. (Am I mentioning France a lot here? Oh, dear.)

Good luck.

More France

So the lovely woman whose house I'll be staying at in the French Alps, and whose Alaskan huskies I'll be babysitting, emails me that I'll need hiking boots. So I ask do I REALLY need hiking boots, because they'll take up so much room to pack. And she says, well, the mountain town we'll be in doesn't have any sidewalks and only one paved road, and sometimes the huskies will see chickens and foxes and decide to go for it and then you need some sure footing to hold onto them, but it's up to me.

The only places I have ever lived in my life are Chicago (actual Chicago, not Shaumberg, not Northbrook, not Winnetka), London, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Los Angeles.

She said they use to have hens but the huskies got into the hen house and, well. You can imagine.

What have I done?

There's high-speed access there, though, so I'm hoping to make some inspired postings from husky-land!

Tip: A Truly Useful Site for Writers

The first most useful tip I want to give everyone is to explore the site

www.publishersmarketplace.com

.

Publishing is like any other industry. You need contacts. Getting an agent or getting published is like getting a job or landing a contract. So if you want these things, you need to research the industry and the companies you want to work with. Publishers Marketplace lets you do that. It has grown from a daily list of deals and gossip to a site and email service that almost everyone in publishing uses daily.

Some of the site's features are free, and many more are included for the minimal fee of $15 per month. What they offer is worth every penny. On the site, you can sign up for "Publishers Lunch," which is a free daily email of the dish on the publishing world. Besides being almost as much trashy fun as Hollywood gossip, there are interesting bits of info for anyone trying to keep up on the industry. They also report -- with good news links -- on lots of freedom of speech issues, like the Al Franken case and the edict that libraries reveal what books you have taken out when asked by the government. Almost everyone in publishing gets this email.

If you pay, you get a Web page, which is ridiculously easy to set up and maintain. This is a nice place to put your best face forward for the industry. You also get access to the list of publishing deals made every single day. You can choose to have this emailed to you, including a weekly wrap-up (which is all I ever have time for), or can just check the ongoing list whenever you want. This is invaluable because it lets you know what agents and editors are buying and selling what kind of projects. Also they have searchable archives of all these deals. So, let's say you think your writing is a lot like Neil Gaiman's. You can search the archives for his name, or maybe search on "Coraline." And up will come summaries of deals that have been made for his work, telling you who his agent is and what editor is buying his stuff. You can then know who the best agent and editor are for you to send your next query letter for your Neil-Gaiman-like novel to.

Agents and other publishing professionals also often have Web pages, so you can research those before you send out query letters, too.

I know this sounds like a commercial, and as you can see on my links I'm a member and I have a Publishers Marketplace Web page, but I swear this has been the single most useful site to me in my career as a writer.

Warning: on the lists of deals, there is ALWAYS some young newcomer who got a million dollars for his/her first book. DON'T LET IT GET YOU DOWN! Let it go, let it go . . .

New Flash Fiction: "Werewolf"; also off to France

Hi, folks. I'm going to France next week, where a friend and I are going to babysit two Alaskan huskies, a terrier, and an unknown number of cats at this farmhouse outside this little town called Laval in the French Alps. (Rough, huh? Hey, it's not how my life usually works.) So I'm getting together the stuff I'm going to work on. Besides another chapter of my nonfiction on Aethelflaed (the daughter of King Alfred the Great, who kicked the Vikings out of England) and my revision of the novel Mercutio (Romeo and Juliet told from Mercutio's point of view), I'm really inspired by these Halloween items my sister sent me. They were in my aunt's house -- vintage Halloween paper stuff, cards and decorations and so on. Some of them are things you'll all remember from your childhoods, but the coolest are these Depression era vegetable men, images that came from Europe. Their Halloween/harvest imagery has these turnip-headed dudes made of vegetables walking around at night grinning. Something very creepy about them . . .

So I'm all Halloween inspired and using the vegetable men et al as fodder for a series of Halloween flash fiction (or prose poems, or short shorts, or however anyone wants to define them). I'm hoping this blog will be a good forum for this not-so-commercially-viable kind of stuff. Here's a fresh sample:

Werewolf

The Moon is the tricky path. If you don’t tell the truth it will take you down past the cliffs and crags and you will lose your footing and go over the point of no return and the jagged rocks below will take you.
Everything shapeshifts in the moonlight.
There’s a dark figure crouching by the river. “Heal me!” he cries at the moon, at the filmy women floating over the nighttime earth. But no one can save him.
His silver-gray eyes are open and round and wet, wet and cold as his graying muzzle. Sad and old and unable to die. His joints are piercing sore with wolf arthritis, woof!
But he cannot leave.
He pads through the forest, finds the hand of a man. A coroner, out for a midnight walk, Tries to nuzzle the hand, but the man will have none.
The werewolf always has to tell the truth or the demons of the jagged rocks will catch him.
Hell, you see, is not fiery but cold. It will be hard on his poor stiff joints.
He looks up at the man, the coroner, whose hands touch the dead. Wolf’s eyes implore.
He can’t speak but he sends his thoughts into the man’s head.
I am a werewolf! You know death! You aren’t afraid of me!
And the man takes pity, fondles his ears, says, “Good dog.”
Then, because he knows they can only stay like that for so long before the werewolf bites him under the moon, as werewolves will, before the wolf-thing kills him or, worse, changes him into what he is, because that is the wolf’s nature, the wolf’s truth, the coroner says gruffly, “Go along, now.”

Okay -- first promised tips for new writers tomorrow, and also my classes always ask me "What is flash fiction?" so at some point soon I'll be addressing that.

But the very first and best tip for new writers, corny as it sounds, is keep writing. So keep writing.

Welcome

Welcome! I've had an email newsletter up to now, but have finally given in to the friends who say to me, "Why don't you just do a blog?" I've sent emails to folks on my mailing list letting them know they can look here now for reasonably frequently updated flash fiction (a form I both love and teach), excerpts from work in progress, upcoming readings and events, and your basic blog miscellenaous musings and greetings. I'd also like to use this forum as a way to pass along tips to new writers as I come across things I think would be useful to know if you're getting started, want to know the routes into getting published, etc. So now I'm off to test my solidly mediocre technological skills and put some links on this puppy. More soon!