Flash Bang Wallop!

I have written flash pieces from time and time and certainly have edited and selected flash for CafeLit; so it was nice to be asked by Cornerstones, that use me a lot now for critiquing short stories, if I was happy to mentor a client writing flash pieces 🙂

So it got me thinking. What do you like about writing flash?

Do you know what it is?

The word count is variable and can, in essence, be from one sentence like the famous Baby shoes for sale; never worn to close to 1000 words which is regarded as the cut-off. I tend to think of 1000 words as a short story rather than a flash piece, but it’s all in a name.

So what does flash do?

People tend to think that writing a whole story in 300 words, where brevity is key, is easy. In fact it takes some skill because it’s capturing the essence of the whole but distilling it into a moment; the flash moment. You need to capture voice (one voice), a moment when everything else before it has happened, so none of the pre-amble, imply this, and still create tension and surprise the reader. While I always say every word has to count in everything you write, and it does, none more so in this form. So it does require skill and time to get right.

So I might be talking about this in my writing group tonight.

So what about you, do you write flash and what do you think makes the best flash fiction?

Some people talk about it being part story, part poem, do you agree? I’d say it takes what the poets do well and that’s distil the surface of moments, they’re very good at taking the essence rather than the preamble — but I think flash is more story than poem. Do you agree?

There are certainly many markets for it, so it is becoming increasingly popular.

Here’s a 100 worder of mine:

Butterflies

Liliya stands at the door, fingers wrapped over a walking cane, watching Hana turn circles.

Ten pound notes flutter from the sky like butterflies.

In the house, an open newspaper, an obituary: Aleksandr Tastarov. Fifty years but still she remembers. She was Hana’s age, lying on the grass.

“Make a wish,” Alek said.

“Money,” she said, “falling from the sky.  No one has to be poor again.”

Hana has his eyes. Not that he’d know, or that he has a son. He was long gone by then.  He always said he’d be rich.

Hana catches ten pound notes.

Liliya wonders.

©Debz Hobbs-Wyatt

Send me some of your best flash!

And have a great week everyone!

The Chop {Editing to Word Count}

It’s amazing how much you can cut to tighten the narrative in a piece. I was looking at a story I wrote that came in at just under 6000 words, written for something of that specification and tightened, sharpened, reworked several times as part of the process. It has yet to be homed. So I looked at it last night with another competition in mind, and in less than hour it shed over 1000 words! If only weight loss was that quick!

It’s not even difficult to perform this kind of cull when you start to really look at what you’ve written and while I plan now to go over this a few more times before it goes out into the world, it shows you there is always room for improvement.
Word count can direct both the writing process and the editing process and is a great discipline. I use the same approach in my novel writing, even though my novels tend to come in on the longer side. It doesn’t matter so long as the words are tight and everything is there for a reason. I work really hard to make sure of this. So when I read the odd review amongst the great ones, that says something along the lines of it being wordy in places, Lydia rambles I have to chuckle, albeit with gritted teeth, because this is part of her characterisation and voice and I don’t think she does ramble, but also so much went into making sure it all counted and nothing was filler. It’s like the person who thought I had lost my way and didn’t know how the novel ended, not everything was neatly boxed off. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. The way it was plotted, how it ended was worked and reworked and deliberately done a certain way. And thankfully 99% get that. Now all of these points are valid and I do think about them, but in truth, and especially when you work with editors, and like me hate filler, I am always there ready to press delete.

So if there is a message this morning, and one that can also count in life in general, it’s this:

Make. Every. Word. Count.

I should write that on my wall of inspirational messages, alongside: Change the World, One Word at a Time.

That is all.

Have a great day.

Taken from my whiteboard that I look at every day! The mantra of my life!