The Secret to Flash Fiction

Flash fiction is a great way to craft a story without it becoming so daunting that you spend most of the time procrastinating. At Watford Writers, our Flash Fiction competitions are around 300 words, but other groups and competitions will define it somewhere between 50 - 1000. We have a competition about once a month, so I've had some practice now at this form of art.

The ones that tend to win have:

• Immediacy (we know where we are and who we are with within in the first sentence or two - and we aren't confused by too many characters or settings)
• A subtle twist (but pandering to a punchline at the expense of good writing and solid grammar will lose you marks)
• Every word working for the author (including a carefully considered title)

This month I won third prize in on the theme of REVENGE. Congratulations to Cynthia and Steve who came first and second. My entry is below.

For some extreme flash fiction (140 characters to be precise), get involved in #1lineWed on Twitter.

 

A Close Shave

“Are you wearing false eyebrows?” Charlotte asked, squinting at me.

“No.” I raised the menu higher. She nudged it down with her index finger.

“You are!”

I said nothing.

“Why on earth are you wearing them?”

I sighed, shielding my face but being careful not to dislodge the eyebrows. “It’s a long story.”

“I’m listening.” She leant back, laying her menu down on her plate.

I felt my face redden. “Well, I was giving John a trim, you know, with the clippers.”

“And you accidentally shaved your own eyebrows off?”

“No!” I shot her a look.

“Sorry. Carry on.”

“I didn’t realize the guard wasn’t on, and took a really closely shaven strip out of the back of his head.”

Her mouth formed an ‘o’. “Was he mad?”

I shrugged. “Quite possibly.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t know how to tell him, so I just pretended everything was normal.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And then nothing happened, he went to work and nothing. Came home – nothing.”

“No-one noticed?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Until…?”

“Until I looked in the mirror yesterday morning and I had no eyebrows.”

“Oh my God! He shaved them off?”

I nodded.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. He had already gone to work. So I bought these and let him wonder how I had miraculously grown my eyebrows back during the course of one day.”

“Oh dear. You two are a right pair.”

I raised a false eyebrow and shrugged, thinking about the permanent marker I had picked up from the stationary cupboard at work. I leaned back, took a sip of wine and plotted my next move.

When is it time to stop re-drafting and move on?

Today I got a reply from a literary agent to a submission of KEPT.

Not quite her thing, she said. (Heart sinks).

BUT she'd be interested to read the psychological thriller I mentioned I was developing in my notebook.

Heart leaps! Then I realise that this means I actually need to write the damn thing. It means leaving behind the novel I have toiled over for the last five years and moving on before I've seen it grow up in the world.

It got me thinking: when is the right time to move on?

Most authors become better writers over time. Some people believe it's a gift, but you only have to read the early work of Curtis Sittenfeld to see how she developed from Prep to American Wife. Better writing comes with practice. Editing is a different kind of discipline.

That's not to say that we should abandon our first work completely. But we should not let our emotional attachment to it hold us back. Even if it does not get picked up ever, it is not wasted, because every sentence written took us forward to becoming better writers. It may not be the first novel that catches the agents attention. In July 2015, Harper Lee published her second novel Go Set a Watchman, which was written before To Kill a Mockingbird.

There are many more literary agents I could (coulda shoulda woulda...) contact, but I also see the value in coming back to editing with a more critical eye from practicing.

Screenwiting: turning a novel into a 15-minute screenplay

I've been trying my hand at screenwriting in preparation for a big annual Christmas Watford Writers competition: The Writer's Block.

I decided to turn my 93,000 word novel into a 15 minute screenplay. Tricky, you might think. You are not wrong. Here is what it has involved so far:

• Simplifying everything
• Showing, not telling
• Cutting characters that were not crucial to the story
• Cutting scenes were not core to the plot

Now I know why films are never true to their original texts! But it's actually pretty good advice for any aspiring writer. After all, if something is in your story, it must add value or move the story on in some way.

An added complication is that my novel is set across two generations. That's two lots of characters to get to know in 15 minutes. I looked at films that have done this, and the common themes were:

• Narrator in present day looks back at an episode in their past (Saving Mr Banks, Life of Pi, Titanic, or the book The Poison Tree that was turned into a 2-part drama)
• People in different time periods or places whose stories inter-relate in some way (The Hours, Love Actually)

But in my novel, there are no characters that appear in both the present and the past. Still, with such a visual medium, so much can be put across with a look, a juxtaposition of two frames. I am attempting show likeness between the present day protagonist and her war-time Grandmother in the similarity of physical positions, of facial expressions and reactions when placed next to each other.

Whether I can pull it off remains to be seen. It's tough, but enjoyable, and there will be things I can take back to my normal medium of writing. I would recommend this as an exercise to other writers!

Writing rocks! Editing is boring!

Does anyone else find editing boring?

 

I watched a TED talk from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Positive Psychologist, on Flow – the secret of happiness. 

Flow is the state you get in when you're really happy. Everything just clicks, you lose yourself, hours pass like minutes. One poet describes it as “opening a door that floats in the sky”. It’s when what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.

It reminded me of why I love writing. But this state feels like almost a “magical” thing – how can we recreate it at will?

Mihaly did some research to work out what is going on when people are in flow. He found out that people in flow are facing higher than normal challenges, and feel they have higher than normal skills to deal with them.

So – how does this help with editing?

Well. According to Mihaly and the diagram, I must either think the challenge of editing is too easy, or I don’t feel I have the skills to deal with it.

Well… surely I’m not so arrogant to think it’s easy?

So, tomorrow night I’ll be reading up on how to edit a novel.

Ciao for now.

Building Believable Characters

A month ago I received my first rejection from a literary agent.

“You write with charm but the story seems rather rambling, and you need a greater depth of characterisation.”

Thankfully I was more excited to hear something back from an agent than to be too disheartened. OK, I thought. This I can use.

So where did it go wrong?

• Inconsistencies in physical appearance (or rather, in my case, I didn’t have enough description to help the reader sketch out the protagonist)
• Telling not showing (over-reliance on internal monologue. There is a time and a place for it, but let the reader see and interpret action rather than getting stuck in a characters head for too long)
• Characters sound the same (why were two characters always saying ‘of course’? This was my voice, not theirs)

Putting it right

 

No one wants to spend an extended amount of time with characters who are flat, so how do you achieve greater depth of characterisation?

1) Biography: This is a simple one, but make sure you know:

Name

Age

Occupation

Siblings & extended family

Religion

Nationality

2) Physical appearance: Make a list of your characters defining features. You won’t use all of this, but you need to know. External features say something about the person underneath – for example, my main character Katharine is tall and spends her time hunched, as though trying to make herself smaller so she doesn’t stand out, apologising to the world for taking up that extra space. What mannerisms do your characters have?

3) Personality profiling: The Myers Briggs personality profile can be a useful tool to help pin specific traits on your character. For example, are they introverted or extroverted? Are they more likely to react to situations logically or emotionally? I have found this helpful when dealing with several characters as it really helps identify areas of difference.

4) Defining moments in their past: Did they have a difficult childhood? What makes them hate public speaking? Why are they afraid of cows?

5) Hopes and fears: What do they want from life? What are they most scared of and why? Being alone? Spiders?

6) Flaws: No one is perfect, and we believe in the character that has weaknesses just like us. We admire the one that accepts their flaws and takes a journey to make the best of them.

Some more tips!

Our histories are full with all the characters we will ever need, you just need to borrow some traits from one person and fuse them with the disassembled parts of someone else.

I recommend doing the above for a character you know from a TV show or book, or for someone you know (but never let them see it!). You’ll soon see that there are so many differences between people, and all you need to do is let your imagination (and memory) run wild.

A final word of warning:

Going through the analysis and creation of a character involves the process of reflecting and understanding yourself, so be prepared to face some home truths!