How We Start

As promised, as we raise money for Year 3 of The Cosmic Background, we'll be posting editor Sam Asher's guide to writing Flash on here, in sections, every week. These posts will be removed one month after the fundraising round ends. Here's part one.

How We Start

Flash fiction is the most difficult kind of fiction you get to write.
Now I am not the arbiter of what is-and-is-not tricky (though I should be, I should be the arbiter of everything) but I will defend that particular opinion to the end of my life. A piece of flash fiction cannot afford to be any less a complete narrative than a short story, a novel, or a trilogy, in that it must still function as a compelling journey for your reader.
Except, the Flash Fiction writer has taken it upon themselves to take their reader on the entirety of that compelling journey, while most other stories are still clearing their throats. Under a thousand words!

That is very, very difficult.

But note my choice of verbs in that opening line. Verbs are important. In flash fiction, your verbs will lift a great deal of weight (though we’ll get to that a little later).
I chose the verb ‘get to’. 

Because Flash Fiction, when written well, is an absolute joy to work with. If you have the skills, you can write a piece of flash fiction in twenty minutes. If you can carve a couple scant hours out of your week each week, you can write dozens of narratives a year. While the novelist is torturing themselves over revisions to act 7, scene 900, you’ve taken your reader to thousands of places. You’ve given them thousands of things to think about. And you’ve done it in about a thousand words each time.

So Here’s an exercise to get you started. It’s going to seem a little open-ended, but does in fact have a correct answer – in Flash Fiction at least. 

Read the following first line of a story, and then edit it down to as few words as you think it can handle, while still functioning as an opening. 

He was blonde, and tired, and came into the room, sitting on the green couch. 

 Now, in a novel, this sentence is fine. It’s a little clunky. Even in a regular short story, nothing about is stands out as particularly offensive. But in Flash Fiction? This sentence isn’t going to work. 

Here’s what I’d do:

He sat. 

And that’s it. In 1000 words or less, you don’t have the space to tell me that he’s blonde, or tired. You don’t need to tell me he came into the room – partly because your reader can assume that for themselves (and we’ll talk more about reader assumptions later). You don’t need to tell me the couch is green. I don’t care that the couch is green, not at this length. 

At this length I don’t even care if it’s a couch. 

One of the oldest little tricks taught in Creative Writing classes around the world, is Chekhov’s Gun. The rule (although there are no rules, break the rules) tells us that if you introduce a gun into the start of your story, and it doesn’t reappear, then that gun is pointless, and distracting, and dissatisfying to your reader. In Flash Fiction

All Objects Are Chekhov’s Guns. 

If you’re taking up precious words to tell me about a couch, then that had better be Chekhov’s Couch. That couch better be the most important couch in the history of the narrative form. If not, then cut the couch out, and move on with your scene. 

Now we’ll try with a couple more examples, taken from longer form works. These may or may not in their current circumstances, but how would you make them work, knowing you had only 1000 words to play with?

1. On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He’d dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit.

From Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2. No one had come right out and said it, but Mike intuited that he might never advance past this stage in his career. The rule was that you couldn’t go backward. Whatever baseline he established with the first show could curve only upward, never down. 

From The Subject of Consumption, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

And now, for Hard Mode. 

3. It is third day of interim.

A rather long interim, for us.

All day we wonder: When will Mrs. U. return? To Podium? ARe the Untermeyers (Mr. U, Mrs. U, adult son Mike) pleased? If so, why? If not, why not? When next will we be asked to speak? Of what, in what flavor?

From Liberation Day, by George Saunders.

In all modes of fiction, your beginnings are vitally important. Plenty of good novels have been ruined by terrible openings. But in flash fiction, your first 100 words are 10% of your entire maximum wordcount. That’s the equivalent of 7000 words in your average novel. Would you waste 7000 words in a novel-length work?

As an editor of Flash Fiction in particular, I look for openings that demand I continue reading. That means they employ brevity in perfect measure, they hook me like a fish, and they tell me only, but precisely, what I need to do. As written above, every single object and action mentioned in your flash fiction, needs to function as a Chekhov’s Gun. If it does not, then it is not necessary, and should be removed. Whether it’s Chekhov’s Couch, Chekhov’s walking-into-the-room, or Chekhov’s lying on self-same couch for a quick nap, if it isn’t a part of your story, then it should not be part of your story.

And here is something that might terrify you just a little bit. This class description, with its brief handful of quotes, is already right around a thousand words. This is how long your flash fiction can be. 

No more. 

No less.