Mystery Flash Fiction
Volunteer Marc blogs about what makes mystery flash fiction work.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve really been into flash fiction of all kinds. Sci-fi, comedy, action, horror, etc… I feel flash fiction gives me the full literary experience of a short story while staying true to its incredibly short structure which allows me to finish sometimes two to three or even seven stories a night. But recently, I’ve wondered just how a genre such as mystery can fit within the confines of flash fiction while still building necessary suspense.
I decided to look at some contest-winning stories as well as other popular works to see what the authors were able to do to make the story so successful and how they were they able to do it. Samantha Memi’s “Tempting the Wicked” started off with immediate suspense as the main character’s death propels her into an uncertain afterlife in which her ghost can now see all the events and turmoil that follow her demise. “Unplanned” by Libby Cudmore, nominee for the 2010 Short Mystery Fiction Society Derringer Award, also starts off strongly as the main character is suffering from a vicious gunshot wound and begins backtracking to how this moment came to be.
My creative writing teacher always told me that character backstory was one of the essential building blocks of fiction. Without it, a character can come off as undeveloped, and their actions throughout the story may seem less credible. In “All Those Things We Never Find” by Brandon Nolta, the author was able to uniquely establish backstory through the town’s perception of an old, abandoned and seemingly haunted house. In essence, the author made the house a character.
The number of characters can also dictate the amount of backstory a particular piece can hold. I have noticed that most flash fiction stories have anywhere from two to four characters maximum. I feel this allows the author to further focus on plot rather than having to worry about five or six characters all at once. In “The Unknown Substance,” by Jane Hammons, winner of the 2011 Derringer, the author essentially used only two characters and through backstory chronicled the deteriorating relationship between a mother and her child in this beautiful, gritty story.
All in all, I’ve noticed that flash fiction, as a whole, has the same terrific qualities as any great short story with a need for the reader to invest much less time. So if you are ever in the mood for some light reading, before heading toward the short stories, try reading some flash fiction instead.
An Interview with One Story, a Literary Journal
Volunteer Andrea interviews the editorial staff of One Story, a literary journal.
Volunteer Andrea: The pieces in One Story are diverse (e.g. anorexia, overachieving children, corporate discontent, homosexuality, the silence in relationships), and many stories have won awards. How do you decide which stories to publish?
One-Story: The short answer is that we look for stories that feel whole. By that I mean when you’re finished you feel you’ve had a substantive literary experience. The truth is that we have a broad perspective and enjoy all types of stories from dense and articulate realism to something surreal that challenges your notions of what a short story can be. I think the moment of recognition is different for each editor, but there is an element to which you have to lose yourself in the story. We can have an extensive editorial process and it’s important a story holds up through that process.
Volunteer Andrea: One Story subscribers receive a 3,000-8,000 word story every three weeks. How did you know that this was the right frequency for a One Story subscription?
One-Story: It was really the brainchild of our Publisher, Maribeth Batcha, who in imagining One Story tapped into her own experiences as a reader. She knew that frequency would add excitement and enable our magazine to become a regular part of a reader’s life, making it one of those essentials that would be missed when absent (and in turn hopefully result in a stable subscriber base). On the other end of the spectrum, we knew to publish the quality stories we were aiming for required time. Without the resources to have a huge staff of editors, the once-a-month model seemed the perfect tension point between frequency and quality.
Volunteer Andrea: One Story has both corporate and government sponsors. How has sponsorship fostered One Story?
One-Story: In an ideal world, subscriptions alone would fund all of the magazine’s needs, and our staff would all be paid like investment bankers. But, of course, that’s not how things work. Despite having a vibrant subscriber base of over 15,000, we need support from sponsors to do what we do. As a non-profit, we’re incredibly grateful that there are organizations willing and able to help us keep short stories relevant and accessible to a broader public.
Volunteer Andrea: What does One Story do to support its authors after their stories have appeared?
One-Story: We tend to think about our authors as extended family. After publication we nominate them for awards, host readings, and promote their books on our blog and in a quarterly printed insert (thanks to a generous Amazon.com grant). Every spring we also honor our writers who have published their first book in the prior calendar year at our annual benefit – the Literary Debutant Ball.
Volunteer Andrea: One Teen Story launches in September 2012. What is your vision for that publication?
One-Story: Despite the boom in YA literature in the last decade, the industry has yet to come up with an engaging way to get short stories into the hands of younger readers. One Teen Story is an answer to that. Eight issues published monthly throughout the school-year exploring themes and situations compelling to younger readers. It’s about igniting a life-long love affair with literature in general and short stories in particular.
Volunteer Andrea: Is there anything else we should know about One Story?
One-Story: I think you covered it!
One Story is an award-winning, non-profit literary magazine that features one great short story mailed to subscribers every three to four weeks. Founded by publisher Maribeth Batcha and Editor in Chief Hannah Tinti in 2002, One Story is devoted to promoting the art of the short story and supporting the writers who write them. Available in good old-fashioned print or on the Kindle/iPad, One Story now stands as one of the largest literary magazines in the country with over 15,000 readers. 2012 marks One Story’s 10th Anniversary. Come and celebrate at www.one-story.com.
Nadia Kalman at GWU’s Jewish Lit Live
Volunteer Andrea enjoys a reading from author Nadia Kalman at a Jewish Lit Live event.
Nadia Kalman, author of The Cosmopolitans, spoke to students in George Washington University’s Jewish Lit Live class (and to anyone else who was lucky enough to check the Washington Post’s Going Out Guide and discover that Ms. Kalman was in town).
The author, luminous and animated, read from her work to an attentive crowd. The Cosmopolitans is the story of the Molochniks, Jews who fled the Soviet Union and landed in Stamford, Connecticut. Ms. Kalman’s four samples from the novel, including one requested by the audience, generally traced the wry-eyed life journey of Milla, though many family perspectives are included in this entertaining and insightful book. For me, listening to an author read from her work is a far richer experience than reading it myself. The pauses. The inflections. The smiles. The throaty Ukrainian pronunciations. At the end of her reading, Ms. Kalman took questions from the audience and even stuck around to chat with the Potomac Review blog staff. Look for more from Ms. Kalman as part of an upcoming author interview.
Jewish Lit Live organizers claim that this course is the only one of its kind in the country. Students read the works of contemporary Jewish authors, and GWU arranges for those authors to read from their work and speak with students.
Here’s what the rest of the Jewish Lit Live schedule looks like:
March 1: Nicole Krauss, “The History of Love”
March 22: Pearl Abraham, “The Romance Reader”
April 10: Erica Jong, “Fear of Flying”
April 24: Bel Kaufman, “Up the Down Staircase”
The Washington Post’s Going Out Guide should have more as the dates approach. Nadia’s Kalman’s reading was at 7:00pm on the 3rd floor of the GWU’s Marvin Center.
Facing Anxiety through Writing
Intern Josh blogs about using writing to conquer life’s anxieties.
My second semester with Professor Katherine Smith held one of the greatest shake-ups in my young writing career, and I’ll introduce myself by telling you all about it. Writing can be a way to exercise freedom or possibly even conquer your worst traits. This is my story of how I used writing to do both.
Writing can indeed be used to exercise freedom. However, I didn’t become free until quite recently. Also, I didn’t really have a love for writing until recently. Until I stopped denying what I was (gay), I didn’t really have anything to write about. My stories covered miniscule topics and things that really didn’t mean anything. If it hadn’t been for my epiphany, I don’t think I would have found a love for writing. The moment I got into Professor Katherine Smith’s first creative writing class (poetry), I began exercising my writing freedom.
Through writing, I also wanted to conquer my worst trait, nervousness. I came to a question: what if I did something incredibly offsetting on purpose? Something that could act as a benchmark for future moments of nervousness so that way anything I did that was similar to this event wouldn’t make me nervous. This semester I had Professor Smith again, for fiction. I had one goal: not to be cliche by any means, to do something that only I could do. I kept telling myself “if it feels right than it’s right, and I should be committed to it, otherwise it will already prove to be half defeated.” Still, it was hard trying to find a spine of confidence sturdy enough to support the weight of my story which had Sadist/Masochist Romantic erotica between two Homosexual men and very detailed sexual activity and passion.
That’s right, that’s exactly what I was up against. So dangerously bold, which hasn’t always been me but it is what I was becoming: A very outspoken gay sex-positive writer. I knew that once my lips started reading aloud in class from the top of page one I wouldn’t be able to stop until I reached the last word on the final page. I read it, and I hoped my nervousness wasn’t as apparent to my classmates as it was to me, but I could feel my mouth hesitate; I gagged a little and stuttered a lot, but I got through it. I received my critiques, and before I knew it, it was over.
I can’t say whether my plan worked, whether or not I can successfully use this to look upon and not get nervous about anything today. However, I can say that because of what I did that day, I know how to approach anxiety, by taking it head on through writing.
Just a Contest Website
A website dedicated to sharing information about writing contests has started up. Besides splitting along fiction, poetry and non-fiction lines, you can browse Just a Contest for writing competitions based in the the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. The webmasters at Just a Contest also let you know if the contest has an entry fee and whether publication is part of the prize. A search for fiction contests in the U.S. turned up thirty-seven open contests!
Split this Rock Poetry Festival – Upcoming
The Split this Rock Poetry Festival is just around the corner: March 22-25, 2012 in Washington, D.C.
According to the foundation’s website: “Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness invites poets, writers, activists, and dreamers to Washington, D.C. for four days of poetry, community building, and creative transformation. The festival features readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, parties, activism—opportunities to speak out for justice, build connection and community, and celebrate the many ways poetry can act as an agent for social change.”
The program’s line-up of poets includes: Homero Aridjis, Sherwin Bitsui, Kathy Engel, Carlos Andres Gomez, Douglas Kearney, Khaled Mattawa, Rachel McKibbens, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jose Padua, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Kim Roberts, Sonia Sanchez, Venus Thrash, and Alice Walker.
Register here.
Early-bird rate: $75 (after February 22: $100)
Student rate: $40
Day rate: $40 ($20 for students) except Sunday ($25/$10)
Scholarships are available (deadline February 22)
For the first time, pre-order Split This Rock T-shirts when you register.
February’s Hot Opener – Fiction by Oluseyi Onabanjo
On the first day of every month, the Potomac Review publishes a “Hot Opener” online. The Hot Opener is often prose or poetry that achieved runner-up status in a previous contest or that the editor chose to highlight from the great stories that the Potomac Review receives but cannot fit into the paper version of the journal.
This month’s Hot Opener is “Here, the Mosquitoes are Government Property ” by Oluseyi Onabanjo.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Sit over there. Between those ones. They are not dead. They are sleeping. The blood on that one is dried. It will not stain you. The other one hardly bled at all.”
Click here for the rest of Oluseyi Onabanjo’s story.
If you would like to see a list of all the hot openers, this link will get you there.
Enjoy!
Lather, Rinse, Repeat: Revision Steps
by Karolina Gajdeczka
Intern Karolina blogs about her five-step revision process.
You’ve done it! You’ve navigated the difficult process of writing and came out with a poem, short story, essay or novel. And you think it’s brilliant. So why revise? Besides the likelihood that your first draft is far from the perfect manuscript you envisioned, revision is important to help you clarify your thoughts, iron out kinks in transitions, double check continuity from beginning to end, correct spelling or grammatical errors you may have missed, and the list goes on. There’s always room for improvement. This blog alone went through four drafts!
Personally, I struggle with this aspect of the writing process. I spend too much time trying to make my first draft perfect, which leaves me depleted and unwilling to put forth enough effort for editing. As a result, my writing can suffer. For any writer, the task of improving or changing a piece you’ve spent countless hours on can be daunting, unpleasant and preferably avoided. When I got basically the same advice from a few experienced writers about how to make the most of revision, I decided to give it a try. Once I got the hang of the process, I actually started focusing less on my first drafts and more on my revisions. I would even say I enjoy the process of revision much more! Here’s how to get past the mental block that’s keeping you from making any changes:
1) Familiarize yourself with your work. That means read it. Yes, again. No skimming. Make any changes to glaring technical problems.
2) DO NOT LOOK AT YOUR WORK! Put it away. Take a nap. Go running. Write something else. Take that trip to visit your sister in Ohio that you’ve been meaning to take. Whatever you do, do not look at or think about your work for at least three days. Chances are you’ve become a little too comfortable with your masterpiece, and you two need to take a break for a while. At this point, you can no longer objectively or critically examine it—so put it down! This step is the most important.
3) Read it once without looking for anything to change. Once you have spent three days to a week avoiding eye contact, dodging around corners, and otherwise generally ignoring what you have written, it’s time to muster up some courage and meet with your writing face to face for an honest conversation over your beverage of choice. Yes, it’s time to read it again, but this time, you’ll have a fresher perspective.
4) Then read it again, this time looking for places to revise. Try to find at least three. Then, fix them. A few things to keep in mind as you read this time: Does the sequence make sense for the overall message you are trying to convey? Do you spend too much time creating the setting or not enough? Does any dialogue sound realistic or contrived? (Read the dialogue out loud!) Does the beginning connect to the end? Does it need to? Is your ending where you stopped writing or really a little before or maybe after? Are your transitions smooth? Is there anywhere you could add more concrete descriptions? That’s just a starting point, but chances are, by now you’ll be able to find several places to improve.
5) Workshop your writing. When you finally think you’re done, you’re ready to call on the bookworms, literary nerds, writers or English professors that you may know—basically anyone that reads a lot and can give you helpful feedback. Let them read it, and remind them not to be too nice. Tell them you want at least three pieces of criticism.
Repeat these steps until you feel your writing is at its best. Okay, now your ideas are just as brilliant as when you first wrote them down— but your writing is a bit more polished. Congrats on finishing the revision part of the writing process! Now you’re ready to start submitting your work. Got cold feet? More on that in another post.
Interview with Delia Sherman, Author of The Freedom Maze
Volunteer Andrea interviews Delia Sherman, author of numerous books including, most recently, The Freedom Maze.
Andrea: Your main character, Sophie Martineau, is a young girl whose life is in flux. Did you start the writing process with the idea of sending someone back in time to the Civil War or some other way?
Delia Sherman: This novel started with a dream in which I was sitting on the window-seat of my study at home, looking out the window at a garden and maze that weren’t there in waking life. The image haunted me enough to keep worrying at it, thinking about where it might be and who I might find in it and what they might do there. I’ve spent time in the South (my mother’s family is from Louisiana), so I set it there, and I loved time-travel novels when I was a child, so I put that in. In short, one thing led to another until I had the group of characters and the situation and the setting and a bunch of scenes that eventually came together into The Freedom Maze.
Andrea: What gauge did you use to determine the appropriate tension level for a story about a girl who is considered one race in 1960 and another race in 1860?
Delia Sherman: As you can probably tell from my first answer, I’m not a planning kind of writer. I write, re-write, fiddle, and rearrange until I get something that has the right shape and feels good to me. When it comes to creating suspense and tension, I consult my own tolerances. I don’t like reading about violence, so I don’t often write about it. The scene in which Mrs. Fairchild whips Sophie is about as much as I can stand. I try to scare myself a little, but not too much. As for the question of Sophie’s race, my chief concern was to make clear how her attitude towards race changes when she comes to know a community of African Americans as individual human beings and not as servants. She is forced to realize, not as a huge revelation, but slowly, over time, that “us” and “them” are terms that only have meaning in the context of a social system, and that meaning can change without warning, without appeal, if the conditions are right.
Andrea: You have spent many years researching The Freedom Maze. What would you do differently if you had that research to do all over again?
Delia Sherman: I’d have started ten years later. Yes, really. A lot of the really interesting information I found on slave life and culture wasn’t really available when I began to research. As recently as the mid-nineties, most plantation museums were focused exclusively on Big House culture. Questions like “what did people eat?” and “what did people wear?” prompted lists of fancy, dinner-party dishes, corsets, and hoop-skirts. The standard texts on slavery and slave culture were written by white people, too. That’s changed in the last 15 years, which both made my job easier, in that there was a lot more material out there for me to look at, and harder, as I went back in and changed some things that turned out not to be as true as I thought they were. But everything I learned enriched the book and the world, so I was glad to do it.
The other thing I might have done was to spend even more time in Louisiana than I did. I love Louisiana. I love looking at houses and walking in the cane fields, talking to people and dancing to Cajun music. You can’t get the atmosphere of a place–the smells, the tastes, the way it feels to be there–from photographs or descriptions, no matter how good they are.
Andrea: What unexpected writing process opportunities did you find as Sophie came to life and you continued to develop the various worlds of the plantation where she lives?
Delia Sherman: The Freedom Maze went through a lot of changes over the twenty years I worked on it. The background, story, and characters remained more or less the same, but the pacing, the incidents, and the amount of information on plantation life, changed drastically from draft to draft. I’d say that the most valuable point of the process was when circumstance forced me to put the manuscript in a drawer. I hadn’t given up on the book, but I wasn’t at all sure that I’d be able to sell a children’s book about slavery, or, even if I could, that writing yet another draft of it would improve it. In the next four or five years, I wrote three other books, two of them for younger readers, and numerous short stories. Everything I wrote taught me more about pacing, exposition, about being clear. So when Kelly Link said she’d like to publish it, I was ready to tackle the daunting task of taking The Freedom Maze apart yet again and putting it back together, knowing a lot more about writing than I did the last time around.
Andrea: Your depictions of plantation life are intense and thought-provoking. What was your guiding principle in creating those scenes, and how did you arrive at it?
Delia Sherman: I just wanted it all to seem real. For me as a reader, a really good description isn’t just about what things look like. I like to know what the characters hear and smell and eat and touch, too. Sophie goes from the privileged sanctuary of her mother’s air-conditioned, comfortable home in a suburb, to a hot, damp old house next to a swamp, and from there to a time where bathing was difficult, sanitation primitive, clothing uncomfortable, and work heavy. And that was for the white folks. The slaves had it a whole lot worse. And I wanted the reader to experience that with Sophie.
Andrea: Once your writing was finished, how did you bring this project to the printed page?
Delia Sherman: I didn’t. I’d pretty much given up on it. I’d sold it once, to an editor who believed in it, and bought it back when that editor left the company. After that, my agent sent it to a number of publishers. Some of them said it was old-fashioned, some of them said it was politically problematical, some of them just didn’t like it. So I put it away. A few years later, Gavin Grant and Kelly Link, who founded the distinguished independent publisher Small Beer Press, decided to start a children’s imprint called Big Mouth House. Kelly, who is also a member of my writing group (and one of the best short-story writers of our time), remembered having workshopped The Freedom Maze and liking it. She came to me and asked if I might consider letting them publish it. After I finished dancing and whooping and generally carrying on, I said yes. And then I went to Louisiana again and read some more books and wrote three more drafts.
Andrea: Do you have any project in the works that you can tell me about?
Delia Sherman: I’m working on a middle-grade book about a boy who goes to work for an evil wizard in coastal Maine. It’s called The Wizard’s Apprentice, and it’s based on the story of the same name that was published a few years back in the Windling/Datlow anthology Troll’s Eye View.
The Freedom Maze is available from Small Beer Press and on Amazon. Click here to learn more about Delia Sherman.
Poetry Contest Extended Until February 6th
But we’re serious about the 6th. Thanks for all the submissions! We know that deadlines cause angst, but the beautiful weather in the Capitol region is making the Potomac Review crew staff extra generous. This deadline extension is our gift to you! Here’s a link to the submission guidelines.
