Stay and write with us in the beautiful Palazzo Forani in the Italian countryside, May, 2019! Click HERE for more information!
Launching Today: Our Springtime in Italy Retreat!
Author: Kathy Fish
Kathy Fish has been writing, teaching, and editing flash fiction for over 20 years. She has published five collections of short fiction, most recently Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Washington Square Review, and numerous other journals, textbooks, and anthologies. Fish’s widely anthologized “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild,” was selected for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 and the current edition of The Norton Reader. She is the recipient of a Ragdale Foundation Fellowship and a Copper Nickel Editors’ Prize. Her free monthly newsletter, The Art of Flash Fiction, includes a craft article and writing prompt. Subscribe at artofflashfiction.com .
Interrogating Your Scenes: A Revision Exercise
According to Jordan Rosenfeld, author of the wonderful Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time :
“Scenes are capsules in which compelling characters undertake significant actions in a vivid and memorable way that allows the events to feel as though they are happening in real time.”
As a storytelling unit, your scenes must work. The following is a revision exercise aimed at honing your scenes and “keeping them honest.”
Go back and read a story or flash that is still in early draft phase. Locate ONE scene that you’d like to make more powerful or effective. In flash fiction that one scene may actually be your entire story (and note that a single scene does NOT a flash make unless it has some larger significance or resonance beyond the confines of that scene).
It’s often extremely useful to read a scene aloud so that you can “hear” where it falters.
Now ask the following questions of your scene:
Does the scene capture your reader’s attention?
Is the scene played out dramatically, i.e. with action and dialogue, perhaps in a new setting? You need to provide your reader with an experience, not a lecture.
Could more sensory detail be included to bring the reader into the scene? Do we have a sense of the characters inhabiting a specific space? (avoid “talking heads” syndrome)
What is the most important piece of information that needs to be revealed in this scene? How is the story moved along? (i.e., does the scene create movement in the story, however subtle?)
What does your character want at the beginning of this scene? Think of this as the scene’s “engine.”
Is there any complication or trouble in this scene? If not, add some!
And how does your character respond to this complication or trouble? This is a great way to show us who she is.
Look at the end of the scene. Does your reader now know more about the characters? Is she compelled to keep reading?
Could the dialogue be made sharper? Try cutting way back and see what it does for your scene. Avoid “ping pong” dialogue where every question is answered and it feels more like an interview than a conversation. Ruthlessly cut any “chatty” dialogue that doesn’t move the scene.
Are you making use of subtext? Using body language? Is there anything interestingly strange or out of place here? Sometimes adding an unexpected detail enlivens a scene and primes your brain to think outside the box.
Finally, see what happens to the overall story if you cut the scene entirely. Remember flash fiction writers: Interesting things can happen in the white space!
~Kathy
Max Hipp on Writing, Retreating, and “Getting Messy”
Hi Max! You will be joining Nancy & me for Create in Costa Rica in January. Thanks! We’re so excited for this retreat. What, if any, has been your writing workshop/retreat experience in the past? How do you find ways to honor your writing in your day-to-day life?
I did a Barrelhouse Writer Camp last summer in rural PA (Barrelhouse does great work for writing culture—not only do they publish a journal and many books, they also offer a grant for up-and-coming lit journals!). A creek ran through the property and we’d all get together, a few dozen writers and editors, to eat dinner and watch a terrible movie. I was able to get a lot done.
I make time for writing every day, at least a couple of hours. If I can’t do that, if I don’t have time to even sit down, I’ll write things on my phone. Even if it’s just a paragraph or an idea.
Respond to this quote by Brenda Ueland: “So you see, imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”
This is from one of the four million books on writing I’ve read that I wish I owned. Of course I agree. Personally I’m trying to spend less time “dawdling and puttering” so more of it has an end result.
What is your favorite story that you yourself have written (“favorite” doesn’t have to mean “best” or more successful or whatever). And why is it your favorite?
The truth is my favorite piece is whatever I’m working on. I’ve got a few new things bouncing around, though, that I think are pretty good. Even though nobody has taken them yet, the rejections from journals have been complimentary and specific rather than boilerplate, so that’s somewhat encouraging.
Tell us something we don’t know about you that you are happy to share. AND/OR What are you most looking forward to in the upcoming retreat in Costa Rica?
I write songs, short stories, flashes, and aborted novels. I used to compartmentalize the forms because I was thinking they should all be made so differently. Now I get messy and let them leak all over each other.
I’m looking forward to a community of writers in a new place. It helps so much to read works in progress with other writers and editors–people who are great readers–and just talk about what you’re making.
I love what you say about allowing different forms to “leak all over each other.” And I agree wholeheartedly about the value of community for writers! Max, thanks for taking the time to chat. Nancy and I look forward to creating in Costa Rica with you!
NOTE: A few spots remain for Create in Costa Rica in January! Join us!
Bio: Max Hipp is a teacher and writer living in Mississippi. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, New World Writing, Unbroken Journal, and Five 2 One. Follow him on Twitter: @maximumevil
“Writing has been my window.” A conversation with April Bradley
Nancy and I are so excited that the wonderful April Bradley will be joining us for Rendezvous in the Rockies this August in Breckenridge, Colorado! Here, April chats with me about her writing life and her story, “Little Wake,” which is my personal favorite.
You’re coming to Breckenridge in the summer for our retreat. What has been your writing workshop/retreat experience in the past? How do you find ways to honor your writing in your day to day life?
Along with several workshops with Kathy Fish and thematic ones on the craft of flash and revision offered by Nancy Stohlman, I’ve taken two hybrid writing workshops, one each with Robert Vaughan over at Word Tango and Jonathan Cardew with Bending Genres. I took a workshop on Surreal Flash from Meg Pokrass as well.
I met Kathy while taking Hannah Tinti’s fantastic workshop over at One Story. Last summer I began my MFA program and had my first academic fiction workshop at the Sewanee School of Letters with Jamie Quatro.
I read like a lunatic regardless if I am actively writing. I love the idea of honoring one’s writing. That’s so much better than feeling guilty about not writing.
Respond to this quote by Dani Shapiro:
“Writing saved my life. Writing has been my window — flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence — my way of interpreting everything within my grasp. Writing has extended that grasp by pushing me beyond comfort, beyond safety, past my self-perceived limits. It has softened my heart and hardened my intellect. It has been a privilege. It has whipped my ass. It has burned into me a valuable clarity. It has made me think about suffering, randomness, good will, luck, memory responsibility, and kindness, on a daily basis — whether I feel like it or not. It has insisted that I grow up. That I evolve. It has pushed me to get better, to be better. It is my disease and my cure. It has allowed me not only to withstand the losses in my life but to alter those losses — to chip away at my own bewilderment until I find the pattern in it.”
This is such a wonderful expression of what writing can do for the life and mind of writer, and some of it articulates my own experience. I did not start writing fiction until I was in my 40s and found different ways of attaining and experiencing what she describes, mostly through my own graduate work in philosophy and theology and though my experiences in motherhood. Creative writing, however, pushed me in ways I’ve never imagined. I’ve cried, walked away from a story, swearing I was done with it, only to sit down and work with it more. Writing has been that only thing as Shapiro writes, “…has allowed me not only to withstand the losses in my life but to alter those losses…” Writing has revealed things to me about human nature I didn’t expect. It has revealed things about my own life and past I did not recall. Writing is closely related to reading and to other writers. Writing and reading opens up new worlds for me, allows me to me to express more fully the different aspects of myself but when it reaches others, and when readers tell me something I’ve written takes on meaning for them, there is the gift.
What is your favorite story that you yourself have written (“favorite” doesn’t have to mean “best” or more successful or whatever). And why is it your favorite?
My favorite is “Little Wake.” CHEAP POP published it last year, and I was thrilled. I managed to convey a moment in time and expand it to something so much more and capture the emotion I felt in that moment, that sense of magic, bittersweet loss, love, even a childhood fascination and an adult crush. I can still hear the frogs croaking along to Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da when I think about that story. Got lucky on that one.
Tell us something we don’t know about you that you are happy to share. : )
I meet people I know in unexpected, surprising places like in Venice or New York, in airports, concerts, interviews, courtrooms, emergency rooms. Neat things like that happen to me, and I love it.
Love that! And thanks so much, April. See you in Breckenridge in August!
April Bradley is from Tennessee and lives with her family outside New Haven, Connecticut. Her short fiction has been recently nominated for The Pushcart Prize as well as The Best of Small Fictions. Her writing has appeared in CHEAP POP, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Narratively, NANO Fiction, and Smokelong Quarterly’s “Why Flash Fiction” Series, among others. She has a Master’s in Ethics from Yale Divinity School and is an MFA candidate at the Sewanee School of Letters.
50 Random Sentences or How to Face the Blank Page
We all have experienced that frozen feeling when faced with the blank page. This is an exercise (originally published in Lascaux Review) I have used often and it’s never failed to produce a piece of fiction:
Your goal is to write fifty sentences as quickly as you can. The sentences needn’t be connected in any way. In fact, it’s better if they aren’t. Allow yourself to write whatever comes to mind no matter how weird. You’ll want to number them as you go to keep track. You may start out with a bang, then flounder around sentence #20 or so. Don’t stop. If you have to, go ahead and write a few very simple sentences, like “the car is red” just to keep the words flowing.
When you have finished, go back and read the sentences aloud. Listen for the ones that have the most juice. Where does your voice falter? Which sentences evoke strong emotion? Which ones have their own peculiar beauty? Which demand further investigation?
Highlight these.
Now write each good sentence at the top of its own fresh sheet of paper and write new sentences beneath it. You want to follow a line of thought if you can. Move forward into a narrative if it feels right, but don’t force it. Write whatever emerges without judgment. I promise, at some point you’ll feel a sense of urgency that tells you: There’s a story here. Now tell it.
~Kathy
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