Another little essay of mine on flash fiction was just posted over at Flash Fiction Chronicles today, ‘Frame Your Flash, Don’t Fence It In.’ It’s about the world outside the story, the world beyond the ‘frame’ of the piece — and in the case of flash fiction that is a very small frame indeed, under 1,000 words. This world outside — sometimes existing in a writer’s notes, sometimes the object of pure, spontaneous bluffing on the part of the writer, is one of the things that gives fiction a sense of believability and verisimilitude:

But think of flash fiction — indeed, all fiction — as being surrounded not by a fence, but a window frame. When we look out the window from a fixed position we see only a slice of the world itself. Prior experience tells us there is more to the world than meets the eye, but so too do various clues in the scene itself — perhaps we only see a part of a road, or the shadow of a tree, or, indeed, neighbors moving in and out of frame. Good, evocative fiction should do this too, it should hint at a larger world.

This is even more important for speculative fiction — since the worlds of spec fic are not the world that readers themselves live in and, by extension, believe in. I go on to talk about the various tricks one uses to achieve this, not the least of which is getting yourself into a mindset where you, the author, believe the truth of what you are writing. When you believe in the world outside of the frame, it’s much easier to hint at, and much easier to get your audience to harness their own imaginations in service of your story. For, when the audience starts conjuring their own conception of the world beyond the frame — perhaps even betraying some disappointment that more of this world was not given to them! — then the writer knows they have achieved the great feat of illusion that is central to storytelling.

Over at Flash Fiction Chronicles today I have a post that recalls my misspent youth with some fondness. You see, it turns out all that time I spent reading Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks and Warhammer’s White Dwarf Magazine, I was actually learning how to write flash fiction. Yup, it’s true, all those little snipets of flavor text and one-page stories were way ahead of their time and many were perfect examples of what would come to be known as flash fiction. Not only that but some of that ‘fluff,’ as it’s called, went beyond mere vignette status to give us characterization, setting, and a beginning, middle, and end — all in a handful of paragraphs. This was a style of fiction I never saw anywhere else until the advent of the internet.

Turns out, when it came time to write the stuff myself, both the ‘fluff’ of the RPG and wargames world and spec fic of my own devising, I was ready (which is probably another reason to be saying Thank You, D&D).

Click here to read ‘How I Learned to Write Flash Without Even Knowing It’ at FFC.

I am slowly getting caught up with my reading — not only the stuff that I’m supposed to be reviewing, but also those projects of which I am fortunate enough to be a part. Northern Haunts is one such — an anthology of 100 flash fiction stories released back in the beginning of the year. The book has an interesting theme — not only is it set specifically in New England, but each story is intended to be the sort of thing one could tell around the campfire. Indeed, you could use Northern Haunts exactly in that way, just picking it up to read a piece or two to give your friends the willies.

Like The Best of Every Day Fiction, I find that Northern Haunts and other flash fiction anthologies are best read a few stories at a time, rather than in one big gulp. And, although I have yet to finish it, I’ve been very impressed by the quality of the fiction so far — everything from ghost stories to gross-outs, mysterious strangers, monsters, and haunted environs of all kinds. There’s even a story about a pirate named William Ward!

My own tale, “The Thing in the Woods,” is about a hunting expedition that discovers a . . . well, a thing in the woods. But it is just one of 100 creepy and clever bite-sized horrors that make for great snack food reading or read-aloud storytelling.

All proceeds from Northern Haunts go to benefit the American Cancer Society. It is available in both paperback and hardback from Shroud Publishing.

Over at Flash Fiction Chronicles today I’ve posted about how flash fiction lets a writer really experiment with execution, especially when it comes to authorial voice. In The Many Voices of Flash I talk about how flash’s quick and somewhat disposable nature makes it a perfect vehicle for experimentation, but beyond that it is the constraint of flash with its hard word limit that means such experimental means are often the best way to squeeze every ounce of effectiveness out of so short a story.

In the case of voice, I think it is such a powerful way to create character and mood that to not use it when appropriate — to adopt instead a plain, unadorned, or straightforward style designed purely for clarity or ease of reading — is to throw away one of the best tricks we have available to us. And on the question of voice, I like to draw a distinction between the author’s natural style and that adopted for the story in question:

Instead of voice I like to think of many different voices, those tricks of style that are as different from story to story as the characters, themes, and settings of each piece. Different because they are integral, indivisible parts of the story itself, whether they are the actual words of a first person tale or the differences in cadence and inflection in a third person narrative, there is no excuse not to bring a conscious mind to the creation of these voices. Especially, as I’ve said, in flash fiction where to fail to do so is to write without one of the most powerful tools in the writer’s arsenal.

I love playing with voice, writing in dialect, changing style to fit a story, and I think, so far, I’ve done so with a lot of success. If that isn’t something you yourself have attempted, consider doing so in a few pieces of flash fiction, its the perfect medium to play around in.

Now, having newly discovered the very cool Flash Fiction Chronicles blog, I’ve wasted no time getting some scribbles of my own over there in the hopes that the coolness will rub off on me. My first post there, Flash: The Best Exercise, is up today, and in it I talk about how flash affords writers an unparalleled opportunity for development because it encourages us to try different things.

Flash fiction affords a unique opportunity for just this kind of stepping out and doing something different. The advice may be as old as the hills — writers have forever been saying that short pieces of free-writing, character sketches, writing-prompt challenges, and other assorted short short work are great ways to work out new techniques, explore untested ideas, or just cut loose with raw experimentation — the difference is that now such work stands a real chance of being published.

The growth of flash fiction markets is great news for anyone that wants to try new voices, styles, techniques, or genres because it lets us write something new not merely as a private exercise, but in a way that ‘counts,’ since writing toward publication really is the best way to get better.

Anyway, go check it out. I hope to have some more posts up in coming weeks, but there is a lot of great stuff on there already if you haven’t had a look.

Having been out of the loop for a while, I completely missed Every Day Fiction’s new Flash Fiction blog until recently, but it’s been a pleasure to catch up on the entries over there. Flash Fiction Chronicles, edited by EDF regular Gay Degani, is exactly what it appears to be: a blog focused completely on the art and phenomenon of flash fiction.

Start with Gay’s own post ‘Flash by Defintion‘ on what flash is, and isn’t, by way of introduction. From there you might want to check out the posts from the EDF team that originally appeared in The Best of EDF; Jordan, Camille, and Steven each sharing their own perspective on Flash Fiction and on the fantastic first year of EDF’s existence. But there is a lot more, posts from EDF regulars like K.C. Ball, Oonah V. Joslin, and Sarah Hilary (among others) ranging from story analyses and nitty-gritty dissections of the craft of writing flash, to personal anecdotes and words of inspiration. I think the blog is off to a great start, with something there for anyone interested in writing flash, whether they’ve never done it before or already have a dozen stories under their belt.