“Alas,” said the mouse, “the whole world is growing smaller every day. At first it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.”
“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.
A Note on the Short Short Story or Flash Fiction
The most universally accepted word count is 1,000; however, many editors consider anything under 1,500 to be a short short story. There are variations between writers and editors regarding what is a flash fiction and what is a microfiction, etc. I tend to think of microfictions as shorter than flash fictions. Here is a general breakdown that I follow:
Novel — Over 70,000 words
Novella — 17,500 to 70,000 words
Novelette — 7,500 to 17,500 words
Short Story — 1,000 to 7,500 words
Short Short Story — Under 1,000 words
There is the additional question of what separates flash fiction from a vignette. I like to think of flash fiction as a fully encapsulated narrative arc, with all the trimmings, only many of the trimmings and details are suggested, planted between the words, encouraging the reader to work these out for him or herself, but certainly not forgotten. A vignette leaves details out. It is a part of a story. It may be a character focus or setting study, a section that would function as an aside to a fuller narrative arc. For the linguists, think of the flash fiction as a fully functioning clause without all the adverbial modifiers and phrases. Think of the vignette as a phrase.
The following pyramid illustrates what we consider to be a full narrative arc.
In a longer short story, novella or novel, the pyramid or narrative arc will include all the setting, character and conflict details that provide the reader a fully encompassing experience.
So why, you may be asking, would someone read flash fiction?
Why would anyone read a form that leaves out some of these details, perhaps most of these details? There are many answers to this question, but the one I like best is that flash fiction when written well, precisely, with brevity and virtuosity, is as resonant as a perfectly formed poem, but it is prosaic, accessible, less built on metaphor than a poem, though, perhaps more so than a short story. The narrative voice is accessible and it forms frame, mood and tone, characters and conflict, but it is doing something that a longer work does not do as well. Flash fiction allows the reader a great deal of imaginative and exploratory room within the narrative. For readers who like space to explore within a narrative, room to stretch intellect and artistry, flash fiction can be a mental playground like no other prosaic form. As a writer of flash fiction, the key is giving just the right amount of strategic and precise detail to form this playground for the reader. Just as a child will become bored with a playground too familiar and full of rusty old equipment, or be overwhelmed with too much equipment, so can the reader. Finding the perfect balance will let the reader play and create and then return for more because this form is less about writers showing their geniuses and more about writers who can provide structure and room for their readers to exercise their own intellects.
If I still haven’t convinced you, consider this. Even if you are a diehard form writer, and you simply thought you’d try this flash thing everyone is talking about, imagine how much richer and complete your chapters and scenes will be when you approach them as little works all their own, within the larger context of the overall narrative frame. Writing and practicing flash fiction will make you more aware of your scene and chapter work within the larger work.
And for those of you who are already in love with the flash form. Welcome. Now, let’s stretch your talents and see if we can get you writing some new stories!
Reading Assignment | Five Stories by Lydia Davis (Conjunctions)
Discussion Assignment | What Concerns You Most About Writing Flash Fiction?
Below, in the Discussion and Comments area, describe your biggest concern about writing short short fiction. Perhaps it is the form altogether. Or maybe you are concerned about a particular craft area. What is your biggest concern? Take time to engage with your course peers and discuss your concerns. You may find you are not alone.
Writing Assignment | Small Spaces & Big Problems
Just as Kafka writes of a small maze and a small mouse, we are going to begin our writing exercises here. Choose a very small space. This may be a room, a box, or any manner of concepts. Be creative. Now, put yourself in this space with a problem so big you cannot possibly solve it in this small space. Now, solve it. You may be you or an animal or someone you admire or someone you loathe. Maybe you are Miley Cyrus stuck in a confessional. Maybe you are the Pope stuck in a tanning bed. Have fun with it.
In the past couple of years, as if in apology for his failure to pass the bar exam, Todd had become a surprisingly talented cook. Tonight he’d grilled salmon, and it was done to perfection, a vivid tic-tac-toe board of grill marks seared into the flesh of each moist, flaky fillet. He beamed as the compliments poured in.
“This is delicious,” said Sarah.
“You could start a restaurant,” said Richard. “House of Todd.”
“Your wine is terrific,” Todd replied.
“Speaking of wine…” Richard raised his glass. “Here’s to the chef, and to his lovely wife. Salud.”
There was a slightly awkward pause after the toast, a moment of collective floundering they masked with tentative, encouraging smiles. Kathy was about to fill the space by asking Richard if it might be possible for her to film some of his meetings with the Charlie Chopsticks executives. For too long, she’d put off planning a new project, on the assumption that Todd would pass the bar and find a good job, freeing her to take a break for a couple of years, spend a little more time with Aaron, maybe have another baby. But recently she’d come to accept the possibility that it might not happen, and it had occurred to her that it might be fun to do some kind of comic documentary, something lighthearted but socially engaged, a little hipper and edgier than her current project. The creation of a nationwide chain of Chinese restaurants by a bunch of clueless white guys seemed like just the sort of vehicle she was looking for, a way to shine an amusing light on what was actually a troubling phenomenon: the voracious march of American business, its insatiable need to devour everything in its path— other people’s history, their cuisine, their ethnic identities and cultural traditions— and then spit it back out as bland commodities for sale to middle America. But she needed to be diplomatic, to figure out a way not to tip her satirical hand, and while she was pondering her strategy, Richard shifted the conversation in an entirely different direction.
—Little Children by Tom Perrotta
Welcome to week one of the “Novel I Workshop: Creating Unforgettable Characters.” Thank you for joining us! This week, we will focus on the protagonist.
In the above film clip and the corresponding text from Tom Perrotta’s novel, Little Children, the viewer and reader are introduced to Todd, one of the protagonists. This work is an ensemble work and weaves multiple sub narratives throughout the overall novel arc. Todd has his own narrative. His wife, Kathy, has her own narrative. Sarah, his lover, and her husband, Richard, all have their own narratives, internal conflicts and arcs. There are several more characters who have their own narratives. Of course, any great novel or short story will include essential characters who have their own internal conflicts, but many narratives will point to one particular character as the obvious protagonist and focus character. In Little Children, one might call Todd the leading protagonist and Sarah the second protagonist with both Kathy and Richard their antagonists. Ask yourself how deeply you dig into each individual character? Do they each have their own internal conflicts and narrative arcs?
Before we explore this idea of protagonist further, let’s review some very wise words offered by Kurt Vonnegut on the art of creating character.
Be a Sadist
“Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” (Kurt Vonnegut on Writing)
When we write fictional narrative, especially in our first drafts, we are often so caught up into the world of it, the massive and changing aspects of this world and its relationships, that we cannot focus on one character at a time, not even our protagonists. This is a natural and necessary part of the first drafting phase. However, we must not stop there. We must, at some point in the revision process, focus on one character at a time so to better know the character. We all know this, but we don’t always do it to the level our characters deserve.
In this course we will not be focusing on the overall narrative arc of your book. We have other workshops with that focus. In this workshop, we don’t want a synopsis or an explanation of the book. We don’t want your paraphrased descriptions as to why your character is important. You are going to prove this in schematic mapping and narrative focus writing.
The best way to critically and objectively view our characters is to try and remove ourselves from them while also digging into them. One of the best ways to do this is through analysis, mapping, tracking and coding our character within the narrative. With the following craft techniques, we want your characters to speak only for themselves. If each of the three characters in this course focus—protagonist, antagonist and one supporting character—cannot hold interest on their own, without the support of the fuller setting and narrative behind them, then they are not working hard enough. In this course, we will use character specific and focused schematic and narrative studies to more fully discover your characters outside the immediate context of your novel.
The Golden Rule
If at anytime you feel you must explain your character to us as an introduction to your assignment submission, then your character’s narrative details are not working hard enough and/or they are not accessible enough on the page. Do not attempt to explain or describe your characters as introduction to your schematic and narrative assignment submissions. Do not attempt to explain or describe your overall book project as a way to help us understand your character. Just complete the assignments as given—this is a proven and successful method, promise—and give your characters all the information they need within the specific assignment parameters so that we will connect with them. In this course, our characters speak for themselves. You, the writer, are merely their bard. You must get out of their way.
NOTE: Some writers will initially have difficulty with this “getting out of the way” of their characters and letting their characters’ needs come first. Some writers will want the workshop instructor to provide more immediate, step by step “fixes” for their characters, manuscripts and craft in general, but the reality is that there is no quick fix or “answer” to great writing. It is hours, days, weeks, months, years in the chair and writing story after story then cutting the stories up and rewriting them again. You may find the schematic exercises to be difficult and/or uncomfortable. There is a primary reason why this happens. Writers are by nature right-brained thinkers, and so using the left brain/logical as a primary means toward exploration and research can be disconcerting, especially at the beginning. When you learn to employ both the right and left processes in rewriting and revision, great things will happen to your stories. Please work your way through these first steps, even if they are painful, and trust that this method is not only successful, it has time and again, turned skeptics of schematic processing into practitioners of schematic processing.
Flannery O’Connor is infamous for having made statements about not being able to teach good writing to other writers. She was right in one respect: a successful writer and teacher cannot teach great writing to other writers, but the successful writer and teacher can help support writers in teaching themselves the nooks and crannies of their own organic voices. When writers are willing to do the hard work of writing, rewriting, revision and schematic exploration and are willing to receive honest and pointed feedback then start the rewrite and revision process over again, writers can teach themselves to be excellent writers.
I will be reading and giving direct feedback on both schematic and narrative submissions. Be warned. I will be honest and pointed, but always with your characters’ best interests in minds, which also means I will always have the development of your craft and best interest of craft in mind as well. I will point out the successes as well as areas for further exploration.
Interviews & Background Checks
Say you had an important job for someone to do and you must hire someone new to do this important job. Would you hire just anyone? Would you grab some stranger off the street and give him or her a look over, identify hair color, eye color, a few gestures or habits then offer this person your important job?
No. You would not. You would do background checks, interviews, perhaps even tests and then after they’ve been on the job a few days, weeks, months… you would touch base and observe, identify whether this person is still a good fit or needs to go. If this person is a good fit, you’d not try to do his or her job. You would give this person the room he or she needs to shine. And you would support this person from your appropriate position.
Our characters are no different. You must interview them, hang out with them, observe them, analyze their performances, go to dinner with them, drink with them, share intimacies with them, ask the intimate questions to which they don’t want you to know the answers. And you must do it all again and again. The first few drafts of a story are merely first dates, initial interviews. When you think you know them, you do it again. If you find, after writing this character and interviewing this character and interviewing this character again, that the character is worthy of his or her position, then you let the character tell you how he or she wants to do the his or her job within the overall story. To ascertain what this job is, you must pull out of the overall manuscript a bit, hold it lightly in your mind, while you schematically dissect the details of the character.
On the Proper Relationship with Your Character
In literary fiction, there is no room for writers to have proper and polite relationships with their characters. Literary fiction is not nice. Literary writers are not nice. They are honest and detailed and never gratuitous. Sex and violence must be earned and must be perfect. Essential. You need to know your characters’ dirty secrets and how far they are willing to go to realize their goals.
Remember: In getting to know our characters, we aren’t looking to fill our expectations of what we think our characters must be, but rather, we are looking to discover our characters for what they are. And don’t be mislead. Just because you’ve given your characters birth, does not mean you know them. Your characters are hiding secrets and you must dig. Each decision you make about your character plants seeds for further secrets you have not yet discovered. As much as we think we drive this character development, at some point, your characters will be in the drivers’ seats and this is when you know your characters are moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional.
In this lesson, we’ll focus on your protagonist and bringing your protagonist to a fully three-dimensional realization.
You may likely feel you’ve already investigated your character to ad nauseam. And hopefully you have. However, you have not yet explored the character with group feedback or enough feedback, which is why you are here. It’s time to make your protagonist earn his or her keep within your book. Consider this your protagonist’s coming out party. And we are the firing squad, the mentors and the cheerleaders. We are going to make your protagonist work harder than you ever thought he or she could!
What is a Protagonist?
As writers, we already know this definition, but we’ll review it quickly here for academic’s sake. The classic definition of a protagonist is the character who is the focus of the overall narrative and undergoes the most significant change. A literary protagonist is rarely ever considered to be morally “good.” Literary protagonists are complicated and will often challenge the reader’s concept of “good” and “bad.” Keep in mind that the best literary protagonists are usually also his or her own antagonists to some degree—i.e. person versus self internal conflict.
You might have more than one protagonist, such as in Tom Perrotta’s novel, Little Children. In the below film excerpt, Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) and Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson), navigate an uncomfortable dinner with their spouses. As you watch this scene, consider your own curiosity about these characters. It is this curiosity that drives the narrative and dramatic tension. We will be looking for opportunities of this within your character arcs.
Some Great Literary Characters
Do any of these characters look familiar? As you complete this week’s assignments, consider how some of these familiar characters would compare to your character’s attributes. Some of these characters are obvious protagonists. Some are not. Some are a mix of protagonist and antagonist, such as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Patrick Bateman falls into a special breed of character. He both embodies decorum and rails against it. He is a walking irony, a satire of modern decadence. This makes him a ripe character for study and we will focus on him in next week’s lesson.
& so many more. Below, you’ll see a section where you can discuss your favorite protagonist.
Writing Assignments
Below are two assignments. One is a schematic exploration and the other is a narrative exploration. This is a system for character revision that I have developed and have used in my own revision processes. It includes many revision strategies I’ve been taught by other, more accomplished writers than myself, but with some twists and combinations of my own that I’ve found to be helpful. It includes a revised Freytag’s Pyramid and a character questionnaire that will help you track and analyze the character.
By considering your character in both schematic and narrative forms, separate from the context of your novel, you will begin to flesh out your character’s individual motivations, details, strengths and needs. Much of what you discover about your character through this exercise might never be written on the pages of your novel, but all of it will add to the complexities of the character arc overall. Or, you may find that you will have developed an excellent additional scene or chapter for the longer work. You might have a new short story. Eventually, when your novel is picked up by a publishing house, these character studies can make excellent spin off stories to send to indie editors, who will be helpful in getting the word out on your book.
I cannot stress enough that the schematic character arc should never be the starting point for any character. Characters should birth from messy, narrative first drafts. Overly structured or outlined birthing of characters will too often truncate characters. Begin with messy first draft(s) then once you have the messy and beautiful creature in front of you—a novel or short story you plan to expand into novel—start analyzing the protagonist via the below system. You’ll see that this system can be practiced on your own, and perhaps you have done this already in some form. This workshop experience, however, will give you group feedback in a multi-tier approach or what I like to call the triad approach—protagonist, antagonist, main supporting character—in a progressive character interaction.
For this lesson, we will focus on the protagonist, probably the most developed character in your story to date, but I encourage you to use this pyramidal structure for each of your main characters as you revise your work over the next months/years. You will not only flesh out details, you will build visual profiles and create a character scrapbook. You will be amazed at how much clarity you will gain from this repeated character exercise. The magic of it lies in the isolation of the characters. As much as we want to believe we know our characters, until we’ve isolated a character and analyzed the character, our knowledge is blurry at best.
This is a patient process. Give your character arcs time to develop, revise and marinate. This single character focus is the heart of an excellent literary narrative.
*Don’t forget: Sometimes our settings and/or iconic items want to be treated as characters, too. Not always, but sometimes. Keep your eye open for this.
The below character arc exercise will force you to schematically study your character. You will recall details you’ve already written and you will consider details that maybe you’ve held lightly in your mind but not actually put to paper. In this exercise, you will be forced to actualize your character on and off the page so to isolate and deepen his or her character arc. Complete the following exercise by clicking on the NEXT button and completing each prompt. After you are done, the schematic will be emailed to you. Please add this emailed information at the end of your “Assignment 2: Narrative Exploration.”
Assignment 1: Schematics
Assignment 2: Narrative Exploration
Now that you have explored your character schematically and individually, aside from whatever intention the longer work may have had for the character, you are ready to flesh your character out in his or her own narrative. Write a 1000 word scene or flash fiction about your character. You might center this short short narrative on one of the schematic arc details—i.e. worst or best night. This story must not already be part of the written words in your longer work. This must be new, whether or not you’ve already been thinking on this event in your character’s history.
You might find that this character narrative will become part of the longer work, or you may find it will not. Either way, writing this character narrative is essential to knowing your character better in narrative form, and this will help you write your character with more feeling and interest in the longer work. 1000 words. This word count is firm. Please copy and paste your Schematic Arc at the end of this Narrative Exploration. Both Assignment 1 and 2 should be submitted by the following Sunday, below in the forums, as one MS Word document.
Guidelines
Due Date: The following Sunday, 6 pm.
Submit to below forum.
Character Arc Schematic Submission: Please submit your character arc, along with your writing assignment, to the forums as one document
Narrative Submission: 1000 words or less. (The schematic is separate and does not count in this word count). The narrative word count is firm. This is not only a practice in characterization but also in precision and brevity, the soul of good writing. If you are usually a “wordy” writer and haven’t had a lot of experience with short short forms or flash fiction, this exercise is going to do wonders for your overall craft. Promise. MS Word format, double-spaced, 12 point font, Times New Roman, 1 in margins, heading with name, address, email, website (if applicable), and phone number on page one. Page two and forward should have in the top right corner your last name and page number. You can use this template: Universal Manuscript Format. Follow first, second and third draft techniques below. After you’ve completed revision, please submit to the forums. Link below.
First Draft: As you write the first draft, let your creativity go where it needs to go. First drafts are meant to be messy and creatively uninhibited. After writing the first draft, lay it to the side for at least a day before revising. Please submit the finished third draft to the forums. Link below.
Second Draft: Read through again, and revise for language and lyricism. Remember, we don’t answer questions for our readers, we simply prompt them to ask good questions. Giving our readers room to make meaning for themselves within our narratives is a sign of artistic literary excellence. Now, lay the work aside for at least a day before your next revision.
Third Draft: Now read this revision aloud as you record yourself. Upon listening to your recording, consider any language issues in your revision. You might also ask a trusted reader to read the manuscript aloud to you as you sit with your own copy and make revisions. Hearing our language aloud is one of the quickest and surest ways to improve our pacing, tone, and cadence.
Please make sure to contact me directly with any questions regarding assignments and technology. The fastest way to get ahold of me is by text to 301-514-2380.
Discussion
In the comments section below, briefly introduce yourself and describe one of your favorite protagonists. Feel free to discuss and have fun with this. At some point in time, you might find it helpful to create a schematic arc and 1000 word narrative for your favorite protagonist for your own critical study and comparison’s to your own protagonists.
“Always be a poet, even in prose.” ―Charles Baudelaire
Welcome back! This week, we will explore syntax and cadence through prose poems and short short forms. Then you will create your own.
In short story prose, the literary writer will leave the formal, grammatical constructions of syntax behind and will employ an aesthetic that is both simple and lyrical. For the most part, the sentence structure follows a subject + predicate construction. The introductory sentence variety writers are taught in high school and early university composition courses has little to do with the art of literary storytelling, though, the literary storyteller must know the grammatical rules for the purposes of knowing when and how to break them. Two excellent books on formal structure and grammar are:
If you feel that your grammatical basis would benefit from some quick brushing up, these two works, Woe Is I and Eats, Shoot and Leaves, are fantastic reference works that are well organized resource books and quick reads.
The Prose Poem
One of the best ways to explore your authentic voice, syntax style and cadence is through the study of prose poetry. Prose poetry offers the best of prosaic logic combined with the lyricism of poetry. In reading and writing this form, the short story writer understands his/her language preferences, what “feels” right and “sounds” right to the ear. In this study, it is important that you read the below example works and your own works aloud so that the cadence is made definitive for you.
The prose poem will often appear as prose, structured in paragraphs, but read like poetry. In some cases, the prose poem may be structured with line breaks, such as a traditional poem, but the rhythm takes a narrative cadence and form that engages the reader much like prose. In the first issue of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, editor Peter Johnson explained, “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels” (Peter Johnson, editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal). This precarious position is a trademark of hybrid forms. The reader will often question where the work “fits.”
Within a narrative cadence, the prose poem will also use poetic techniques: fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. Narrative lengths can range from a few lines to several pages. Short short stories often combine with the prose poem form in order to create broader and deeper narratives up to 1000 words and less. Some editors and writers will allow short short forms to include up to 1500 words; however, 1000 words is the market standard and is a good word count for writers who wish to write short short stories, prose poems and essays, especially for online journals and venues from The Paris Review to The New York Times.
Andif sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch,in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, thewave, thestar, thebird, theclock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking… ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”
Notice how Baudelaire uses repetition and listing of both words and contexts, often used in traditional poetic forms, to give the prose more than mere cadence, but rather, rhythm, lyricism, more overt metaphor and cyclical contexts. Contemporary novelists and short story writers, who are writing in a literary aesthetic, will employ the very same poetic elements within their prose styles to some degree:
s, c: alliteration, consonance
ing: terminal rhyme
i, is: assonance
the, wave, star, bird, clock: word repetition in addition to repetition of movement and imagery, a rounded sort of gliding, cyclical.
ask, everything: repetition
What other repetitions of language and context do you see?
alliteration: the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds through a sequence of words—for example, “While I nodded, nearly napping” in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”
assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds in a sequence of words with different endings—for example, “The death of the poet was kept from his poems” in W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”
consonance: a poetic device characterized by the repetition of the same consonant two or more times in short succession, as in “pitter patter” or in “all mammals named Sam are clammy”.
Other writers who practiced prose poems include Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Listen to the below reading of Baudelaire’s “Be Drunk.”
Now it’s your turn, [userinfo field=”first_name”]{{empty}}[/userinfo]! Write a short short story (no more than 1000 words) that includes at least one poetic device studied in this lesson. Write the story in paragraph, prosaic form and follow the revision guidelines below, making sure to pay close attention to the aloud reading phase. As you revise each draft, read a paragraph or two of your favorite novel or short story by another author then revise your work. You might also try the ages old writing trick of handwriting a paragraph from a favorite and contemporary work. As you handwrite the passage, you’ll train your sensibilities and syntax toward that of your favorite writer.
Also, it is strongly recommended that you read your work aloud while recording yourself, several times and with each revision, so you can study the progression of cadence and syntax in your work as you revise. Remember, syntax and cadence is something that is foundational to the writer’s “voice.” A writer can spend a lifetime perfecting his or her voice and every voice is like a fingerprint, no two are exactly alike. Think of syntax and cadence as a marathon effort, the long run, rather than a sprint. Give yourself permission to let your voice change and define itself over time.
Submit for Individualized Feedback
Please use Universal Manuscript Guidelines when submitting: .doc or .docx, double spacing, 10-12 pt font, Times New Roman, 1 inch margins, first page header with contact information, section breaks “***” or “#.”
“Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” (Kurt Vonnegut on Writing)