Writing Exercise: Flash Fiction
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- 8/15/2011 |
- 10:00 am
One of the hot new trends in creative writing during the past few years is called Flash Fiction. Ever heard of it?
Basically, Flash Fiction means 'writing a very, very short story with a strict word count.' In most cases, stories can be no longer than 500 or 1,000 words, which equals out to just a few pages. But in some cases I've even seen Flash Fiction contests where the entries could be no longer than 250 words -- that's just one page of writing for an entire short story!
About a year ago, I was working with my son, himself a talented writer with a strong command of language. The problem was, he has too much language. His stories were brilliant, but practically everything he wrote was too flowery, too bloated, too wordy. I tried sharing the advice of the great William Faulkner, who said, "In writing, you must kill all your darlings," -- which basically means that once you put a word down on the page, you should be prepared to come back and edit it out later, no matter how much you're attached to it.
But it wasn't helping. He couldn't bring himself to part with any of his beloved nouns, verbs or modifiers.
And then a lucky thing happened. I came across an ad for a Flash Fiction contest open to young writers. I shared it with my son, and encouraged him to submit one of his stories. However, there was a catch: the word limit for the contest was firm at 750, and he hadn't written anything remotely that short. He'd be forced to cut a story in half -- to kill his darlings -- in order to qualify.
The results were a little painful for him at first. I watched him agonize over what to get rid of, chopping out descriptions and then adding them back, cutting out sub-plots and then patching up the holes that resulted. But by the time he was finished, much to his surprise, the finished product (at half the original length) was much better than it had been before. What had been a pretty good story was now a great story!
The lesson here is that we, as writers, often overwrite. We get so tied up in our stories and we become so attached to every last word that after a while, we can't see the forest for the trees. We can't see that being efficient with our writing is sometimes the best gift we can give a reader.
Now, that doesn't mean that every story should be free of description, or that you should go through all your writing and trim out 50 percent. It only means that learning how to get rid of stuff that may not serve your story -- even when you love it! -- is all part of becoming a great writer.
For this month's writing exercise, I want YOU to come up with an original piece of flash fiction. Set a word count for yourself, maybe 500 words, and then set to work creating a fully-contained narrative that clocks in under that limit. Believe me, it's harder than it sounds.
Or better yet, dig up something you've already written and see what could stand to be trimmed out of it. How is the shorter version better than the original version? Or how is it lacking?
Now get to work on that story!
