JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: Flash Time

by April Bradley

The first piece of fiction I wrote was supposed to be in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 words, but I ended up with 218. I labored over those few words and loved how the careful attention to that moment opened up a world, but I had no idea what to do with it. Who’d publish such a small thing or read it the way I did? I’d never heard of flash, had little familiarity with short fiction or literary magazines, had no training or academic experience in creative writing, didn’t know any other writers. It felt like I had failed because I was supposed to be writing a novel. I abandoned that unintentional piece of flash on my hard drive. That was in 2007.

This was during my mid-thirties when I read even more than usual, feasted on fiction and craft after the house was asleep, or in parking lots of elementary and middle schools, at libraries, doctor offices, the town green, and I did not write. That half-decade hosted an inferno of events and living that converged into a calm focus by the time forty came around.

By the time I was 36, my daughter and I survived a high-risk pregnancy and birth; I left a graduate program and dropped out of law school; my career was derailed by multiple episodes of blood clots in my legs, lungs, and brain; my spouse and I divorced. I agreed to co-parent my child with my ex-spouse in the same home and to mother full time. I should have been writing. I wanted to write, but coaxing the words to line up into a coherent, immersive story with evocative, vivid characters seemed impossible. I wrote around story; I didn’t create it.

For years supportive friends and family encouraged me, saying things like just sit down and write, keep a journal, free write, take a class, find your tribe, write, write, write. Keep in mind that an intense life was plowing right along; the topic of my creative writing didn’t come up all that often. Peter, my daughter's father, and my grandmother were the most persistent.

Peter, also a writer and narrative theorist, knew I’d have to work for it and thought I was wasting precious time; my grandmother was firmly in the sit-down-and-write-a-masterpiece camp. I had outlines, plot ideas, research, and character sketches that obtained a great deal of length, but no life, and certainly no sense of story.

Those years were vital for me to read and re-read and study, turn my thinking around from theory and criticism to creation. Finally, when I was nearly forty-two I started writing what would be my first—and first published—pair of short stories. They too started off first unintentionally as flash. I wrote a vivid moment, put it away and came back to it a couple of months later and developed it into a story of more length and arc. At that time, I had a vague idea about flash that at best could be described as “I think it’s short short fiction.”

 

I wrote at least sixty drafts of a story over a five-month period, pushing myself to learn with it, and length is difficult for me. My naiveté with literary journals became obvious. After Glimmer Train declined to publish it, I sent it to two others, one of which was Bartleby Snopes. They told me that I had two stories in play, neither of which resolved the conflict of the other. They were right. The two shorter, revised stories immediately found homes at Dew On The Kudzu and Thrice Fiction.

As I acquired more familiarity with literary magazines and worked for one, I gained more exposure to flash. Discovering flash was like discovering a genre no one had ever mentioned. It was more than a miniature short story. Imagine if fiction or poetry were suddenly revealed to exist—that’s how wonderful and dazzling flash was to me. Yet, it was also familiar.

Flash is the medium I gravitate to out of a creative instinct, but it is no less difficult an art form. It intrigues me as a creator and as a philosopher. Narrative time in flash is uniquely experienced and expressed, and this feature of flash is particularly compelling. There is a dissonance in how long it takes to read a piece of flash, how it is portrayed in time through physical space in story time, and how long time and emotion resonate with the reader. The various elements of flash each influence the way time is re-ordered internally and externally.

Flash is similar in some aspects to many familiar forms of narrative, but it owns itself. After I started writing and publishing longer form stories and gained more confidence in my writing, enough confidence to write spontaneously, experiment with structure and form, emotion and content—I wrote more and more flash. Then, I sought guidance and studied with some of the masters of the forms: Kathy Fish, Gay Degani, and Nancy Stohlman. My education is by no means over.

These days, I have more story than time. There are flash projects in the works; I belong to a fantastic writing group, and I have been working on a flash novel-in-progress that suspiciously resembles a novel. Besides writing, the best thing about flash is the vibrant community of writers who shape and create it.

I found that original piece of flash, rewrote it entirely, and it didn’t work at all. In its original form with a bit of refinement, I submitted it Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal. They published and nominated it for a Best Of The Net Award.

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April Bradley is from Goodlettsville, Tennessee and lives with her family on the Connecticut shoreline. Her work has appeared in Boston Literary Magazine, Flash Frontier, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Magazine, Narratively, Pure Slush 5, and Thrice Fiction, among others. She is the Associate Editor for Bartleby Snopes Literary Magazine and Press. Find her at aprilbradley.net.

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: It's a MAD, MAD, MAD World

by John Towler

In the late 70’s and early 80’s, there was no greater thrill for my brothers and I than getting the latest issues of MAD, Cracked, Spiderman and Superman. We each started our own handwritten satire publications to entertain each other, and spun off from those were our own series of superhero comics. I was about ten years old.

I used creative writing in a variety of ways, including school projects, homemade birthday cards and my first forays into short stories. Creative energy was never lacking, but proper training to use that energy did not come along until I took college level coursework. Reading over one’s early work is a trip down Dreary Lane. As a novice you unwittingly violate all the rules of writing a thousand times over. Only in retrospect do you appreciate the reason writing, with all its diversity and originality, has some universal structures that should be honored.

One of the most developmentally important college courses I took was was playwriting. It was a year-long program (one semester of beginner/intermediate, one of advanced) which taught me valuable writing principles. The most enduring lesson was learning to trust dialog. Writers sometimes struggle with trust issues with their audience. Will the reader picture the character’s expression? Will the reader understand the emotion? Will the reader imagine the correct action, be it a whimsical flourish of the hand or a fist pounding a table top? Some of these things we must describe, but some are implicit in the character’s dialog. Circumstance may frequently be relied upon to dictate tone. Allowing your reader to understand through inference rather than blatant explanation involves them in your story to a much greater degree.

After my formal education, the three most significant influences on my growth as a writer came from participation in an active writer’s forum, a terrific writing group and my role as an editor at Every Day Fiction.

Back in the mid-2000’s I joined the Writer’s Digest online forum. We had a mix of novice and experienced writers in the WD Forum and writers were welcome to post their work for critique. There were some brutal, sometimes cruel assessments, of the work offered for review, but after sorting through the snide and sadistic remarks, you could find plenty of helpful commentary to improve your piece. Growing a thick skin was a side benefit of throwing your fiction into the mix and the clever participant could learn from other writer’s mistakes, improving their own craft at other’s expense.

The “Nudge Nudge Collective” was the name of our writing group. There were six of us and everyone had experienced some publishing success. We lasted through about seven or eight  of each other’s novels, picking them apart chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word. It was intense, emotional at time, but unlike the forum experience, it was utterly devoid of snark or nastiness. Tough love? Yes. But when everyone is operating from a place of honesty, it makes the toughest critique easier to handle.

Finally as an editor with Every Day Fiction I worked with a core group of insightful people who could ferret out the strengths and weaknesses of a story with remarkable accuracy. EDF editors provide some of the best feedback in the business, and so from my colleagues’ comments I came to learn not only the finer points of fiction writing, but also that intangible quality of what “works” in a story and what does not.

I’ll close by noting I’ve read a number of how-to books, from Stephen King’s On Writing to Jordan Rosenfeld’s Make a Scene. They are helpful for tips, learning useful habits, and developing your own critical eye, but there is nothing more useful than finding beta readers who will give you honest, detailed feedback about your work.

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John Towler lives on the Outer Banks of North Carolina with his wife and children. He is a career law enforcement officer, a videographer, writer and is now running for public office. 

Read John Towler:  "Company" and "Punch Buggy"

Outer Banks Hummingbird Rescue video.

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: How Did I Get To Be A Writer?

by Barry Basden

How did I get to be a writer? I often wonder how I got to be anything. It all seems like a kind of dreamy accident.

My early years were chaotic, eight or nine different schools in twelve years. Read a lot. Hung around with poets and actors and other loners in high school. After graduating in Houston, I bounced around the country. Lived near MacArthur Park in LA. Rode a Greyhound to New York. Clerked. Drank. Spent a lot of time in the Village, but made sure I read for three hours every day—Faulkner, Hemingway, Wolfe, etc.—trying to educate myself.

Hitchhiked back to Texas. No trade, still clerking, I took freshman English at night. The teacher was an alcoholic, a former English professor at Notre Dame, but by then just an adjunct trying to get his life back together. He used to sip ginger ale with a bunch of us while we drank and listened to him in a quiet bar after class. He seemed to know everything I wanted to learn, very supportive, urged me to write about NYC, saw that I was published in the school magazine. My writing, raw and terribly derivative of the Beats, gained some notoriety in that west Texas town. The best teachers are often the kindest and I remember Mr. Mooney fondly all these years later.

I scraped by on the fringes and learned “join the army if you fail” long before Dylan sang about it. I served in the Far East and Central America, but missed Vietnam. Barely. Cosmic luck. Somewhere in there I wrote 25,000 words of a novel that just petered out. I volunteered for straight midnight shifts at my radio site and took evening courses before work. Out of curiosity I enrolled in an accounting class. The teacher was an air force captain who told stories about auditing officers' clubs and supply systems and catching thieves. I found it interesting, just the sort of high class trade I was looking for, something I thought I might actually be able to do.

I finished school on the GI Bill, 3 years in 18 months, top accounting grad, a piece of cake because all I had to do was go to class and do the assignments. I became a CPA and spent several years auditing youth training centers, wildlife refuges, and Indian affairs throughout the West, trying to make the world a little better place.

Then I worked for years as a financial manager for the military in Europe. There I found Annie Proulx's Heart Songs and Carver's What We Talk About. I now know that Gordon Lish had a lot to do with why I couldn't read Carver's book without weeping.

After I retired, I did oral histories for a WWII museum, writing up war stories that got filed away in dusty archives. That's how I met Charlie Scheffel, a combat infantry officer who fought in North Africa and Europe. I found his story riveting and it eventually became Crack! and Thump, published in 2007. The book still gets nice reviews on Amazon. It's actually a memoir in flash and writing it helped me find my natural way to tell stories.

I began to read and write flash and micro fiction and later founded Camroc Press Review that focused on stories under 500 words. I couldn’t seem to get enough of it and ran CPR for 7 years before closing down last year.

I keep plugging away at my own stuff. I’m not prolific by any means, but I’ve turned out a couple hundred flashes, some of it collected, with a chapbook related to war coming out perhaps this summer. I love trying to hone a story down to its essence. It's something I hope to spend the rest of my life doing, happy that my long strange journey has led me to such a perfect place.

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Barry Basden lives in the Texas hill country with his wife and two yellow Labs. He is coauthor of Crack! and Thump: With a Combat Infantry Officer in World War II. His shorter work has been published widely, both online and in print. His latest flash collection is Wince. You can also read Ray's People here.









MacArthur Park Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMacarthur_Park.jpg"Macarthur Park" by Wurzeller at English Wikipedia - Self-photographed. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons 

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: No More Hawaiian Punch Notebooks For Me

by Bud Smith

I remember driving very fast down Double Trouble Road in Berkley Township. There had been a forest fire a few years before and all the pines were charred. But there was new sprigs of green coming up out of the last of the dirty snow and I didn’t have a job, I was in love. This is when I decided I was going to write a novel.

My brother was in the hospital because he'd fallen off the back of a garbage truck and landed in a giant slush puddle.

I didn't know how bad he was hurt, just that he'd gotten hurt at work and I had to sign the release forms at the ER for him, or maybe he just needed a ride. I don't remember.

Double Trouble Road is just two lanes and there's usually no one on it so you can drive as fast as you want. Around 80mph I decided when I got back to my room downstairs I was going to make a real novel.

I’d written them in notebooks since I was fourteen. But I’d never learned how to type and now I didn’t give a shit anymore. I was going to type out the novel, skip the notebook. All the notebooks in all my life have never gone anywhere. They’ve just gotten Hawaiian Punch spilled on them or left out in the rain on a picnic table and that’s that.

My father had found a computer at the township dump and he figured out how to put a new motherboard in it, and he gave me the computer. And he gave me a garbage dump keyboard. And a garage dump mouse. And I took the shitty formica desk from upstairs because they were going to throw it away, smashed off the top hutch and made it a computer desk. I’ve still got that here actually, I’m sitting at it right now, 13 years later. On 173rd Street and Haven Ave. in Washington Heights, NYC. Year of our Lord 2016.

When I got to the ER, Year of Our Lord 2003, my brother was wheeled out by an orderly and he was holding this big plastic bag on his lap.

"What happened?”

He started to tell me this story: "I was jumping over this slush puddle and my foot slipped when I landed on the back of the truck and ... I cracked my head on the road and I was laying in this icy ass puddle and this old lady opened the door and said 'don't move you might have a spine injury I'll call an ambulance'.

"What's in the bag?"

"My trench coat."

The orderly busted out laughing and I started laughing too and my brother was pissed.

In the car on the way back to the house I think I told him that I was going to write a novel and he was looking out the window still really pissed off at me.

We were on Double Trouble Road again and I was driving very fast again. Pretty much the only road I ever drive recklessly on back in my hometown was that road.

Except this other time when I was thinking about buying the car I have now, and I wanted to take it for a test drive but my brother is much more mechanical than me so he went along for the ride and it was pouring rain and I got that car up to 125 mph on a rain slick road and my brother said, "Please slow down you're going to get us fucking killed.”

"I'm just testing it out ..."

"Well don't ..."

"Seeing what it can do."

"Take me home.”

I did write that novel. I came home from the hospital and I started that night. I was laid off of work at the time and I didn't have to go to sleep. And back then everything was new to me and I didn't know a single rule, I liked to drink Seagrams Seven and ginger ale. I’m glad I didn’t learn too many of those rules. I’m happy they still make Seagrams Seven and they still make Ginger Ale.

I just wrote and wrote and wrote and it was all garbage.

But Jesus, I had the best time.

When the novel was done, I was cool with being done too. I didn't edit it past a first draft. I didn't submit it to any publishing houses. I went to Staples and I got one copy of the book printed out and bound with rings. Cost me $22 or something silly.

I looked at it and said, "Fucking A, I wrote a book."

I remember it snowed really hard and my friend who was living in Seaside Heights called me up on the phone to come over and eat painkillers with him, so I hopped in my car and drove across the bridge all icy like the end of the world and when I got to my friend's apartment there was nowhere to park on the street, so I put the car on this little basketball court that was around the corner because I figured no one was going to play basketball with the court that iced over. I guess the cops figured that too because they didn't give me any tickets, which was strange because pretty much anytime I ever went to Seaside Heights, I got a ticket. Once I got two tickets and one must have blown away and I got my license suspended for not paying the other one.

When I walked up to my friend's door he'd grown a beard and I guess so had I, so it looked like something you just automatically did when you turned 20, no matter who you are. We sat on his couch and he asked what was new and I said, "My brother fell off the back of a garbage truck and got hurt pretty bad and I wrote a novel.”

"Holy shit, bro! You wrote a novel? You're gonna get fucking rich.”

"Oh definitely."

"R, I, C, H."

We celebrated our good fortune that there were five Yuengling beers in the fridge and one Rolling Rock and the Chinese food place down the block would still deliver no matter how close the apocalypse came to the edge of the cave.  And we took the painkillers and watched TV, and it was a Wednesday with nothing at stake and life was good.

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Bud Smith wrote the novels F 250, Tollbooth and I'm From Electric Peak. He works heavy construction in NJ. budsmithwrites@gmail.com 

Here's two stories I like:

Tiger Blood at Hobart

http://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/tiger-blood

JANT at Monkeybicycle 

http://monkeybicycle.net/jant/