On the Art of Flash Fiction

ON THE VERY CONTEMPORARY ART OF FLASH FICTION

Lord Chesterfield called the novel “a kind of abbreviation of a Romance.” Ian McEwan described the more compact novella as “the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated, ill-shaven giant.” William Trevor considered the short story “essential art.” Writing a story, he said, is infinitely harder than writing a novel, “but it’s infinitely more worthwhile.” And now we have the even shorter story, a form that was validated, if it needed to be, when Lydia Davis, whose stories are sometimes a sentence long, was awarded the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. In their citation, the judges said of Davis’s works: “Just how to categorize them? They have been called stories but could equally be miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or even apothegms, prayers or simply observations.”

The short-short story is narrative (or it’s not) that is distilled and refined, concentrated, layered, coherent, textured, stimulating, and resonant, and it may prove to be the ideal form of fiction for the 21st century, an age of shrinking attention spans and busy and distracted lives, in which our mobile devices connect us to the world as they simultaneously divert us from it. And on the screens of our smartphones and our iPads and our laptops, we can fit an entire work of flash fiction. It’s short but not shallow; it’s a reduced form used to represent a larger, more complex story; it’s pithy and cogent, brief and pointed, and like the gist of a recollected conversation, it offers the essential truth, if not all the inessential facts.

The market for flash fiction is extensive and it’s growing. A Google search for flash fiction markets nets 719,000 hits in .55 seconds. Duotrope lists 4,700 publications looking for flash fiction, and a few of those outlets publish 365 stories a year. Your chances of finding a home for your short-short story are considerably better than they are for your novel. What better way to break into the world of publishing, to get your name out there, to earn the endorsement of editors, to introduce your beloved characters to an appreciable number of readers? If your dream is to write a novel, consider that flash fiction might be your first small step. I learned to write novels by writing short stories and learned to write short stories by writing very short stories before they had a snappy name.

While flash fiction may be quickly read, it is not often quickly written. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” To be brief takes time. But the obvious fact is that it does take less time to write a short-short story than it does the longer forms. It might take years to write a novel (it does for me), months to write a story, but only weeks, maybe days, if you’re lucky, to write a very short story. And an occasional morsel of sweet short-term gratification won’t make you sick. Promise! With the end so close in sight, you are emboldened, and you learn to finish. If you don’t finish, you can’t revise, and if you don’t revise, you won’t learn to write.

Read further @ LitHub

Strategies to Help Struggling Young Readers

Four Teaching Moves That Promote A Growth Mindset In All Readers

Reading can be a very fraught topic for parents, teachers and students. Strong reading skills are essential for accessing later curriculum, so teachers put a lot of emphasis on it early. But the pressure and angst of getting students reading on schedule can sap the joy out of an activity that many young children love. At its heart, reading is a way to access stories, which in turn make readers wonder about the world. In the race to get kids reading, it can be easy to treat reading like a procedure, instead of the complicated experience that it is.

Read further @ KQEDnews

Writing Memoirs

9 Tips for Dealing with the Emotions When Writing a Memoir

Writing a memoir is much like going through your trunk of family treasures and keepsakes. At times the memories may be fuzzy, just like the ink on the pages of that 70-year-old journal your great-grandmother kept. Sometimes the memories may be painful, much like the ring your father gave you before he passed away. And sometimes the memories may be glorious, like the wedding dress you have stored safely, in hopes that your daughter may one day wear the family heirloom.

Due to the emotions that emerge in memoir writing, it is often necessary that the writer understand how to navigate and conquer the writing process, in spite of the added element of being taken for a ride on an emotional roller coaster each time one sits down to write. There are strategies writers can use to help ease the pain, slow the emotional twists and turns, and take the raw emotions and coat them with a little extra love and understanding, so as not to startle our readers.

Read further @ Huffington Post

Be a Better Writer by Reading

“It usually helps me write by reading — somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.” -Steven Wright

Reading is fashionable. Again. It’s cool. We bet you all can find many statements about how good and useful reading is, how much it can influence a person and his way of thinking, and how awesome it is to sit on your cozy sofa, reading your favorite book and diving (not literally of course) into this imaginary and so wonderful world…

And all such statements are true, actually. Many famous writers, singers, politicians, and even movie characters prove the fact of reading’s great influence on people’s mind: if you take a look at their bookshelves, you’ll definitely be surprised.

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” -Stephen King

These words of the “Great Master” and famous American essayist can hardly be objected, taking into account his writing skills and his books’ importance for several generations of readers from different countries. Does it mean you should read a lot if you want to write like a professional? The answer to this question is quite predictable: yes, you should.

No good writing is possible without reading. Any proof needed? No problem.

How Reading Influences Your Writing

Being a writer, you’ll probably agree with the fact that the art of writing is nearly impossible to teach. It is impossible to finish some courses on creative writing or graduate from some university with a diploma of “a professional writer.” Do you consider it possible? We have bad news for you then.

Writing is a skill. But this skill is very complicated, because it can’t be got by simple learning of grammar rules, punctuation marks, and different writing techniques. Certainly, you should know how to write correctly, but only reading can help you achieve greatness. How?

• It helps you find inspiration
• It lets you gain new knowledge
• It helps you learn your genre better
• It provides you with wider vocabulary for your own works
• It makes you understand the language better
• It helps you learn from real gurus of writing
• It helps you reveal the secrets of this job in practice

Can you imagine a musician who does not listen to music himself? The same question can be asked about writing. Every author writes for readers; no grammar rules and writing techniques will help you understand your reader if you do not read yourself.

Enjoy what you read. It is difficult and mostly impossible to write something really good if you did not experience anything good that had been written already. Being a writer yourself, you have an ace in your sleeve: you can read a book with an eye for writing, though you do not even realize it.

Everything you learn as a reader, you can use as a writer afterward. But even if becoming the second Ray Bradbury is not your plan, it is not a reason to forget about reading and consider it useless at once.

Read further @ the Huffington Post

What makes a book successful?

More @ Gally Cat

What’s the Future of Books, Nowadays?

The future of books, today

There is much talk of bright tomorrows for publishing at New York’s Digital Book World expo, but how optimistic are readers?

While we’ve all been thinking about Andrew Miller and the Costa’s new enthusiasm short stories and Rushdie’s troubles in Jaipur, in New York, publishers have been looking to the future.

Many reports from the Digital Book World conference are brimming with positivity, with the independent publisher Dominique Raccah singing the praises of books created “at the end of a community-building process”, the author and futurist David Houle celebrating the astonishing fact that “more books [were] published this week than … in all of 1950” and Barnes and Noble’s James Hilt suggesting that the flood of data sweeping through an industry which is finally catching up with the digital age “helps us all”. But gloom isn’t that far behind – optimism “wanes” when executives are asked about the future for publishing and readers alike.

Continue reading @ The Guardian

Books and their future

The many futures of books

There are exciting innovations afoot in both digital and conventional publishing

My prediction about books in the early years of the 21st century: readers, writers, and bibliophiles in general will look back on the cross-fertilisation of the digital world with the global recession, and marvel at the strange fruit that flourished in the paradise of texts.

Consider the following evidence. In Notting Hill, the Redstone Press, an independent devoted to exquisite design and quirky conceptual innovation, published Will Hobson’s The Household Box, a book-in-a-box manufactured in China. Just down the road, Unbound launched the first of its new hardbacks, Terry Jones’s Evil Machines, a sequence of 13 stories about the hidden perils of technology. And finally, Penguin announced it was about to launch a series of short books (novellas, stories, non-fiction) as ebooks for £1.99.

Read full article @ The Guardian