My piece, Flashlight, earned a quick and positive response from several markets, which was a sure sign that it was a winner. This week, I got the acceptance I was looking for.
Flashlight is a flash fiction about a girl in a bad but somewhat ambiguous situation, told in less than three hundred words. I'll update my blog when it's published. Meanwhile, I'm working on some other stories--a story about retirees whose idyllic life goes by too quickly, a story about a woman with a terminal illness and the demon that tempts her, and a story about a man's bond with art. Once I'm finished thinking about and revising those, it's on to novel time before AWP in late March.
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I said the other day that I hate writing from prompts and that I never produce quality work from it or even snippets of work that I could salvage and use later. The closest I came at Goddard was in Reiko Rizzuto's wonderful workshops on troubleshooting one's writing, in which she urged us to channel our characters, freewrite about their wants and needs, and to manipulate scenes to unblock ourselves.
The best writing I do is spontaneous or, more likely, germinates in my subconscious until I decide to put it on the page, and then it goes through a lot of editing. So, I came up with an idea to challenge myself. I took an old prompt piece that I didn't hate but thought was meh, and I'm going to revise it into a publishable flash story. Success=published, and not in some vanity magazine either. Since I'm putting this out there, let's call failure "the inability to become published within eight months." Why eight? First because it might need a couple rounds of revision, even if it is a flash story. Second because lit mags take a long time to respond, so even targeting faster markets, I'm going to have to be aggressive about sending it out. If I can get it into a form I like, I'll pick another prompt piece; I have a bunch, but this one, a flash fiction from 1920s Rome, seems a likely candidate. If you want to do the same, I've love to hear about it. This is 'competing against yourself' at its finest, so we all win if we're writing, revising, and submitting. Happy writing! Although I've seen some literary magazines asking for short forms, hybrid forms, and innovative forms, I haven't yet seen a magazine asking for strictly flash CNF. I think there's a real interest in having such a publication, and I'd definitely want to publish in one!
For instance, it can be arduous to spend an entire book worth's of time with someone, especially if they aren't incredibly witty, profound, or famous. Flash is a great way to get out some of the memoir-istic anecdotes we have inside of us without alienating, explaining too much, or spiraling into dullness. Likewise, it's a good way to test a topic before committing to writing a longer piece. I'm thinking about experimenting with this form in my own writing, and also about publishing a modest lit mag that would provide a home for the work, the way that Vine Leaves does for vignettes and various other places do for novellas, or novelettes, or formal poetry. We'll see if that ever happens, of course, but it seems like a good idea to distinguish a market through specialization since there are so many lit mags out there. |
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