Writers in the Storm

By Sudha Balagopal

I wrote big, then went small. I discovered the art of writing small fiction or flash fiction after having two short story collections and a novel published. My first flash piece was published in 2016, when the form cast the initial spell on me, fascinating me with its versatility, immediacy and energy. Since then, I've written flash exclusively, with dozens of stories appearing in journals around the world. When I asked myself why I'm attached to the form, I came up with the following ten reasons.

1. The Word Count

I love writing flash because the stories are under 1000 words and, to me, small is beautiful. This form of fiction has also been called the short-short, sudden fiction, the postcard, and the miniature.    

2. The Brevity

I love writing flash because of the intensity in the brevity. The stories might be bite-sized but they contain an intensity and a succulence that satisfies the reader.                                                                           

3. The Challenge

I love writing flash because the style is challenging. The stories might be short, with few characters, but the size of a piece of flash does not make the writing easier. It takes practice and skill to condense, to weed, to excise, all without taking away the crucial elements to create a complete story arc.

Flash fiction is about compression, efficiently and effectively delivered.

4. The Strong Splash

I love flash fiction because the story starts in the middle of the action with no lengthy introductions. With this form, I arrive late to the party and exit early, but not without making a strong splash. 

5. The Experimentation

I love writing flash because the style lends itself to experimentation. I've seen flash written as a crossword puzzle and flash that masquerades as a review. I've also seen flash pieces that are entirely without dialog, and many that are one-sentence paragraphs.

The hermit-crab flash borrows a specific form to tell a story. One of my works in Matchbook Literary, Life Times Nine, uses the form of the times-table. In Lunate Fiction, I used anaphora, a repeated phrase at the beginning of each sentence, in Learning to Row.

6. The Impact

I love writing flash because of the impact of the story on the reader. A good piece of flash leaves the reader thinking about the story long after the story has been read. The punch and the resonance that a piece of flash packs is what makes the form so captivating.                                                                                 

7. The Blank Spaces

I love writing flash fiction because of the story that is not told. Flash fiction believes in an intelligent reader who can fill in the blank spaces, one who can make the connections within the story, between and under the lines. 

8. The Ease of Consumption

I love writing flash because the stories are easy to consume. In these fast-paced times, readers can read flash on their devices, while they're on the move, while they're waiting somewhere, or in the traditional manner. Well-respected journals like The New Yorker have published flash fiction.

9. The Uniqueness

I love writing flash because as Kathy Fish, teacher and flash fictioneer extraordinaire, says: "Flash fiction, I believe, is its own unique literary form, not merely a short story in miniature, and we should teach it as such."

Fish's article in full: Flash Fiction As It's Own Unique Form

10. The Profundity

I love writing flash because it is the arc of a captured moment, when the small becomes profound. As Nancy Stohlman has said, it is the cupcake of literature.                                                                               

# # #

Flash Resources:

Book: Going Short by Nancy Stohlman. 

Articles:

• Do it in a Flash by Sandra Arnold
• Going Long, Going Short by Grant Faulkner

Flash Workshops/Teachers:                                                                                                                                  

• http://www.megpokrass.com
• http://www.kathyfish.com

Flash Contests:

• Bath Flash Fiction Award
• Reflex Fiction (quarterly international competition)

Examples of Flash Journals:

• Fractured Lit
• SmokeLong Quarterly
• Wigleaf
• 100 Word Story

Have you written flash fiction? Do you have other flash fiction resources for us? Share your thoughts down in the comments! (And please welcome Sudha, our newest contributor at WITS!)

About Sudha

Sudha Balagopal's recent flash fiction appears in Monkeybicycle, Matchbook, Smokelong Quarterly, Split Lip Magazine and Milk Candy Review among other journals. She is the author of a novel, A New Dawn. Her novella-in-flash, Things I Can't Tell Amma, was highly commended in the Bath Novella-in-Flash contest and is forthcoming from Ad Hoc Fiction. Her work will appear in Best Microfiction 2021. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions and is listed in the Wigleaf Top 50. Find her on Twitter @authorsudha, or via her website at www.sudhabalagopal.com

Top Image by Kranich17 from Pixabay

By John Peragine

There has been quite the buzz about Kindle’s new offering- Kindle Vella. It has not launched quite yet. Insiders tell me it will be in June 2021. But, authors can start creating stories right now. So what is Vella, and why all the hubbub?

Vella allows you to create stories as a serial- that is, breaking them into episodes. While this is not a new concept Amazon Kindle has gamified it.

The Cover

One of the advantages of coming out with a series is that you can publish it quickly. The cover is no exception. You can use a simple picture that they display in a round porthole style. Nothing fancy, and you don’t need a designer to create it. You just upload, and you are done. The only drawback is that you only have one graphic for the whole series, and you cannot add any pictures to your story.

The Text

You have three choices for content. You can type the story directly into the box. You are limited to one font, but you have bold, italic, and underline options. The stories are read on Kindle devices, and so you could change the font as the reader. You can also cut and paste into the box as well. The third way is you can upload a .doc or .docx file. When I did this, I had to fix a couple of margins once it was uploaded. You can edit directly in the box.

Title

You create a title for the series, and then each episode has its own episode name. You also make a short description of your series. In addition, you are allowed seven story tags- these are searchable words and are very important for people to search and find your story. In addition, you can pick two categories (genres) for your story.

What I have found interesting is that each episode has its own ASIN number. So I anticipate that each episode will be searchable on Amazon- both as a series and as an individual episode. However, these stories do not have an ISBN, which makes sense as they are only digital and only available on Kindle.

Length

Each episode is 600-5,000 words. There doesn’t seem to be a maximum of episodes. They allow you to post content that is “not freely available elsewhere.” This means you can use already published work, but you can’t use work published elsewhere for free. Other than that, there are not too many rules concerning content. Every episode you create has to be approved by them, but it is not clear what they are looking for. I had one episode they would not publish without explanation. I changed the title of the episode, and it went through fine the next time.

Royalties

This is where it gets a little tricky, so bear with me. The first three episodes of your story are free. You make nothing on them because the reader pays nothing. This is to test out whether they like your story enough to continue.

Here is the breakdown. A reader buys tokens, and a token is worth 100 words. So, it would take 6 tokens to unlock a 600-word episode. As a writer, you make 50% of what the reader paid for the tokens. They have different packages of tokens. For instance, it costs $1.99 for 200 tokens. Another package costs 525 tokens for $4.99 (therefore a little less per token).

If your episode is 600 words and it costs 6 tokens, then you’d make .03. My thought is to publish smaller episodes for the first three episodes and maximize the size of the episodes after that. The other thing is to work toward having many readers to maximize your return.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

One of the exciting aspects of Vella is the ability to add the author’s notes at the end of the episode. I can explain the characters, my thoughts, and the process for writing that particular episode. It allows me to speak directly to the reader.

Feedback from Readers

I am glad there is no star system or written feedback. (At least that is my understanding. If it is on Amazon’s catalog, I am not sure whether they will be able to leave a rating). The new system is a thumbs up for the episodes you enjoy. At the end of the week, a reader is given a “fave” crown that they can assign to their favorite serial. The stories with the most crowns for the week are featured as the top stories. This is a step away from the current rating.

I have my first serial ready to launch and plan on writing more before Vella launches. In part 3 of this series, I will talk about my favorite techniques for writing episodes and how to engage and keep readers coming back for more.

What are your thoughts about Vella? Is it something you are willing to try?

About John

John Peragine has published 14 books and ghostwritten more than 100 others. He is a contributor for HuffPost, Reuters, and The Today Show. He covered the John Edwards trial exclusively for Bloomberg News and The New York Times. He has written for Wine Enthusiast, Grapevine Magazine, Realtor.com, WineMaker magazine, and Writer's Digest.

John began writing professionally in 2007, after working 13 years in social work and as the piccolo player for the Western Piedmont Symphony for over 25 years. Peragine is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. You can learn more about his books at JohnPeragineBooks.com. 

His newest book, Max and the Spice Thieves, was released on April 20, 2021. Click here for a free first chapter. 

By Janice Hardy (@Janice_Hardy)

Get your protagonist up off the couch and into the story.

When I was six, I wrote a series called Dog City that followed the adventures of a team of dog archaeologists as they searched for a lost city of, you guessed it, dogs. It was all of four books, bound in aged cardboard from the backs of legal pads, and custom illustrated.

Laugh all you want, but that series had a more proactive protagonist than the “real novel” I wrote twenty years later.

Those industrious little puppers had goals—to find that lost city and fetch a rare magical item that would save the world from evil dinosaurs (it really should have been mailmen, right?). My “real novel” had a protagonist who was being manipulated by gods for a variety of reasons, and there was a prophecy she didn’t want to be a part of, and some romance, and an evil sorcerer, and a curse…you get the picture.

Even written in crayon, the dog story was better because it had a protagonist actively trying to achieve a goal and resolve a problem, and not just a protagonist who only acted when something else forced her to. My six-year-old self knew what the story was about and who was driving that story. My older self did not.

That’s the difference between a proactive and a reactive character, and why some novels flatline even though the scenes are filled with exciting problems.

If your protagonist isn’t making the story happen, then why are they the protagonist?

A protagonist who sits around waiting for things to happen or just goes along for the ride when things do happen, isn’t doing anything to help advance the story. It might seem like it because they’re in the middle of everything, but if you took them out and put any other character in there, would things still unfold the same way?

With a reactive protagonist, the answer is often “Yes,” because the plot is happening to them, not because of them. They’re not making any decisions that only they could make, based on motivations unique to them. Anyone faced with X problem would make Y choice, because the author set it up that way so Z would happen. The character is irrelevant to how the plot turns out.

5 Ways to Have Your Protagonist Create the Plot

(and not just follow directions...)

1. Give the Protagonist a Goal that Matters to Them

The struggle to achieve a series of goals is what creates a novel’s plot. In every scene, the protagonist should want something (a goal connected to a problem) and work to get that goal. To be clear, avoiding something is also a goal, such as “try not to get killed” or “not getting emotionally hurt again.” Maybe they want to find something, or tell someone something, or create something, or escape something, etc. Your potential goals are limitless; they just need to be something the protagonist wants.

The second part is why they want it. It’s the why that really makes a protagonist proactive, because their actions stem from personal motivations to see the problem resolved. Without those motivations, the protagonist is just doing what plot tells them to.

2. Make the Protagonist Part of the Action

If you took your protagonist out of a scene, would the event in the scene still occur? Would it change how the scene unfolded? If not, that’s a red flag your protagonist isn’t adding anything to the scene, and plot is happening regardless of what they do.

A proactive protagonist is part of the action, even if they’re reacting to and trying to deal with something that’s just happened. They might fail, or make the wrong decision, but they’re not simply sitting off to the side observing or waiting for others to act or tell then what to do.

3. Make the Protagonist Influence What’s Happening

A proactive protagonist tries to direct how scenes turn out. Their decisions to act—or not act—have consequences on how the plot unfolds. They might screw it up, or things might go horribly wrong, but they’re trying to make a change through their actions. It’s that motivation to make a difference, or cause a change that matters.  

If your protagonist’s actions have no effect on the outcome of a scene, or the major events of the plot, there’s a good chance they’re not doing enough in the story to cause the story to happen.

4. Give the Protagonist Specific Expectations that Drive the Story

A protagonist who goes somewhere “to see what happens” with no expectations of what that might be is a sneaky type of reactive protagonist. It seems as though they’re being proactive since they have a goal, but they’re not actually trying to do anything. They’re simply waiting for the answer to fall out of the story and into their lap. And that usually happens, because the plot says they need to discover that answer in that scene for the plot to work. But there’s nothing specific that causes them to go where they need to go or do what they need to do.

The protagonist thinks, “Gee, I have no idea what to do next, so let’s go to the crime scene and see what happens.” And when they do, they randomly walk about and conveniently find a clue they didn’t even know they were looking for (this holds true for any genre, even those without crime scenes).

If your protagonist spends a lot of time “hoping to find a clue” about what to do next, try giving them a more concrete plan to work with. Give them expectations of what they specifically hope to find, or a specific reason they’re doing whatever it is they’re doing. “Let’s search his office and see what we find” is weak and reactive, while “Let’s search his office to find evidence he was at the bar last Saturday when the murder occurred” is proactive. There’s a specific goal.

5. Let the Protagonist Make Decisions that Affect Where the Plot Goes

Proactive protagonists make decisions that affect the plot, even if they have lousy options to choose from. Having to make a choice forces the protagonist to act, and that action moves the plot and story forward. If your protagonist rarely chooses the next step, or the choices aren’t really a choice (because there’s only one real option), you might have a protagonist who isn’t taking control of the plot.

If the answer on what to do next is obvious or feels forced, readers won’t wonder what will happen—they can see it, and see what’s coming a mile away (which is usually boring). If it makes no sense at all, readers won’t understand how the protagonist got from Point A to Point B. But when readers aren’t sure how a decision will change the story, and want to know where a choice might lead, they become curious to see what happens next. That keeps them reading and enjoying the story.

A protagonist who’s driving the plot creates a more compelling plot, because the questions they have and the answers they seek will also be things the reader wants to know.

Showing what the protagonist wants, why they want it, and what’s in the way of getting it not only creates the plot, but generates unpredictability and uncertainty for readers, which piques their curiosity. That keeps them invested in the story.  

A proactive protagonist doesn’t have to be in control all the time, but even when things are out of control, they’re still trying to get something done. They may just be puppers in pith helmets digging in the sand, but make sure events are happening because of what your protagonist does. 

How proactive is your current protagonist? Did you think of any new ways to have them steer the plot while you were reading? Do you have any story problems you want to discuss? Please share them down in the comments!

About Janice

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author and founder of the popular writing site Fiction University, where she helps writers improve their craft and navigate the crazy world of publishing. Not only does she write about writing, she teaches workshops across the country, and her blog has been recognized as a Top Writing Blog by Writer’s Digest. She also spins tales of adventure for both teens and adults, and firmly believes that doing terrible things to her characters makes them more interesting (in a good way). She loves talking with writers and readers, and encourages questions of all types—even the weird ones.

Find out more about writing at www.Fiction-University.com, or visit her author’s site at www.JaniceHardy.com. Subscribe to her newsletter to stay updated on future books, workshops, and events and receive her book, 25 Ways to Strengthen Your Writing Right Now, free.

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