Writers in the Storm

by Kelli Short Borges

One night several years ago, I went to bed ruminating over a lengthy personal essay I’d written about the sad dissolution of my first marriage. Writing it hadn’t been easy, but it was cathartic and sharing it with others had been undeniably rewarding. Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking about the essay, couldn’t stop thinking about the traumatic end of my marriage.

As I lay trying to fall asleep, certain stubborn images and vivid sensory details persisted— the red neon flash of a Wendy’s sign, salty French fries, freckles spattered across a cheek, the thump of a Phil Collins song from a car stereo. A diamond ring, long gone.

I was annoyed, to be honest. I desperately wanted to move forward, to leave that terrible chapter behind. I’d written something emotionally wrenching, published it, shared with others, but it still felt as if I hadn’t been able to express how it truly felt to go through such an awful divorce.

Why couldn’t I let it go?

Finally, I managed to doze off, only to find myself wide awake again at two a.m., with an insistent, fast-paced rhythmic narrative running through my brain.

What was happening?

I grabbed my phone from the bedside table, quickly jotting down what seemed to be coming from nowhere—a strange mash-up of images from the essay mixed with fresh new language and a different pace.

I’d written quickly and furiously, exactly the way my brain heard it, so formal punctuation was missing, but somehow that seemed right. My subconscious had apparently been working overtime! And the entire thing was short. Very short. Wide awake now, I transferred it to my computer. It was just over a single page, double spaced.  

What is this? I wondered.

Now, I know that I’d written my first micro. And what’s even more interesting? What I wrote, without realizing it, is a form called a “breathless sentence,” a single-paragraph, one-sentence story told with urgency. Telling my story without rules, exactly the way I “heard” it, and without overthinking, gave me a sense of emotional release that I hadn’t experienced writing the essay. Yes, this is exactly how it felt, I thought. This is exactly how it feels. I cried.

From that point on, I was hooked on experimenting with shorter forms, and I began intensely studying micro prose (aka micro narratives, micro memoirs, micro essays, micro stories or microfiction).

What, Exactly, is Micro?

A subgenre of flash, a micro is generally considered to be a piece of 400 words or less. It doesn’t matter if the story is fiction or nonfiction, the same story-telling principles apply. Micros rely on extreme brevity and often a single, intense moment, while telling an expansive, larger story. The magic of the story lies in what’s left out, what’s left to interpret. This is called “white space.”

Take, for example, this now famous six-word story, commonly attributed to Hemmingway:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn. 

Or, a modern example, Bob Thurber’s 50-word story, “Shortcut on Christmas Eve,”

The lake was frozen solid but shadows made the surface look dark and wet. My father, drunk on eggnog, measured his strides. While I waited for the slip and fall that would crack his skull, it occurred to me any passersby might believe they’d witnessed a man walking on water.

Zoom in on the ending lines of the stories above.

• Is there a moment in which you are invited to fill in the gaps?
• A moment in which something changes, in which you breathe in a larger truth? 

The emotional weight of the story hinges on the white space—what’s read between the lines.

Why Experiment with Writing Micro?

A few reasons you might want to try your hand at writing tiny:

• It’s fun to experiment and try something new! You’ll stretch your literary legs by pushing yourself outside your comfort zone.

• You’ll become a (much) better self-editor. When you need to whittle a piece down to its essence, you’re required to be brutally precise with word choice, keeping only what’s absolutely necessary.

• You can submit and get published as you go. With some practice, micros can be written relatively quickly and submitted as you work on a larger, lengthier literary project. And you’ll get the satisfaction and encouragement of having your work celebrated along the way, a great dopamine hit. A personal example of this: I took a chapter from my novel-in-progress and shrank it down to its marrow—a 350-word micro, which was subsequently published.

• The flash and micro writing community is welcoming and supportive. There are tons of amazing workshops, mentors and fellow writers who are ready to cheer you on as you learn!

I’m ready to learn to write micro! How do I start?

You develop micro writing skills by learning the elements of what makes micro so effective—which means lots of practice reading and writing it. And joining workshops with other micro writers is always a smart move, as you’ll get feedback and support as you go.

Resources to help you get started (there are oodles of these, but here are a few that have inspired me):

Reading:

Best Microfiction Anthologies:https://www.bestmicrofiction.com/

100-word story: https://100wordstory.org/

River Teeth’s Beautiful Things: https://riverteethjournal.com/beautiful-things/

Writing Workshops and Substacks:

The Flash Institute:https://flashfictioninstitute.com/

Bending Genres:https://bendinggenres.com/writing-groups/

Kathy Fish/Substack: https://artofflashfiction.substack.com/

Meg Pokrass/Substack:https://megpokrass.substack.com/

Francine Witte Writing Groups:https://francinewitte.com/blank-4/

Have you ever written flash or microfiction? What was your experience like? Do you have a favorite flash fiction author?

* * * * * *

About Kelli

Kelli Short Borges is a Phoenix-based writer who traded her career as a reading specialist for the thrill of crafting her own narratives. A multi-award-winning flash and microfiction author, her work has been featured in several Best Microfiction anthologies and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions anthologies. You can find more about Kelli and her work at https://www.kellishortborges.com.

Top Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay

The world is a chorus of pings and alerts, and, for a creative, that noise is more than a distraction—it’s erosion. We spend our days building rich, emotional, sensory worlds for our characters, but we often leave our own souls in a sterile, gray "To-Do" list environment.

If you’ve ever sat down to write and felt your energy vanish before you typed a word, that’s not a lack of talent. It’s probably decision fatigue.

Decision fatigue is a common ailment in our modern world. There are only so many decisions a rational human being can make in one day. Some are common: What am I going to wear today? Coffee or tea? Carbs or protein for breakfast?

Others are more stressful: Which of those emails am I going to answer first? Is that a scam? My favorite software just changed and now I hate it. What am I going to switch to?

When decision fatigue steps in, your nervous system is resisting the weight of the world, not the work of the story.

Building Sanctuary in the Senses

In my own office—my sanctuary—I’ve started surrounding myself with things that ground me: a warm blanket, a fountain, and a wax warmer for lovely scents. I’ve added plants because seeing something grow reminds me that creativity has its own seasons.

When life gets loud, we need breathing room. Not a retreat to a cabin in the woods (although... I wouldn't turn one down), but a "reset" we can trigger in thirty seconds.

The Five-Minute Reset

Try these sensory anchors to tend your spark when the room feels crowded:

• Touch: Keep a "talisman" at your desk. It could be a smooth stone or a favorite figurine. When the inner noise gets too high, hold it. Let your body remember it’s safe.
• Sight: Look for an ember of joy: a shift in the light on the floor or a sentence you wrote that lands "just right." A pet. A picture of a friend. Surround yourself with things that make you smile.
• Sound: Mark the threshold of your writing time with a specific song or the sound of a fountain. It tells your brain: Here, we create.

Play in the Sandbox

We often treat technology and publishing like a final exam: stressful and judgmental. We must succeed or… what? What terrible thing do you imagine happening if you don’t succeed? Or is that just me?

What if we approached our industry as play? Play removes the pressure to succeed and invites discovery. It keeps your creative spark growing because it removes the "test" mentality and replaces it with curiosity.

Your job isn't to save the world today. Your job is to shine in it. When your spark burns steadily, you become a point of clarity in a crowded world.

What is one sensory "anchor" at your desk that helps you feel grounded? If you don't have one, what’s one small thing you could add today to make your space feel like a sanctuary?

About Lisa

Lisa Norman's passion has been writing since she could hold a pencil. While that is a cliché, she is unique in that her first novel was written on gum wrappers. As a young woman, she learned to program and discovered she has a talent for helping people and computers learn to work together and play nice. When she's not hanging out with her family, writing, or teaching, she can be found wandering the local beaches.

Lisa writes as Deleyna Marr and is the owner of No Stress Writing Academy. She also runs Heart Ally Books, LLC, an indie publishing firm.

Interested in learning more from Lisa? Sign up for her newsletter or check out her school, No Stress Writing Academy, where she teaches social media, organization, technical skills, and marketing for authors!

Her next book, The Work of Joy is now available here.

Top image from depositphotos.

by Becca Puglisi

What does your character fear the most? You need to know because that fear will motivate them throughout the story and contribute to their fatal flaw—something they must address if they want to achieve their goal and grow as a character.

You see, when a deep fear or insecurity is triggered, characters instinctively default to a familiar defense mechanism. Usually, this is a knee-jerk response that helps them deflect, control, or avoid emotional pain. Dishonesty, denial, aggression, and isolation are examples of these self-protection measures.

Those behaviors and flaws in response to perceived threats are a kind of emotional shielding that keeps potentially threatening people and situations at a distance. They’re unique to the character’s life and personality, most often arising in the aftermath of a painful experience.

Let’s look at this in action with young Lindsay.

A Character Arc Character Study

Eight-year-old Lindsay was abandoned by her mother at the mall. What she takes from thisawful experience is that the people who say they love you might not, and they could leave you at any time. This makes sense to Lindsay. Her mom did say she loved her, and she was a good mom at times—but at the end of the day, she chose to dump Lindsay without looking back.

So Lindsay goes into foster care, where she encounters more people who don’t care about her, use her for their own reasons, and generally aren’t in her corner. Over the years, this deepens her belief that if you let others get close, they’ll either hurt you or bail when things get too hard.

Her desire to be part of a family is overpowered by her fear of being abandoned again. To protect herself, she behaves in ways that discourage people from engaging. She’s rude, hostile, and emotionally distant. These tendencies are like a porcupine’s quills, warning people to keep away.

Analysis

Lindsay experienced something horrible as a child, and her greatest fear is that it might happen again. So she adopts new traits and behaviors to protect herself. And to a degree, they work, because people can’t abandon her if they’re always kept at arm’s length. The problem with using flaws and unhealthy defense mechanisms for self-protection is that they also block good things: healthy relationships, positive opportunities, and the chance to work through problems constructively and build resilience.

Knowing this information for Lindsay, we see a snapshot of who she is at the start of the story: wanting to be loved and belong but isolated, fear-driven, and unable to trust. And as her fear becomes more entrenched over time, her emotional shielding also deepens, creating new problems in her current story.

Lindsay’s hostility keeps people away, and this suits her just fine. But as she gets older, it starts being an issue—like when she mouthed off to the corner store owner when he didn’t give her a job, and she ruined any future opportunities there.

In her late teens, she’s placed with a new family that seems to truly care and isn’t scared off by her tough-girl attitude. Their daughter is her age, and for the first time Lindsay has someone to talk to and hang out with. But when the family brings up adoption, Lindsay’s fear of abandonment is triggered because the only family she’s ever had took off.

Her hostility rises as it always does when she feels threatened—and if she lets it out, it could stop the adoption in its tracks. Is that what she really wants?

Analysis

This is a crossroads moment for Lindsay. She’s become aware of both her fear and how her behavior is limiting her. To achieve her goal of belonging to a family, she needs to heal from her pain of being abandoned, and the opportunity is right here. It terrifies her, but she wants to find a family who loves her. To do that, she must 1) fight her fear instead of being ruled by it and 2) overcome her fatal flaw.

The Two Parts of a Fatal Flaw

In fiction, a character’s fatal flaw is the central internal obstacle they must overcome to reach their goal. It has two parts: a behavioral component—something they do—and a cognitive component—something they believe, also known as a false belief.

Lindsay’s fatal flaw is her hostility (behavioral) combined with the idea that letting people in leads to hurt (cognitive). If she doesn’t challenge both, her fate will be sealed and any hope of being part of a family will go up in smoke. But why would she reject her fatal flaw when it’s helped her feel safe for so long?

Growth can only happen when the character recognizes that her defensive behavior is keeping her stuck. What’s causing Lindsay’s hostility? Her fear of abandonment. By recognizing how much power her fear holds over her life, she takes the first step toward subduing it.

Newly aware of fear’s stranglehold, Lindsay challenges herself to see past the fear and view her life objectively. Her foster family’s unconditional love has created opportunities for Lindsay to be herself. She remembers moments when she let her guard down and nothing bad happened. When she spoke her mind, she wasn’t kicked out. Without fear obscuring her view, she now sees that putting herself out there emotionally doesn’t always result in harm.

Analysis

A new belief takes hold: Lindsay needs people, and vulnerability is a necessary part of achieving that end. It’s a risk worth taking. With this new perspective, she sees that her hostility is standing in the way of what she wants, and she can take steps to respond differently when she feels threatened, letting people in instead of keeping them out.

Backstory Elements You Need to Know

This is a character study of a change arc in action. To win in the story, the protagonist must face their fear, challenge their false belief, and replace the behavioral aspect of the fatal flaw with productive habits. This isn’t easy. It means embracing vulnerability for the hope of something better, and only someone truly committed to change can achieve it.

It also requires you, as the author, to know exactly what your character must overcome so you can provide the opportunities for growth that will enable them to succeed (or fail, if you’re writing a tragedy). To get there, you’ll want to identify the following backstory elements of your character’s arc:

• Their wounding event
• The specific fear it spawns
• The lie they believe about themselves or others (it explains, in their mind, why the wounding event happened)
• Their shielding behaviors and traits they adopt to protect themselves from experiencing the same trauma again
• Their fatal flaw: the cognitive aspect (the lie) plus the behavioral aspect (their go-to trait or behavior meant to protect them). Your character will have adopted many shielding behaviors in the wake of their trauma, but one of them should rise to the top as their default response that protects them when they’re threatened while keeping them from getting what they want the most.

Armed with this information, you’ll have a good idea who your character is on page one, how fear will drive them, and the fatal flaw they’ll have to address by the end. And you can build a story that will get them exactly where you want them to go.

For more information about the fatal flaw, fear’s role in character arc, and how it contributes to your story, check out The Fear Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to What Holds Characters Back.

Do you create your character’s backstory to help identify their fatal flaw? What character flaws do you tend to use? Is there a character with a specific fatal flaw that sticks with you?

* * * * * *

About Becca

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and best-selling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and other resources for writers. Her books have sold over 1.4 million copies and are available in multiple languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online resource for authors that's home to the Character Builder and Storyteller's Roadmap tools.

Top Image by John Hain from Pixabay