Writing extremely short fiction seems simple at first brush. Unlike a novel—which is more like trapping an octopus in a suitcase—good flash fiction distills a story down to only the essential moments. It’s daunting to paint a world on a grain of sand, but there are five places I recommend to check out if you want to learn how:

• flashquake and SmokeLong Quarterly (Two excellent online flash fiction journals)

• Micro Fiction—Edited by Jerome Stern (An anthology of the best fiction under 250 words)

• Making Shapely Fiction—By Jerome Stern and “Who Cares?”: The Nuts & Bolts of Making Narrative Matter—Randall Brown (Two very good how-to resources)

Brown’s blog is especially  important to creative writers of every stripe. Pretty language, pithy dialogue, and evocative descriptions are expected. No matter how skilled your writing, stories won’t matter until you give the reader (and the character) something to care about.

There are a couple projects I have going right now, including revising a new 500-word  short story and looking over a more finished one. After they’ve been sent to their respective contests, it’s back to work on the novel again.

NEWS: I also just found out my favorite book store will close in March. Wolfgang Books was much more than a place to buy books. It was where I wrote a large part of my novel’s first draft, where my kids bought their books.

In his email announcement, the owner Jason said e-readers (among other things)  played a role in sealing the store’s fate. What do you think? Like Netflix doomed the video store, will the rise of digital books wipe out most brick and mortar book stores?

Thanks for stopping by. The blog has been a bit neglected, true, but remember to stop back over the next few days. There will be links to old stories available on the web and new content added regularly from here on out, including information about a new anthology which will contain my short story “Ghost Fleet.”

Pardon this post if it is not quite as polished. It’s late and I wanted to get a couple thoughts out before sleep beckons.

In many graduate creative writing programs writers, like so many cows, find themselves herded toward creating literary fiction. Perhaps it is so a program can say, “Look, there’s proof that our graduates can write a capable story. Sure, nothing happens, but look at that prose! Pretty, huh?”

Or more likely it is because teachers find themselves in the same boat as one of my undergraduate professors who banned anyone from submitting science fiction or fantasy in his workshop. He never read it, never understood it, and wouldn’t begin to know how to critique it. If you have a limitation, well hey, then I suppose that’s fair enough.

But art and artists tend to have a dash if not a dollup of chaotic in their nature. The assignment says, “Write a five-paragraph essay with X number of sources,” and the creative writer’s mind tends to spin out that in a million different directions.

Take me for example–I hadn’t written a true horror story in years. Yet in the past four months, in addition to working on my literary novel, The Sugarmaker, three or four different horror short stories have taken root. It’s like that urge to craft polished work has been overtaken by a sneaky little genre gnome who wants nothing more than to dabble and play, just make stories that play out like roller coasters.

“Want to write about family drama?” he asks. “Well, then I want to read a story that scares you. I want a story that tosses you into a situation and world where anything, even magic or monsters or robots can happen. And I’m not going to let you go back to your pretty sentences until you do it for me.”

The beautiful thing about Rosemont College, where I received my MFA, was all writers, no matter the genre or interest, were welcome. They populated the same workshops, swapped stories, challenged each other to find a way to critique a story that adhered to conventions unknown. Genre writers were treated as equals to people who wrote nothing but realism.

The program director did this by design.And this is what I learned in my time at Rosemont: Genre fiction in the hands of a capable writer can be every bit as beautiful and significant as any piece of literature in the canon.

So actually in my current writing I’m more than willing to indulge this urge to write the stories that he’s demanded I finish. At the same time, he’s giving me space to go back and work on my longer, more literary project. A good bargain actually.

Here’s hoping that writers everywhere have enjoyed this same freedom. Genre shouldn’t be a separate shelf with separate writers. Stephen King and Neil Gaiman should mingle nearby Faulkner and Hemmingway. Because writing is more than an art or an act of self discovery. It’s the willingness to play, to risk being silly, and to boldly create whatever story feels most compelling to you.

Best wishes on amazing successes in 2009.

Shawn Proctor

After popping open my mailbox this morning, I discovered a business-sized envelope from a literary journal I’d submitted to a few months ago. Based on the weight, I knew the response right off: form rejection. 

The form in this case consisted of a small scrap of paper, which had no handwriting, just the name of the journal and a polite “thanks, but no thanks” message. Woo.  Hoo. (Twitter folks might call this #submissionfail.)

New writers, on the other hand, often send a handful of submissions and gather these rejections like messages from on high. They fear the editing gods have looked upon their writing and moaned a collective “meh.”  Discouraged, some writers give up entirely.

But did they surrender too soon?  Perhaps, though not everyone’s destined for J.K. Rowling writing stardom. And even the best unproven writers only succeed in publishing one out of 100 submissions they send. So it’s understandable (even practical) that a number give up the dream and move onto less demanding work like actor, doctor, lawyer, or Senator.

Yet why do so many writers, in the face of daunting odds, persist? They keep writing and submitting, writing and querying, writing and, well, more writing. Thousands of words, story after story, all without the assurance that someone, anyone would ever want to read their work.

Here’s the secret these writers know: To paraphrase Nietzsche, the editing Gods are dead. There’s no great and booming voice resounding from the sky.  No divine hand to usher the chosen writers to land of milk and honey or shove the unwashed masses aside.

Many ink and paper journals, the traditional literary tastemakers, folded long ago or share equal footing with quality electronic journals.  Even the models for publishing books has shifted, leaving gaps for novels to find smaller niche markets. Or unusual voices to emerge as bestsellers.

Ultimately, the writer needs to plug into the literary community to find the resources that await. Plan to market the book and talk up the newly published story.  Ask friends to blog about your work, call the local paper, and do anything they can to help.  Moreover, continue writing, because in a society fractured by distractions readers will only give their precious time to a voice that’s worth being discovered.