My flash-fiction test has produced results: an acceptance. Perhaps such immediate encouragement will never happen again; however, I’m going to take that encouragement and raise it. I’m placing another bet on the table. It’s about chance and skill and not much more than that. Art, yes, there’s gotta be art in this game, but that’s a given.
My story was strange, and I loved writing it: art and skill.
I found an editor who happened to be of like mind: chance and skill.
I’m writing another piece of flash: art and skill and chance.
I’m on a roll. It’s in the moment. The moment is all there is. A story can lock a moment into place. Flash is especially good at that.
I’ve avoided writing flash fiction for years. I had a goal to publish long stories with story arcs and developed characters and plots. When I achieved that, my next goal was to write a novel. Now that I’ve done these things, I’m ready to revisit my old instincts, to write about the gist of the thing, to write a story in a few hundred words.
It’s satisfying to write a tight tale in a couple of hours. Flash fiction is everywhere.
Every day, I take a rural bus to a civilized ferry to a city bus. I am flooded with flash. Flooded with different personalities doing wonderful, stupid and sad things that novels are built on.
Or maybe just paragraphs.
Maybe I have the wherewithal, once again, to spin the shortest of tales from a simple gesture that came into my view. Maybe I can make that moment live a bit longer, in a different form, for a period of time. And maybe one of these busy editors who can only make time and space for a few hundred words will give me a nod and publish my snapshot of make-believe.
I sent out a piece this weekend. I wrote it on the ferry, on the bus, and then in the car while my husband ran in the store. The entire process took about three hours. It was fun and easy to write. This story is my test: going back to my instincts and going forward into the current readership, the busy people, the digital readers, of our new world.
