from Ravi Mangla

I used to believe if the story was short the editing process would be a breeze – fewer words, fewer drafts. Many rejections later, I came to understand the revision process for a work of very short fiction should be just as involved and demanding as the revision process for a much longer fiction piece.

Very short fiction can’t overcome awkward phrasings, careless repetitions, flimsy word choices. There just isn’t enough soil to bury an error, whether large or small.

Good editing is about varying approaches and assuming different perspectives.

Read your work in different ways: silently, mouthing the words, pronouncing each syllable, out loud, a little louder, now just a tiny bit louder than that.

Read your work at different times during the day: first thing in the morning when you’re still shaking off the sleep, after a seventh cup of coffee, late at night when you can barely keep your eyes open.

Read your work as another person: pretend you’re someone who hasn’t read a lick of fiction since high school, an angry New York editor with a fat cigar and “REJECTION” stamp, dabbed in red ink, hovering inches above the page.

Edit in different fonts and font sizes. Single-spaced, double-spaced, triple-spaced.

Export to PDF and let that creepy robot read to you (also – a quick side note – it’s a lot of fun to feed the creepy robot dirty words)

Put on Track Changes. Sometimes it will push you to take bigger risks, rewrite more freely, since it’s so easy to revert back to the original.

When you have the story memorized, can recite it back verbatim, without a mistake, forwards and backwards, standing on your head, then it’s probably all right to start these steps over again.

Bio: Ravi Mangla lives in Fairport, NY. His very short fiction has appeared online at Sleepingfish, MonkeyBicycle, FRiGG, elimae, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. He interviews writers at his blog, Recommended Reading.

Read "Jupiter" in Wigleaf

Read "Sparkle" in Hobart

from Scott Garson

[note from the sheriff of this here town: this is a re-post of a blog entry written by SG for my junior level fiction writing class--maybe a year or two ago?]

Dear English 398
Your professor and I go way back. Let me tell you about your professor. One time she and I were at this bar and –

Sorry. Forgetting myself here. On to business.

I'm tempted just now to use a fancy term to describe the writing of 'flash,' as people call it. Like all such terms, it loses in exactitude whatever it might gain in sex appeal, but I'll go ahead and use it: the art of the dive.

Whatever could I mean by this? Let's see.

For readers, the full-length short story might offer immersion, twenty minutes, half an hour's worth. This accords w/ that dictum of Poe's that you've all probably read at some point or at least heard about: the short story has to be readable in one sitting. What this doesn't accord with, at least in most cases, is the experience of writing a full-length story. It takes time. It takes some people (wince) a lot longer than it does others, but it takes time, and because of that many of the writers I know are liable to think of full-length stories as an investment, one that is made hopefully but that entails (sorry for the unpleasant terminology) risk.

I'm just about to arrive at some kind of point here. Hang on!

If you're a writer, and you're going to invest time in something you know from the outset might fail, there's going to be a temptation: work more carefully! Keep your eyes open! Catch mistakes before they kill you! But here's the problem. The part of your brain you stimulate when you urge yourself to take care is not the part of your brain that writes good fiction. (This might be one explanation for what people call 'writer's block'….)

So. A dilemma. For me at least, the very short story is one way out. It's a dive. An escape from the daylight of my brain, from my plans and ambitions, etc. Swoosh, I'm in the water. And I know that I'll be back up soon – so the investment-risk thing doesn't apply.

Yes, the analogy is cloying…. We'll leave it behind.

I'll say this: I think some of my own best stuff is very short stuff. In that category one of my personal favorites is a story that I wrote on a day when I was busy and not technically 'writing.' I was busy, as I say, but when I had a second at one point I read a short by Lydia Davis. I'm embarrassed not to recall the title just now, but I loved it. I wasn't sure why I loved it. I didn't immediately see what made it a story. But I loved it as fiction, and when I set it down my blood was fizzing. I wanted to write something, you know. And so I did. What I wrote hadn't been an 'idea' in advance -- or an image, a 'kernel,' any of that. It had been nothing.

Of course this is all simplified. I'm not suggesting, for example, that with shorts there's no rewrites (stuff in the first paragraph of the one I just mentioned ended up in the last paragraph of the final version). I'm not suggesting…..

Oh enough of this. You see what I'm suggesting, right?

Happy writes, all. Bedevil her for me,

s

Bio: Scott Garson is the editor of Wigleaf. His chapbook, AMERICAN GYMNOPÉDIES is forthcoming from Willows Wept Press. Scott blogs at Patterns of Silver Light and So Forth

Read "Eight Micros" at FRiGG

Read "American Gothic" at Smokelong Quarterly

Read "Ode to a Bad Album" at Hobart

from Erin Fitzgerald

Pegasus and Ralph

There's a chapter in the Beverly Cleary book "Beezus and Ramona" where the two sisters are in an art class, under directive to paint a picture of an imaginary animal. After endless rumination (and self pity over not being inherently creative), ten year old Beezus decides to try for a carefully rendered Pegasus.

Meanwhile, four year old Ramona doesn't stop to think. She paints a blue stripe across the top of the page for the sky -- lots of little kids do this, actually. She tufts footprints across the page, which are meant to represent Ralph, the imaginary lizard who follows Ramona everywhere. After about five minutes of painting, Ramona steals the lollipop of the boy sitting next to her. Chaos ensues, she goes out to the playground, and her painting is never completed.

Beezus is frustrated by her Mobil Gas-like Pegasus -- she's only finished the sky, and an outline. She has a moment of inspiration: Why not paint a picture of Ralph as if he were visible? After all, since Ralph isn't real or visible, she's free to do what she likes! Beezus sets aside Pegasus, and gets another piece of paper. As she paints Ralph, she makes him breathe cotton candy and adds lollipops to his spine. Why? Because it just seems right.

For the first time ever, other people admire her work. Her teacher tells her that her picture will be hung in the center spot of the bulletin board. Much more important? For the first time, Beezus truly enjoys painting. And she no longer worries about whether she is creative.

It's hard to set aside Pegasus. It's hard to believe that Ralph can truly matter. But sometimes, at the end of art class? It's so obvious that you could kick yourself for not having seen it sooner.

Bio: Erin Fitzgerald got an MFA in writing a long time ago, and wrote a lot of short stories and novellas before she wrote any flash fiction. She lives in Connecticut, and is editor of The Northville Review.

Read "Four Sieges" at Hobart

Read "Early Decision," "Riposte," and "Waiting Room" at PANK