Tag: flash fiction

Dancing with Word Tango

Word tango
Word Tango’s logo

I completed a second weekend hosted by Word Tango with Kathy Fish as the teacher, a couple of weekends ago. A birthday present to myself.  I like Tango, I like words.  I love Word Tango. The focus for the weekend was flash non-fiction. My, oh my it was a good group of writers. I was honoured to be part of  it. During these weekend sessions conducted via the forum site, Kona, Kathy posts a lecture and some prompts on day one. And then another extension to the prompt on day two. The writers then get on with it and give each other feed back in a thread.

Unlike Argentinian Tango where I can’t make any moves although I adore the dance and the music,  I’m not a beginner in writing flash. I’m not an expert either. They say it takes several months or longer to get the basic steps of  Argentinian Tango. Then you improvise and improve over many years. Lovers of the dance spend their whole lives going to Milongas, getting close up, becoming more intricate, learning about space. Now I’m in my fourth year of flash fiction writing, I’m past the basics and getting bolder. The word-dance in flash fictions  should set people on fire, ignite their passion. Everything that goes into the Tango.

The interesting experiment on this weekend with Kathy, was the challenge to weave flash fiction memoir extracts into different orders and to think about the use of  space. A generalisation, but it’s my view that writers born in other countries seem to find it easier to think about white space when composing flash fiction. Is this because of our densely populated island, I wonder?  My piece was fine, but I think it was too packed. I’m re-drafting now to break it up after seeing what other people produced. I’m cutting and trying out different arrangements, using short paragraphs, lists.

It was really a wonderful dance that weekend. I highly recommend writers have a go at one of these weekends.  Word Tango also has a writers’ community with great support for people. I’ve yet to check that out, but I believe that on their current submit-to magazines-and-competitions-day they’ve been suggesting writers  submit pieces to the latest round of  Bath Flash Fiction Award. So I’m very pleased about that too.

Dribble, drabble, toil and trabble

I had fun adapting the title for this post from the witches’ spell in Macbeth “Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble… for a recent tweet at @bathflashaward. I can’t resist using it again.

A Dribble is the term for a 50 word story, a Drabble, 100 words and a Trabble, 300 words.  I don’t believe the writers  who came up with these terms toiled to find them. I’m sure they were playing in order to discover a fun way of encapsulating the essence of the  form –  very short but not only that – something more.  Perhaps that is why I took the phrase from the witches’ chant in Macbeth. Good tiny fictions mesmerise. Like a spell, you can be changed by a mere few sentences.

There are many longer definitions of very short fiction including this lovely metaphor by writer Luiza Valenzuela I used in a post on the Bath Flash Fiction Award website

” I usually compare the novel to a mammal, be it as wild as a tiger or tame as a cow; the short story to a bird or a fish; the micro story to an insect (iridescent in the best cases)

The one word or short phrase descriptions for the form are also often metaphorical. According  to Shouhua Qi, writing in the brilliant Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, in China, where the form is currently ‘white hot,’ very short stories  go by  the following names:

Minute Story, Pocket-sized story, Palm-Size story, smoke-long story, hint fiction.

All these names suggest something more than just the ‘size’ of the work. There are other names that describe the process of writing or reading very short stories

quick fiction, fast fiction, furious fiction, sudden fiction, flash, five-minute fiction.

Very short fiction can be ephemeral, written fast and then forgotten. But gone in a moment, they can also linger long  like the brilliant flash of that iridescent insect you might first have seen as a child and never forgotten.

Other terms suggest the places where such stories can be dashed off:

postcard fiction, napkin fiction.

There’s an ongoing debate as to whether prose poetry is the same as very short stories.

‘Flash’ fiction – arguably the term  most widely used – in the US and UK at least –  was coined in the early 1990s by the writer James Thomas who, together with Robert Shapard collected stories published in  an anthology called Flash Fiction in 1992.

I don’t know why there is so much fascination in providing different names for stories 1000 words and under. There are many more names than the ones I’ve mentioned. Longer stories only get the one name – short stories. Longer still you get ‘novella’, then, of course, novel. Perhaps it’s because the shorter the story becomes, the more room there is for experimentation. Nearly everything can fall away – plot, structure as well as most of the words. The one or two word description for the genre, can be itself a tiny story.