Saturday, July 4: Mississippi Mud
You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism. — Erma Bombeck
I hope all of you have a great Fourth! — JMF
SHORT CUTS
by John M. Floyd
Speaking as one who’s too tall to be comfortable in most car seats, theater seats, and airplane seats, I’ve always considered “short” an advantage. Believe me, those movies that show Gary Cooper sprinting through a submarine are just Hollywood tricks — he’d have knocked himself unconscious on the first of those little rabbit-hole doors.
But how short is too short? Even those who complain about cramped legroom and low-hanging light fixtures might also complain if they had to run around at Mickey Rooney height. (That top elevator button could be a challenge.)
In the writing/publishing world, short is relative. I assume, since you’re reading this blog, that you enjoy short stories, but what exactly is a short-short? The definition I’ve heard most often is “less than 2000 words.” And less than 1000 words or so (some say less than 500) seems to be “flash fiction” territory.
An old argument revisited
Should a piece of flash fiction, you might ask, even be called a story? Well, there can’t be much development of characters or plot — but you can at least build up to a conclusion, often a surprise ending. (See Melodie’s and JLW’s plot diagrams in the June 22nd CB column.) Or it’s sometimes a vignette or character sketch or “slice-of-life” story with little or no plot at all. When flash fiction gets really flashy it’s less than 100 words (blink fiction, maybe?), which is usually no more than a joke with an entertaining punch line. Still, they can be fun.
Examples, anyone?
Here are a couple of flashes (alas, not of genius) from my own files. This one, called “Executive Orders,” is 64 words — I first published it in Illya’s Honey:
The prisoner stood facing the firing squad. Lieutenant Garcia finished his cigar, tossed it aside, and raised his sword.
“Ready!” Garcia said. “Aim . . .”
A sergeant rushed forward, handed him a document. Garcia broke the seal. It was a pardon from the governor.
Relieved, Garcia turned to the prisoner — and smelled smoke. His cigar had ignited a clump of dry weeds.
“Fire!” he shouted.
The second is a 55-worder that I wrote to send to a book called 55 Fiction, but I let the deadline pass and didn’t submit it to them. It was published instead in Flashshots some time ago. Its title is “Mum’s the Word”:
“A story in 55 words? Impossible.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Try it, then.”
“Okay: Honey, I’m pregnant.”
“What!?”
“Just kidding.”
“That’s not funny.”
“How about: I’m pregnant, and it’s not yours.”
“What!?”
“Kidding again. How many words, so far?”
“38.”
“Let’s stop this. I’m hungry.”
“For what?”
“Pickles.”
“Pickles?”
“How many words now?”
“52.”
“And ice cream.”
The short into the shtick
I’ve tried a few even more brief than that. In an earlier CB column about short-shorts I included a 26-word “story” I wrote in which every word began with a different letter of the alphabet — in order. (I will mercifully not repeat that one here.) And the following piece is unusual in that it’s only six words long. I sent it to a market that was asking for submissions of that length but I never even received a reply — which is the fate it probably deserved:
APPROACHING BERMUDA TRIANGLE. NO PROBLEMS WHATSOEV —
I realize that might not be the best example to end on — but I do think there are two good things about this kind of “fiction.” The first is that it’s fun to dream up, and the second is that it’s a wonderful exercise in word choice and usage. It forces writers to make every word count. As mentioned in one of the comments to Sunny Frazier’s guest column awhile back, learning to write tight can help us with our novel writing as well.
On that subject, I recently had an article/essay called “Writing Short and Tight” included in The Writer’s Journey Journal by Wolfmont Publishing in Georgia. I can only hope my contribution was “written tight.” But I know one thing for sure: It’s short.
Light verse at the end of the tunnel
Since by now you know I have no shame, I’ll close with a poem about short stuff in general. I first published it in the delightful little magazine Rhyme Time — it’s called “The Tiny Farm in Littlefield”:
A Shetland pony pulls the plow,
A wee man walks behind;
The silo’s short, the house and barn
So small they’re hard to find.
“What do you grow?” I ask the man —
He answers: “Tangerines,
And cherry-sized tomatoes, and
Some baby lima beans.”
Have no shame? You’re walking tall with these. You have inspired me to try this short stuff.
I must admit, I agree with JLW that the shortest and flashiest of flash-fiction stories aren’t really stories. In my case, I suppose they might be called humor pieces. Still, they’re fun to write.
Sometimes efforts by journalists to “write tight” turn out to be inintentionally funny, and often misleading (headlines, for example). And I heard that someone who sent a question in to a celebrity gossip column once asked: “How old Cary Grant?” The columnist responded: “Old Cary fine. How you?”
The nonfiction counterpart to a flash story is called a squib, after a small firecracker. The OED defines one as “a short composition of a satirical and witty character; a lampoon.”
Bernard Dupriez’s A Dictionary of Literary Devices (translated from the French by Albert W. Halsall, 1991, University of Toronto Press) lists another definition of squib, viz., “A very short editorial, either paradoxical or humorous, on a contemporary news event”, and provides the following example from the Montreal Le Devoir by one L.-M. Tard, presumably from the time of the Nixon administration:
Tard spelled out the rules of the genre:
Take a subject from the headlines. Invent a comic comparison with a dazzling punch line. Center the text on a single idea. The first paragraph should contain the exposition of the subject; the second paragraph should contain the transition and punch line. The text should be reworked to produce concision and a variety of terms and expressions.
Sounds like Leno or Letterman, doesn’t it?
The desire to crowd a great deal of information into a small space can lead to such things as this headline at a paper where I worked: Mary Jones Dies; Cooked at Colonial Cafe.
Who noticed the semi-colon?
At least she wasn’t Cooked and Served at Colonial Cafe.
My contribution to six-word competitions was:
My wife wouldn’t hire a hit
I have to favorite short stories which I can quote more or less from memory. Apologies to the authors whom Ihave forgotten.
The last person on earth sat in a room. There was a knock at the door.
AND
That morning, the Pope forgot to take her Pill.
Rob, I like all three of those. I don’t recognize the last one, but I think the author of the “last person on earth” story was Fredrick Brown. (I started to say Jack Ritchie, but I’m pretty sure it was Brown. Both are among my favorite writers.)
I heard that someone else wrote a follow-up story to that one and billed it as “shorter by one letter than the shortest short story.” It was something like this:
The last person on earth sat in a room. There was a lock on the door . . .
Some time ago over at Naked Authors, Cornelia Read (following Louise Ure’s lead) asked readers to come up with three word summaries of books. I started with a one-word summary, and provided two three-word summaries:
Gaudy Night — Bluestalkings
The Hound of the Baskervilles — Bog dog fog
For Whom the Bell Tolls — Nun’s gun’s run
Short, sweet and to the point!