There’s three things that need to lock into place before I’m willing to commit to a monthly chapbook release all through 2022, and yesterday I ticked off the first of them.
I’ve spent the last four days writing the twelve vignette/flash fiction pieces that will go into the first three issues, batching the drafting together in a single burst of productive work. The Scrivner-stat above represent 9 stand-alone vignettes, 3 that are part of an ongoing serial from issue to issue, and one additional scene that ended up being less ‘vignette’ and more ‘first scene of the story I’ll use in issue three’.
And I’ll note that all of these were new, rather than simply typing up some of the notecard stories I’ve been writing on my way to work, so I’m actually fifteen or sixteen story drafts ahead of where I need to be.
STORIES I TELL MYSELF
Way back when I first interrogated the idea of doing a monthly release, I was looking at doing two fully fledged short stories rather than a short story feature and a bundle of vignettes. Problem is, my short story writing has been getting longer in recent years, with every project drifting towards novelette or novella length. I held no confidence in reliably delivering two stories a month, let alone two stories that were good.
I’d done occasional test-flights of the idea, such as the Short Fiction Lab series, but they never hit the kind of schedule that I’d been hoping for. Life got in the way, and then Brian Jar evolved, and things I planned on doing regularly fell by the wayside.
Here’s a thing we don’t often talk about in writing and publishing: there are narratives that build up around your work. Narratives that other people construct, and narratives you tell yourself.
My narrative around fiction has been…well, let’s call it rocky…for the last few years. I’ve written a lot of work, but not with any degree of confidence. Partially that’s a function of moving into longer work, and partially it’s a function of simply writing and submitting less.
And partially it’s a function of life being a pretty horrendous gauntlet of disruptions stretching back to 2016 (and probably a few years before that, although 2016 was the point where everything bubbled over).
I’ve written an awful lot over the past few years, but very little of it is finished and submitted/published. All of my successes have been with backlist work, whether it’s the Keith Murphy novellas or short story collections, and that’s had an impact on the story I tell myself about my writing career.
All too often, in recent years, I find myself thinking “I used to be good at this.” I often start projects trying to figure out how not to fail (again), rather than trying to make the story succeed.
And given the challenges in building a writing career, that’s one heck of an eight ball to put yourself behind and try to manoeuvre out of.
TRANSIT STORIES
I started writing flash again after taking Mary Robinette Kowal’s Patreon workshop on the form, which laid out a structure and ideology around crafting short vignettes that held some appeal to me. If you’re not one of Kowal’s Patreons, you can find a somewhat truncated but still informative series of notes on the topic over on Kowal’s twitter feed.
Both these resources focus on the 250 to 500 word flash format, which is not my favourite, but as Kowal is fond of noting in multiple courses she runs, writing has a tendency to be fractal and the toolkit for writing a 500 word story expands just fine when creating a neat 1000 to 1500 word vignette.
I used to write a lot of stories around that mark, back in 2007 to 2010. I often thought of them as “Phone Bill Stories,” as they were projects I could burn through fast and often paid just enough to cover my phone and internet bill if someone accepted them. Stories under 2000 words were also a weirdly useful thing, because when an editor’s got a limited budget for a magazine and really loves that submission at the top end of their word count, they look for something short and on-brand they can acquire with the rest of the budget.
This is not an attempt to disparage flash fiction (although I prefer the term “vignettes”, ) — I often wrote those stories because I originally trained and published as a poet, and the 1,000 word story often played to the skills I brought over from that form. A good flash fiction story relied on a certain level of control and ability to play with an audience, while also playing with resonances and allusions from other stories. And, because the form couldn’t support detailed world building, you had the freedom to be pretty damn weird and trust the reader to follow along.
But as I started finding my feet as a fiction writer (and picked up a day job that covered the phone bill), I left the shorter formats behind and worked towards longer works whose ambitions lay in places where my craft was weaker: structure and plot development, third person narration rather than a close first person, fast-paced action rather than weird-ass concepts for the fun of it.
WAKING UP
I’d largely forgotten the pleasures of vignettes over the last few years, and probably wouldn’t have revisited the form at all if I hadn’t been working full time. But two strange thing happened once I started writing flash fiction on my commute: first, I started finishing things.
Second, I was having fun for the first time in years, writing in a way that was disconnected from the eventual success and failure of the piece for the first time in years.
And the thing about finishing things that are fun? It makes it easier to do more. What started as six minutes of scribbling on an index card while driving to work soon became those six minutes plus ten spare minutes during my lunch break, which meant I was finishing twice as often and thinking about what I could do with the stories once I’d typed them up.
More importantly, I was working my way through ideas I’d had a decade ago and never got around to finishing, which did wonders for my self-narrative around writing and feeling perpetually behind.
By the time I was four days in, and close to hitting the twelve-vignette mark I’d set as my target for the week, you can see how hungry I was to simply get this done. I wrote four vignettes in a single day, and probably the best of the one’s I drafted this week, and doubled the word count of the previous day in one fell swoop.
All because I was having fun, and I could see the path to a clear and achievable win.
And while writing here in the gap between Xmas and New Year is basically productivity on easy mode—I’m on leave and not besieged by major commitments or stressors—the notion that I just finished twelve stories and started a thirteenth at the tail end of a year where I published no original fiction for the first time in over a decade is a big thing.
In a pinch, I could have these bundled and out as a stand-alone chapbook by New Year. I could submit a stream of stories to markets for the first few months of the year, and maybe pick up some publications. I could release an original story to my newsletter list every month, and thank folks for signing up.
At this stage, I’m doing none of these things, but I’m predicating the decision on tactical choices about the best use of the work rather than failure to produce.
And that’s not a thing I’ve been able to say for…well, years now.
Many, many years.
TELLING MYSELF A STORY BY TELLING STORIES
So the four-vignettes-an-issue goal I’m setting myself with the monthly Digest is as much about rewriting the stories I’m telling myself about writing as the stories I’m telling all of you. It’s a narrative of steady wins, having fun with form, and trying new ideas. Using vignettes as R&D when the occasional tale explodes into something longer (as one of these did) or a character/concept catches reader attention and earns itself a revisit.
It’s also a narrative of control within the writing itself, pushing to find ways I can bring a concept home inside of 1000 to 1500 words. Re-engaging with the discipline of conveying detail in short bursts, hinting at larger world, and finding an ending.
And I’m hoping that when I move on to my next batch of tasks — writing the short stories — that sense of precision and control stays with me as I focus on nailing a concept in four or five scenes instead of one.
If you’ve been in a writing slump — or if the story you’re telling yourself about writing bears more than a passing resemblance to the negative one I’ve been carrying, given everything that’s going on — I can recommend taking a gander at Kowal’s process and the way it breaks down story goals and intent by sentence level for a tightly written flash story.
You probably won’t follow it exactly — Lord knows I don’t — but busting out a quick win or two just might be the kick start you need to challenge the story you’re telling yourself.