278. What is Flash Fiction? With Veronica Klash

Author and editor Veronica Klash talks about what is flash fiction, its importance, and how flash fiction can improve your writing skills.
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Check out Veronica's bio:
Veronica Klash loves living in Las Vegas and writing in her living room. She is an associate editor at Okay Donkey Magazine. You can read her fiction and non-fiction in Wigleaf, X-Ray Lit, Electric Lit, and Catapult, among others. Her work has been featured in the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. Find more at veronicaklash.com.

Visit the resources mentioned in the episode (plus some extras):
https://okaydonkeymag.com/
https://www.smokelong.com/
https://wigleaf.com/
https://splitlipthemag.com/
https://flash-frog.com/
https://ghostparachute.com/
https://www.chillsubs.com/

Transcript

Jennia: Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the podcast that takes a whole person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. Veronica Klash is an editor and author of fiction and nonfiction. And she has a passion for flash fiction. She's going to tell us what it is, how it can help you sharpen your writing skills, and give us some tips on how to get your flash fiction pieces published. This is "What is Flash Fiction?"

Jennia: Hello, Veronica. So glad to have you here!

Veronica Klash: Thank you so much for having me! I'm excited to speak with you today.

Jennia: Yeah, me too. We haven't really talked about flash fiction before. And I think that it's going to just be an interesting subject for a lot of people to not just hear about it, but see what some of the possibilities are with it.

Veronica Klash: I am ready to talk about flash with anyone at any time for as long as they will let me. So... (laughs)

Jennia: Oh good! How about half an hour? No (laughs).

Jennia: So first, how do you define flash fiction? What makes it different from, say, a short story, or a novella, or any other type of short-form fiction?

Veronica Klash: Yeah, so I think for most people, it's fairly easy to define flash fiction. Generally it is 1000 words and under. There's a pretty hard line when it comes to word count. Some magazine venues are a little more flexible. They'll go up to maybe 1200. But I think once you get below 1000, you're kind of starting to move into what's known as micro—

Jennia: Mmm.

Veronica Klash: (laughs)—fiction territory. But it falls under that similar umbrella. But beyond the sort of hard line of the word count, flash fiction tends to have a certain urgency to it that you may not find in a short story. And obviously a novella is a lot longer and gives the writer a lot more space to explore. And when it comes to flash fiction, really, the reader is being dropped immediately into the action. There's no time for throat clearing of, like, "Okay, I'm going to tell you a story. Get ready for the story. Here's the background for the story. Are you ready for the story?" There's none of that happening. This is the story. You're in it. And you just kind of hit the ground running.

Jennia: That really makes sense, and I see this a little bit with picture books where it's sort of that same idea where we don't really have time for setting up backstory because picture books are limited usually to 1000 words. So it's kind of that same feel. How does this affect your plotting and character development? Can you tell us a little bit about each of those?

Veronica Klash: There might be a slight misconception when it comes to flash fiction that it can almost just be musings, right? Just a moment in this character's life. But true flash fiction does have a narrative to it. Now, whether it can be more experimental than most longer fiction? For sure. And that is definitely part of the fun of writing flash, but there definitely is a sense of change or development within the character. So if you are starting, let's say you've chosen a particular moment in a character's life. Let's say they're graduating from high school. You know, if you've chosen this particular moment of the character's life, it can't just be, "We're at graduation and here's the character graduating." That's not really a story—

Jennia: Yeah, exactly.

Veronica Klash: —There needs to be conflict and tension. So maybe we're at the character's high school graduation, and their father has shown up, that they haven't seen in ten years, right? So there's that tension, like, "Oh, suddenly this moment has meaning." This is a meaningful moment in this character's life. And then, you know, maybe we're kind of watching the graduation ceremony and the character is kind of anticipating that moment of when they're going to have that conversation with their father. And it's possible that at the end, the father disappears—

Jennia: Mmm.

Veronica Klash: —So they never got to have that conversation. So we still had that conflict building, and the tension building, for the character. And what needs to happen in this scenario, what needs to happen then at the end is maybe the character realizes they didn't need to have that conversation with their father. Having that conversation in their mind and resolving it for themselves was all they needed and they're ready to start a new phase. So, even though, you know, we didn't get the dramatic sort of fireworks, there wasn't this, like, extreme thing happening. The character still went through a change in this singular moment.

Jennia: Right.

Veronica Klash: Now that's not to say that flash always has to focus on a singular moment. It's just easier to do it that way. You can put an entire lifetime in under 1000 words if you want to, if you're creative enough with your pacing and the tools that you're using. But there needs to be a shift. There needs to be a narrative. And there needs to be something that allows the reader to feel invested. Even though you only have them for that short period of time, it's all that more pressure on the writer to make that time meaningful.

Jennia: Do you think it's harder to come up with an ending that will resonate with readers when it is so short? So I'm thinking, for instance, you don't have that whole final chapter to wrap it up. You really must be limited to only a line or two.

Veronica Klash: Yes (laughs). The short answer is yes. I think endings in short fiction in general, in short stories as well, it's tough to land that ending so that it feels satisfying to the reader, and it feels like the narrative has come to some sort of resolution, rather than just, like, "I've stopped writing. So this is the ending."

Jennia: Right (laughs).

Veronica Klash: Because those aren't the same things—

Jennia: Yeah, that's a little abrupt.

Veronica Klash: —The reader needs to feel, again, that there is some sense to what they've just read and some sort of meaning. Rather than, "Oh, you know, the character was sitting on the porch watching some fireflies at night, and then there's a shooting star, and that's the end." It's like, "But nothing happened. What does this mean?" So there def—

Jennia: Right, yeah. Exactly!

Veronica Klash: —There definitely is a pressure when it comes to wrapping up in a way that is satisfying to the reader. That's definitely one of the challenges of flash.

Jennia: So wording matters to us no matter what we're writing and the language we use. But that seems like it might be even more true when we are writing something in such a short amount of space. Just because we know we have to choose the exact right word every single time to best get across what we're trying to say. Is that something that you've experienced? And what advice do you have for people with this?

Veronica Klash: That's a great question, and I think... this is why I recommend that any writer, regardless of genre, regardless of if you're a poet, if you are into speculative fiction, if you love writing novels, is it doesn't matter what kind of writing you generally enjoy or generally are drawn to. If you bring writing flash— and it doesn't have to be fiction, it can be flash nonfiction— if you bring flash into your practice, it's only going to make you a better writer.

Jennia: Ahh.

Veronica Klash: Because bringing in that constraint of having just 1000 words—

Jennia: Right.

Veronica Klash: —is liberating. And I know that's (laughs) ironic. It's liberating because you kind of have to shed all of the other things that you would normally rely on. If you're normally used to writing novels, you're used to having chapters upon chapters to create that connection between the reader and your characters. You don't have that time in flash. You need to create that connection, hopefully, within the first sentence. If not, the first paragraph. So by the end of the first paragraph, the first couple of sentences, the reader needs to have a sense of where we are, what is happening, and who it's happening to. Otherwise, you're going to lose them, and there just simply isn't enough space. So, to your question, this is why the word choice is so important. If you can find a way to say something in three words versus five sentences, that's a fantastic skill to have, right? No matter what you're writing. If you are able to— for example, going back to, you're a novelist. If you are able to create that reader-character connection in the first chapter, in the first page, not only are you able to have more space for other things to play with, because the reader is already invested, but on a more industry level, it's easier to get an agent that way—

Jennia: Mmm.

Veronica Klash: —If you are able to capture someone on the first page, that is very indicative of them being able to trust you for what you're going to do in subsequent pages. You know, for example, let's say we're introducing a character, and I say she has a ballerina's gait. That's three words, right? A. Ballerina's. Gait. You have a mental image, because a ballerina is a very common social construct. When I say ballerina, or when you read the word ballerina, you have an immediate image. So and  I don't have to say she was slender and graceful, or she moved with a dancer's ease. Three words have conjured up something very specific for the reader.

Jennia: That's an excellent example, and I think it just showcases so well that we often can take what would be paragraphs of information and boil it down to some core element that's able to get across what we were trying to say, but without that extra wordiness.

Veronica Klash: Yeah. And this is what I love about words, and why I love flash, is because you can get so granular. Going back to a ballerina's gait, right? If I'm just reading those three words, there is so much I can extrapolate. So she has a ballerina's gait, but she's not a ballerina. So I can tell she's not a ballerina, but she moves like one. There's so much that you can interpret and kind of unpack from this very small space. And as a writer, I find that very exciting.

Jennia: I think it's a good exercise too in trusting our readers intelligence. Which is, you know, advice we hear all the time because we are trusting them to make those inferences or those extrapolations from what little we've given them. Whereas, again, if we had extra word count, and sometimes we do see writers do that, where they're filling the space just to fill the space because they have some predetermined word count that they've decided is their goal. But it doesn't necessarily need to be the goal if it's not necessary for getting the story across.

Veronica Klash: I love that you brought that up, because one of my biggest things is, I tend to leave things off the page (both laugh) rather than put them on. Because I feel like the reader-writer relationship is one of inherent trust—

Jennia: Mhm.

Veronica Klash: —Because readers are giving us their most valuable resource: their time. There's nothing more precious. So they are trusting me to provide them with something, with a feeling, with an experience. And so I give that trust back to them that they will understand my intentions and what I'm trying to accomplish on the page.

Jennia: That is such a beautiful way of looking at it, and I think it makes more of a relationship between them where you're not writing something just for the sake of writing or because you hope to get an agent, or a royalty check, or whatever, that you really are doing this for your audience. But the way that you phrased it, it's not like you see them as an audience so much as a participant in your storytelling.

Veronica Klash: Yeah, you're hitting the nail on the head. They are a participant because the other part of it too, is that once our words are out there, however we choose to publish them, however they get to our readers, we have no control over how things are going to be interpreted. And sometimes that's great and amazing, sometimes not as much. But I think that's part of the magic of literature, is that it just continues to take on a life of its own through the reader. And they are. They are a participant. Their imagination, their whatever backstory they have, right? All of that contributes to how they are going to engage with what you are presenting them with. It's almost collaborative in a very loose sense of the word.

Jennia: Yeah. I mean, ideally, I'd like to think that most writing is like that, especially if we are putting it out in some public platform. Whichever platform that might be, because we do need to take those considerations into account and thinking about, who will be reading this, how will they be interpreting it, where have we been ambiguous, intentionally or unintentionally? And how will that ambiguity be interpreted by these people based on their own life experiences and beliefs?

Veronica Klash: That is one of the really special things about flash too. Because when you're dealing with longer works, again, you have that backstory. So it's less likely that longer works are going to have that ambiguity and that space for the reader to interpret. Now, there are longer works that definitely lean on that. They lean on that brevity, that sparseness of prose—

Jennia: Mhm.

Veronica Klash: —but that is something that you find in flash more frequently because we don't have the backstory.

Jennia: So you said that flash fiction can be also flash nonfiction. Can you give an example of how that might work? Or maybe a piece that's popular or well known?

Veronica Klash: Yeah, so it's exactly as it's implied. Instead of an imagined or created story, it's a narrative based on the writer's life or experience.

Jennia: Hmm.

Veronica Klash: I'm trying to think of—mmm, "Forest Elegy" by Despy Boutris. Despy is normally a poet, and—

Jennia: I think I've actually heard of this (laughs).

Veronica Klash: —Yeah, it's beautiful, and it is nonfiction, and it is under 1000 words, and it's technically not poetry.

Jennia: Very interesting. Do you think there are any genres where flash fiction or nonfiction work better than others, or are at least maybe easier?

Veronica Klash: If you make the commitment to create a narrative and tell a story within that 1000 words, it can be anything. And that's, again, going back to that whole, "The constraint is liberating"—

Jennia: Yes.

Veronica Klash: —things that you might not want to spend, you know, 90,000 to 120,000 words trying to experiment with, or things that might get old at that length. You can experiment with that. And there's so much flexibility within flash. The idea of the hermit crab flash— which essentially just means using a different type of written communication to tell a story. So, for example, a crossword puzzle. Like, any, like, a grocery list. So being able to tell a story within a written format, that's not usually used to tell a story.

Jennia: How interesting! Yeah, it sounds like you can really become creative with this. I mean, even more creative than just writing itself, but pushing away some of those parameters that we usually assign to written form.

Veronica Klash: Yes, 100 percent. And again, this is why I recommend that any writer, no matter what you're into, explores flash. So it really gives you room to play in a way that's very accessible and it doesn't commit you to, like, a years-long process of—

Jennia: Exactly. And where you might feel like you have to push through and complete it, even though you're not really enjoying it or you're not happy with the result, because it's just not really fitting you and your voice.

Veronica Klash: Yeah, it just encourages play in a way that longer form doesn't.

Jennia: So you mentioned agents. How would one go about getting their flash fiction published then, and where would they find an agent for flash fiction?

Veronica Klash: It's pretty uncommon that agents seek out flash collections. Flash collections that are out there are generally published by small presses, so you don't need an agent. If you're a flash writer and this is what you mostly do, an agent is not really necessary. Unless you're kind of going into more of, like, the short story collections or, you know, longer works, novels, that type of thing. But in terms of publication, one of the other things that I love about flash is that accessibility. There are so many outlets and venues that publish flash online. They're free to read, they're free to submit to, and it gives you the ability to explore other people's work, really gain an understanding of that particular magazine's vision and taste.

Jennia: Mhm.

Veronica Klash: Because flash, within and of itself, is a category, yes. But there are different kinds of flash. You can have this sort of literary flash. You can have beautiful, lush, exploratory flash. You can have experimental flash. There's just a lot of different categories. And once you start kind of exploring a magazine's back catalog, you can tell their aesthetic and you can tell the type of thing that they are really drawn to, or at least the editors—

Jennia: Right.

Veronica Klash: —are drawn to publishing. And the great thing— again, that this is pretty common advice when it comes to publishing short fiction, is, you know, read the magazines that you want to be published in. And then, you know, figure out if your style fits in. Don't change your style to fit (both laugh) with the publishing—

Jennia: Right, yes.

Veronica Klash: —But figure out, you know, does your style fit in? And then submit. But the challenge when you're looking at short stories is oftentimes the more prestigious publications, you can't read their back catalog unless you buy it and—

Jennia: Right, exactly.

Veronica Klash: —you can't submit to them unless you pay. Flash outlets are not like that. Most of them, even the most prestigious ones like SmokeLong, they're free. They're free to read, they're free to submit— unless you're dealing with a contest, normally there's a fee for that. But you can read a magazine's back catalog and really get a great sense of whether your work fits in. And also just get inspired. So if you are someone who's starting out in flash, there are so many great magazines. So I mentioned SmokeLong. Obviously I'm going to plug Okay Donkey Magazine, where I'm an associate editor.

Jennia: Oh that only makes sense (both laugh).

Veronica Klash: Definitely check us out. Then you've got other places like Split Lip. They do short stories, poetry, and also flash. Wigleaf is a great place for micros and flash fiction. Flash Frog is one that's newer, but has really kind of emerged as a leader in the space. Their stuff is getting picked up for a lot of, like, "Best of" anthologies.

Jennia: Oh, very nice!

Veronica Klash: So, yeah, again, there's so many options. A good resource is Chill Subs, chillsubs.com. It's a great database of literary magazines. If you set up an account, you're able to search the database by word count, by genre, by type of magazine. So if you're into short stories, it's a great resource for that as well.

Jennia: That's fantastic. I mean, I was tempted to sit here and start writing down notes, and I thought, "Well, you're recording this. That's just silly." (laughs). Before we end, is there anything else you'd like to let our listeners know that maybe we didn't touch on? Or anything that you have that's coming up soon?

Veronica Klash: There's nothing for me in particular. If you want to check out my writing, it's at veronicaklash.com. Veronica with a "c." Klash with a "k." Also, please do check out Okay Donkey Magazine. I always love to see new writers in our queue submitting to us. We tend to like the more bizarre types of (laughs) stories.

Jennia: Oh fantastic (laughs).

Veronica Klash: But, yeah, just in general, if you are someone who doesn't have a lot of time, and you're like, "I really want to write, but I only have, like, 20 minutes every week to myself."

Jennia: Right.

Veronica Klash: Flash is for you. You can read, like, three flash stories in 20 minutes. And you can write at least half of a flash story in 20 minutes. So it's a great, accessible format.

Jennia: Well, thank you again so much. I think this has been wonderful, and I know I've learned a lot, so thanks again! (Veronica laughs)

Veronica Klash: I'm so glad! Again, I am here to talk to anyone about flash for as long as they will let me. So thank you so much for giving me this platform to get on my soapbox and talk about how great flash is (both laugh).

Jennia: Well, it was wonderful having you. Thanks again!

Veronica Klash: My pleasure!

Jennia: Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for additional information. If you have any tips for writing flash fiction or a favorite piece you think others should read, please let me know using the fan mail option on Buzzsprout, and I'll share some of these responses on a future episode. And please join me next week when Polly Holyoke will be visiting to talk about writing for the middle grade audience. Thanks again!