FLASH!

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How small can we go with SFF? No, how small really?

I love short-shorts - make no mistake, I also love the deeply-rooted, sprawling masterpieces of the classic epics.

But I love short-shorts - or flash fiction as the modern lexicon tags them. In fact, one of the first reading projects I set myself when I reached the point in my study of Japanese that regular reading was required to progress any further was to explore the work of Hoshi Shinichi, a science fiction author famed for his mastery of the short-short format.

The short short story format takes you to a world and gives you the penny tour through the eyes of the protagonist. It leaves enormous vistas open to the imagination and puts your mind into overdrive. It's like a carefully selected aperitif - just a taste, really, and maybe an incredible contrast to the main course, but perfectly formulated to make your stomach growl and your mouth water.

But (contrary to a recent call for submissions that suggested you could write a 1500 word story in an hour (but maybe take an extra hour to edit it)) the short-short is very challenging to do well. After all, you have only one or two thousand words in which to provide the reader with an engaging situation, a believable context, and most importantly a relatable hero. 

Can it really be done? Can you really pack all three of these things onto a single sheet of paper?

My answer: Not only yes, but hell yes.


Step 1: In media mother fucking res!
Look, the situation is easy. But you need to start hard and fast - not just in media res but what I call in media mother fucking res. 

I'm serious: don't start your story with the usual platitudes. Hoshi Shinichi had it easy: he could rely on the beautiful density of meaning in Japanese to do two or three things at once. Writing in English we have no such luxury: hit the ground running.

Homer brings us the tradition of in media res via his opening of the Illiad: he doesn't waste time telling us (yet) why the Achaeans are at war - he gets straight to what is happening now. Check out these lines from Samuel Butler's prose translation (archived online here):

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another. 

And which of the gods was it that set them on to quarrel? It was the son of Jove and Leto; for he was angry with the king and sent a pestilence upon the host to plague the people, because the son of Atreus had dishonoured Chryses his priest. Now Chryses had come to the ships of the Achaeans to free his daughter, and had brought with him a great ransom: moreover he bore in his hand the sceptre of Apollo wreathed with a suppliant's wreath and he besought the Achaeans, but most of all the two sons of Atreus, who were their chiefs. 

"Sons of Atreus," he cried, "and all other Achaeans, may the gods who dwell in Olympus grant you to sack the city of Priam, and to reach your homes in safety; but free my daughter, and accept a ransom for her, in reverence to Apollo, son of Jove." 

It's all there: we know the Achaeans are at war, we know Agamemnon has taken the daughter of Apollo's priest and that the latter has come to ransom her, and we know - from the first line - that the shit is about to hit the fan because that pissant Achilles can't keep a lid on his temper. Homer also skillfully pulls a fast one on us in the next lines: after opening with the warning that it's all down to Achilles' anger management problem he flips it and makes Agamemnon's refusal to accept the ransom the trigger for Apollo's curse and all that follows.

Sweet, yeah?

But wait - Who has time for all this? It takes him more than 220 words to get this far!

OK, so this is actually pretty quick by modern fantasy standards (200wds isn't even a page!) and anyway it depends on whether you're using Butler's prose translation, Cowper's blank verse translation (available here) or for that matter looking at the original Greek, but it's still painfully slow when you need to get from here to a satisfying conclusion in another 800-1300 words. 

There is no time to set the scene, and you don't need to anyway. The key here is what I call writing on the edge - the story lives on the interface between the character and the situation. Stick to that ragged edge, embed everything there if you can, and run with it.

Using this principle, you don't need to set the scene, even with something as immediate as Homer's first lines in the Iliad. No, go straight for the throat and show the protagonist moving, acting, doing what needs to be done. The protagonist bursts onto the page in the midst of a crisis point - depending on what you're writing this could be immediate peril, a critical decision, a sudden discovery. This - This is where you start.

Don't believe me? Check out the first line of Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1953):

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of the Dancers.

Look what is packed in there - we know so much just from Marlowe's first encounter with Lennox. We can guess what time of day it is, we can guess what part of town, and we can say with fair certainty what sort of man Lennox is. 

Nah, strike that - let's go hell for leather and look at Donald Westlake, who is the absolute master of in media mother fucking res in his Parker novels (written as Richard Stark):

When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first.  -- Backflash (1998)

When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away. -- The Mourner (1963)

When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed. -- The Outfit (1963)

When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger. -- the Man with the Getaway Face (1963)

When the knock came at the door, Parker was just turning to the obituary page. -- The Jugger (1965)

What's that? You want something more "literary?" Sure thing:

It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.

That last one is from Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (1936) - and just look at it: we know what time it is, we have a rich detail of setting, we know there are several people involved, and we know that something - perhaps something terrible - has happened.

Hit the ground running. Never, ever stop - this is a short-short, the whole thing needs to be a mad scramble for the conclusion.

2. Who needs context when you have Ma?
That opening is the hard part. I'm serious - every example I offer above is so carefully crafted it's mind-blowing. But the examples also serve to show something else that is absolutely critical the shorter your piece gets: The principle of Ma.

I cover this in more detail here, but in brief: you don't need to give us the whole world, just show us the door.

For SFF short-shorts this is absolutely critical. Don't (do I need to repeat myself?) don't waste time and precious words on passages exposition and description when you have the most exquisitely crafted tool in all the world to work with: your reader's imagination.

Don't give us passages - give us frames. Give us waypoints and lead us from one to the next. Let us do the describing for you!

This works for the action of course - look at some of the opening lines above: check out that opening from Westlake's Backflash again:

When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first.

Just look at that. In the space of 19 words we get everything we need: we know there's been an auto accident of some kind, we know what kind of condition the car is in, and that it's not likely to move again, we know Parker is facing an immediate physical threat. But what else do we know immediately? 

We know that Parker exists in a world something like our own. We know that Parker is strong and resilient. We know that Parker is willing to fight and maybe kill.

Important: Westlake tells us none of this directly.

He doesn't need to - we do the describing ourselves, working from the waypoints he's offered us. Look, it's not rocket science - it's connect the dots. 

I hate pinterest with a passion, but look at this gallery of sumi-e work. Notice how little there is on the page? How few details? Notice how the ones that have the most impact seem to be the ones that offer the least?

The key to the application of Ma is not just to have as little as possible, but to strip everything down to the absolute essentials. 

Cut, cut, cut - but make sure that what's left is critical, that it's the anchor from which the reader's mind will weave the rest of the tapestry.

3. Introductions
Much is made of the "rule" that you need 500 words to establish a perspective character. 

Unfortunately, like any statistic of dubious origin it's a lie. Or rather: misleading.

Let's take a look at the opening of Neutron Star by Larry Niven (as appearing in the October 1966 issue of IF). Ignore that first bit - the technical stuff that sets the scene and gives us the illusion of in media res - the story really begins where Beowulf finds himself face to face with his first puppeteer while staring at the new Sinclair intrasystem yacht in the drug store (and he never even got his lighter battery!). This is a pretty classic establishment, and in the space of about three and a half magazine columns (or just over 600 words) Beowulf Schaeffer's voice and place in the world is established.

Coincidentally, we learn rather a lot about the universe in which Beowulf lives as well - some through direct exposition, but much of it through Niven's mastery of Ma: for example, we know people smoke and we know that lighters are electronic, and we know that Sinclair ships are considered pretty but not particularly reliable, and we know to be impressed by the puppeteer's title when it introduces itself because of the throw-away line that establishes President of General Products as the pinnacle of rank. But I digress.

This opening is a classic, and follows the kind of pattern that so many SFF stories do: set the scene, give us a taste of the protagonist, introduce the foil. All to establish the perspective.

All those words are necessary. But does Niven ever really tell us about his character?

No, absolutely not. And in fact it would violate that cardinal rule: Show don't tell.

Editors are always telling authors not to stop the story to introduce a character. It's a bad habit some writers have - to rein in and provide paragraphs of background and description when a new character bursts on the scene. 

Yes, you might need as many as 500 words to establish your perspective, but you don't need to do it by telling us about the protagonist in any way, shape or form. This goes back to my first point: in media mother fucking res! and my second point about Ma:

Look, your character doesn't exist in isolation. In fact your character doesn't exist - well, you know that, but that's not what I mean. What I mean is that your character is just like the people you know in real life. How do you get to know them? Do you shake hands and exchange resumes? 

No.

What you do is share the mutual experience of engaging with the world. You learn about people by watching what they do and listening to what they say. You don't plug your brain into a port on the side of their head and download a properties file, however convenient that might be sometimes.

Why in the world should be be any different for the characters in your story?

Make your character do something.
Make your character engage.
Frame every descriptive word from the protagonist's perspective.

Make your protagonist hit the ground running, with an urgent need and a compelling crisis, tell it all from the protagonist's frame of reference and "perspective character" just sort of happens.

Look back at that Niven story.

And look at the opening chapter of Dune: Paul's perspective is solid within the first 300 words - and he doesn't even do anything! But everything, every detail is presented to us ruthlessly from his perspective in the same way that Niven does it for Beowulf - and Niven has the advantage of using his perspective character as the narrator.

So how does this all apply to short-short stories?
Make no mistake, the rules above are obvious when you look at the classics. But the fact of the matter is that they apply just as much to short-short SFF stories as they do to stories of more common lengths - more. The key is: 

• hit the ground running
• use only the words you need - and the most evocative ones
• do it all from the perspective of your protagonist.

This, of course, assumes you mean to write a story - not a prose poem or a vignette. Don't misunderstand, these are great projects as well, but the truth is that it's harder (much harder) to write a coherent story in limited space.

To make this work, I wondered just how short we could go. Looking through various pulp and slick magazine archives from way back, I found a number of magazines that had (for a time anyway) regular features where the author packed a story onto a single magazine page, or on the facing pages of a digest-sized mag. 1000 words, or thereabout.

Now that is a short story. 

So I went to the pulp formulas of the masters - things like Lester Dent's master formula as used in his development of Shadow installments, or like Nelson Bond's formula...which is for pulp, but seems to come at it from another, slicker angle. 

I looked at those short-short features and tried to see what made them tick.

I looked at some of my own "microfiction" as published on Twitter.

I stuck all that in the cauldron of my mind and started plugging at the 1000 word formula you can find at the beginning of this article.

There's the frame, people. And all the words above this are about the process. 

Now you have everything you need to write high energy, hard-hitting flash fiction with a pulp vibe.

Go get em.