Re-visioning Your Flash

It's about going deeper.

Photo by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash

It might seem dismaying that you should see what your story is about only after you have written it. Try it; you’ll like it. Nothing is more exhilarating than the discovery that a complex pattern has lain in your mind ready to unfold. — Janet Burroway

Hi friends,

Many of you have asked for my thoughts on revising your flash stories. As flash writers, we often hear that it’s all about cutting our stories to the bone. Making every word count. And this is great advice! But I often feel as though writers go in with the machete far too quickly, before they really “see” the story. I view writing as an act of discovery and revision is probably my favorite part of the process.

Let’s look at some reasons for revision. (And here, I’m not talking about line edits, which I believe you should wait to do until the very last draft.)

1. We revise for CLARITY.

2. We revise for BEAUTY.

3. We revise for EMOTIONAL COHESION.

4. We revise for RESONANCE.

General tips for revision include: Reading the work aloud (with each new draft), sharing the story with trusted readers who “see” the story more objectively than you do, rewriting the story from memory, etc. See my recommended links from Matthew Salesses below for more.

Please do not feel beholden to your first idea, alluring as it may be to be “done” in a single draft. By embracing revision, you are leaving space in your creative brain for a spark of deeper resonance or innovation, the “next level” we all aspire to in our work.

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YOUR PROMPT

This is more of an exercise, or method, than a prompt.

A Two-Step Process for Revision

This is a method I use for my own work, devised for going deeper into the material of the initial draft, thus enriching it and making it more cohesive and emotionally resonant. Going deeper involves boldness and risk-taking, but the benefits are huge. You will use a mind-mapping technique to create a unique vocabulary for our stories. In this way, we truly get “to the heart of the matter” to a solid and satisfying second draft. 

I want you to keep discovering your story. 

Think of the process of writing your first draft as an act of discovery. You venture out, but perhaps at first you keep to a well-trodden path. It feels both pleasant and safe, but you have the nagging sense that something better lie ahead, if you only go deeper. 

Remain open and receptive to the possibilities that lie further ahead. 

Be open to the beautiful / ugly / arresting SURPRISE you may be given as you go deeper.

What does it mean to venture further, deeper, into the unknown? How does it feel? Well, very likely it feels a bit scary but it’s also exciting. 

Summon the courage to venture deeper where it’s murkier and you will discover the stronger, more resonant and evocative story you were meant to tell all along. 

So. How to do that? It’s a two-step process. And it involves tapping into your subconscious. 

Step One: Create a word bank for your story. The word choices you’ve made in the first draft will tend to be automatic ones. Go-to descriptions and cliches. Now, allow yourself to free associate and branch out. Discover the diction that best serves and enlivens your story. Often, it’s the diction, the story’s vocabulary, that pulls you (and your reader) deeper into the story. 

In some cases, this will lead you to make substitutions. You’ll discover more precise words. Specifics to replace generalities. Sensory details will emerge you hadn’t thought of before and want to include. And these details will often reveal an emotional layer to your story that wasn’t there before. 

Creating a word bank for a first or second draft is revelatory and enriching. You may feel you have cracked your story open to something new you hadn’t planned on. 

The story you hadn’t planned on is the one you are meant to write. Be open to that possibility. 

Now, hold on to your word bank. You will use it to create your next draft. 

Step Two: Read through your draft. Interrogate it. Keep asking yourself, “So what…?” 

Here, you may or may not find places in your story that beg for further exploration. Often these are the places where you struggled to get the wording right. Or places, upon rereading, that made you a little uncomfortable. The parts that are nagging at your subconscious because they point to something deeper in your story that you’re not addressing yet. 

Maybe your character does something that in writing your first draft you thought was slightly amusing or strange, but doesn’t feel altogether necessary to the story. But maybe you put it there for a reason. “So what…?” 

We so often begin with an “idea” or a “plot” and then feel so beholden to that initial idea that it cripples us in a way. I think we ought to consider more strongly (and interrogate our stories for) significance over plot. This is what Joy Williams has to say about this:

"So many times in a single day we glimpse a view beyond the apparent. Write those moments down. They might not speak to you at first. But eventually they might. Everybody writes too long and too much anyway, sacrificing significance for story. Truth be told, we all want to be poets." ~Joy Williams

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As an example of this process, see my story, “See How They Run,” published in the wonderful Inverted Syntax.

“See How They Run”

See the girl first. See her large family moving in next door. How it twins your own. One girl, so many brothers. How they are different. How they are so thin and pale. How their faces look like masks of children. How even at five, you see that you and yours are stronger, wilder. How your brothers are already collecting rocks and loading them into the Radio Flyer. See the girl’s strange shoes, like the stiff, white booties they corkscrew onto the formless feet of babies. How she is your age, maybe. Watch and wait. Let them approach first, says your brother, the tactician. How your backyards share the long, tall fence along the alleyway where rhubarb grows. Establish the battleground. Roll the wagonload of ammo behind the houses. Come out, come out you cowards. How they call back like girls, We don’t like you at all, at all, at all. How they go door-to-door holding what look like soup cans. How the mothers stand warily behind screen doors, nodding. How you offer to go stomp on the girl’s ugly shoes. How your brothers deign to swing their gaze your way. Do it! She won’t even feel it. How they wager you won’t have the guts. But you do. How she lowers herself to the grass, then. How calmly she unlaces her shoe, rolls down her anklet, examines the blood. If you could just have a moment, you’d sit next to her and explain about wanting to be seen. Her brothers, though. Screaming. Your brothers, though. See how they run. How your mother yanks you up by one arm and flails like she’s shaking out a rug. Your mother. If I ever see you harm that girl again…How you never end up playing with those kids, that girl. No battle ensues. How the mothers, one afternoon over coffee and cigarettes, broker a detente. They barely leave their house, then, those kids. Until the day an ambulance rolls up the alleyway and hauls their mother away. See their hands, raised up over the top of the fence like morning glories, waving goodbye. 

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This above is the published version, but in looking at an early draft, it was that moment when the sister offers to go and stomp on the neighbor girl’s ugly shoe that bugged me a little. A weird, funny, mean sort of thing that a kid might do. When I reread the draft, I questioned my choice. Do I want this girl to be so mean? Really? So what if she announces this to her brothers. Maybe that bit could go. 

Then I realized her motivation. Her need to be seen by her brothers who mostly ignore her. Her need to say to herself: I’m not like her.

It opened up the story for me. And while I didn’t dwell on it, for me, it became the load-bearing moment. That is the point in which I felt my flash traded story for…significance. And by not going on at length, by just leaving that moment there for the reader, I felt I gave the story an air of mystery and resonance that wouldn’t have been there had I discarded it in favor of the “war” story I initially set out to write. 

You can do this for your own second drafts. Maybe you got to significance and deeper meaning in your first draft (it happens!), but maybe not. By interrogating your story, line by line, you may discover what lies deeper in your story that takes you beyond your initial vision. 

By this two-step process, you can venture deeper and discover the story that is available uniquely to you. 

Honor your memories, your dreams, your experiences. Honor what’s inside you. Do not settle for easy or safe, the well-trodden path. Stay with your stories a bit longer. You will be abundantly rewarded. 

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RECOMMENDED READING

“A Guide to Creative Mind-Mapping and Brainstorming” by George J. Ziogas (this is more oriented toward the business world, but is generally helpful in understanding how mind maps work.)

We are lucky in our community to have a terrific, insightful revision scholar in Matthew Salesses. As writer-in-residence at Necessary Fiction way back in 2012, Salesses shared his own wisdom and invited several other authors to weigh in with revision essays. Check it all out here: “A Month of Revision.”

As a great teacher of revision, he also provided numerous revision exercises for Pleiades magazine here and here and here. And I highly recommend his brilliant book, Craft in the Real World.

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Thanks so much, as always, for being here, for reading these monthly missives and trying the exercises. I am having such a great time drafting (and revising!) my craft book, The Art of Flash Fiction, and can’t wait to put it out into the world.

Warmest best wishes,

Kathy