What Editors Want
What do editors look for in flash fiction? A panel set out to answer this question at AWP. Answers included a good opening line, a good closing line, a beginning, a middle, an ending, plot, depth, clarity, movement, transformation, and meaning that lingers. Of course editors, and readers, appreciate these qualities in fiction regardless of form. Flash, then, is simply traditional fiction writ small. Flash modifies fiction, a casual adjective, but does not really change its makeup. The trick is to cram as many of the trademarks of good, long fiction into as small a space as possible, to lodge Moby Dick in the belly of Jonah, or something along those lines. Uncomfortable, it seems to me.
How exciting to be working with compressed creative arts, where, I think, part of the joy of reading and writing is realizing that compression challenges us to search for unconventional stories. It could be that we pass over some of these stories when we indulge in the comforts of big fiction. And compression challenges us to tell our fictions through different, daring, even disturbing styles of storytelling. Disturbing in the sense that the reader is uncomfortable. The reader is on unfamiliar grounds, tasked with learning to interpret a different kind of narrative.
So, the laws of good writing, amassed and expressed in their entirety in one tremendous bang of concision. Is that what editors are looking for in flash? In compressed fiction? And if they are, should they be? Sure, I think so. But my feeling—it’s just one out of many paths leading to very tiny fiction that matters.