Writing by Feel
News Flash: The Prose-Poem Project has accepted my piece, “Trouble Sleeping the Night Before a Big Test.”
We now return you to your regularly scheduled post.
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I’m back from residency, and when I’ve had a chance to catch up on things like work, home life and sleep I’ll try to post an anecdote or two. In the meantime, this is something I was thinking about during the residency.
Before we arrived, one of the professors suggested that we write funny relationship pieces centered around fights or arguments. They could be fiction, nonfiction or poetry. I think the idea was to have an informal sharing of them, but that didn’t quite work out. I did, however, read mine at the student reading. I even have a high-definition video recording of it that I hope to post soon.
Writing a flash fiction story under tight time constraints makes revision tough. I didn’t have weeks to let the story sit before considering it again, or even days. I had to write it, then revise it twice, all during the same day. I had to make snap judgments about concerns that I would normally postpone.
For example, about two hundred words into this four hundred ninety word story sat a sentence that troubled me. The narrator paused for a moment’s reflection on his situation. It did not advance the plot, though it did shed a little light on the narrator and how his current problem was not a new one.
Nine words out for four hundred ninety. This is less than two percent of the story, but if I extrapolated it out to a seventy-five thousand word novel, this would represent almost fourteen hundred words. That’s a whole scene’s worth of reflection.
Now the rules of flash fiction are not quite the same as those of a novel, but thinking in terms of percentages and equivalences can help illustrate the amount of weight a part of the whole is given. Did this sentence add enough value to merit its inclusion?
I did not have time for much more analysis than that. I had to make the call, so I went with my gut: I kept the sentence.
When I read the story aloud at the residency, I paid special attention to the audience reaction when I got to that line: they roared with laughter. They loved it. Two or three people later approached me and told me it was their favorite line.
I think it’s safe to say that everyone who writes has read a great many books, enough that there are small things we learn about writing that don’t come from conscious focus on craft or form. These are the emotional reactions we have to text, flow and presentation. We notice these physically, as a variety of sensations that common parlance lumps together as “gut feelings.” I think that if we can learn to pay attention to our gut feelings about what we write – assuming we can maintain enough mental clarity to hear them – we can produce better work than our craft alone might generate.
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Submissions update: since I last posted, I have submitted pieces to Camera Obscura and Bacopa.
