Fast Fiction

Author: Roberta Allen
Publisher: Story Press Books
ISBN: 9781884910272
Category : Authorship
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Set a timer for five minutes, select one of the more than 300 "prompts" at random, then immediately start writing and don't stop until time is up. The rules of Fast Fiction are simple; the results, liberating. By telling you what to write about ("write a story about a coward", "...warmth", or "...a whisper"), the timed exercises focus all your energies on the telling. By imposing a deadline, they force you to write spontaneously, bypassing the inner critic and allowing your voice - as well as surprising images and associations - to emerge on the page. Step by step, Allen shows how to turn your five-minute writings into short short stories - intense fictions that use language with power and precision. She then shows you how to use the timed exercises to built longer stories and novels. You'll see, for example, how one of her students turned eight of his exercises into a chapter for his novel. By looking at your fiction a piece at a time, the writing process becomes less intimidating and more open to experiment. Allen illustrates all the possibilities with examples of students' work, as well as a variety of published shorts - from classics by Anton Chekhov and Robert Walser to contemporary pieces by Joyce Carol Oates and Mark Strand.

Fast Fiction

Author: Denise Jaden
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1608682552
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
Writers flock to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) each November because it provides a procrastination-busting deadline. But only a fraction of the participants meet their goal. Denise Jaden was part of that fraction, writing first drafts of two subsequently published novels in that tight time frame. In Fast Fiction, she shows other writers how to do what she did, step-by-step, writer to writer. To ensure success, her program begins a month before the month of drafting. During this prep period writers think through plot, theme, characters, setting, etc. Then Jaden provides day-by-day coaching for the thirty-day drafting period. After writers “race to the finish,” they are not left high and dry. Jaden's “After the Draft” revision tips allow writers to determine if a draft is not just workable but compelling, so that they don't waste months or years developing it. Her camaraderie and skill allow Jaden to both instruct and inspire.

Very Short Stories Flash Fiction

Author: James Thomas
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393308839
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"These stories are not merely flashes in the pan; there's pay dirt here!" ―DeWitt Henry, editor of Ploughshares

Writing Flash Fiction

Author: Carly Berg
Publisher: Magic Lantern Press
ISBN: 9780692355008
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
Writing flash fiction is a fun, easy way to break into print and quickly establish yourself as a professional author. This book shows you everything you need to write great stories under 1,000 words, as well as how and where to get them published. It concludes with tips for re-publishing those stories all together as a book.

Richard Mallinson's Fast Fiction

Author: Richard Mallinson
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1481781286
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 533

Book Description
At only a page each in length, Richard Mallinson's elegantly structured short stories are a pithy fast fiction for a modern multimedia age. A rapid succession of carefully worked observations, the stories read like a dynamic anthology of life's collisions and interactions, its projected plans and unexpected rotations. There is a great joy in the subverted (the interviewer becomes the interviewee; the private detective becomes the conspirator) as well as an interest in the open-ended. Possibility abounds, for these are always tales of the present; the past is unclear and the future unwritten. Adhering to the strict one-page format, the writing is marvelously precise: it is highly disciplined, but infinitely rich, conjuring the most unique and sharply observed characters with remarkably few words. If indeed "we read fiction . . . in order to meet individuals" as the character Tolson declares in Mallinson's "Tolson's Creed," then in this anthology we are introduced to a plethora of distinct personalities, rendered all the more compelling by their relentless unpredictability.

Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World

Author: James Thomas
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393352420
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
A dazzling new anthology of the very best very short fiction from around the world. What is a flash fiction called in other countries? In Latin America it is a micro, in Denmark kortprosa, in Bulgaria mikro razkaz. These short shorts, usually no more than 750 words, range from linear narratives to the more unusual: stories based on mathematical forms, a paragraph-length novel, a scientific report on volcanic fireflies that proliferate in nightclubs. Flash has always—and everywhere—been a form of experiment, of possibility. A new entry in the lauded Flash and Sudden Fiction anthologies, this collection includes 86 of the most beautiful, provocative, and moving narratives by authors from six continents, including best-selling writer Etgar Keret, Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah, Korean screenwriter Kim Young-ha, Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, and Argentinian “Queen of the Microstory” Ana María Shua, among many others. These brilliantly chosen stories challenge readers to widen their vision and celebrate both the local and the universal.

Flash Fiction Forward

Author: James Thomas
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393328028
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Book Description
An anthology of bite-sized tales represents the work of some of today's best fiction writers and includes Rick Moody's definition of an armoire, Lydia Davis's sojourn into the world of cats, and Dave Eggers's exploration of narrow escapes. Original.

Sudden Fiction

Author: Robert Shapard
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
ISBN: 9780879052652
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
Presents over seventy short stories five pages long or less by such American authors as Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Bradbury, Langston Hughes, and Raymond Carver, and includes authors' commentary on the genre.

The Quick and the Dead

Author: Joy Williams
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030776382X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • From one of our most heralded writers comes the “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny” (The Washington Post Book World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert. Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents—from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum—accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old—the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless. With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny. A panorama of contemporary life and an endlessly surprising tour de force: penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career. Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood."

Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction

Author: Tara L. Masih
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780978984861
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. Literary Criticism and History. Reference. With its unprecedented gathering of 25 brief essays by experts in the field, THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH FICTION meets the growing need for a concise yet creative exploration of the re-emerging genre popularly known as flash fiction. The book's introduction provides, for the first time, a comprehensive history of the short short story, from its early roots and hitherto unknown early publications and appearances, to its current state and practice. This guide is a must for anyone in the field of short fiction who teaches, writes, and is interested in its genesis and practice.