So I’m doing the Clarion West 6-week flash fiction workshop. I thought I would write about it here in case people are interested in doing it in the future and would like to know what’s involved.
We were assigned into groups of 7 and we have just completed the first week. This comprised some online video lessons on writing, reading some flash fiction, hand-picked to reflect the lessons in class, and then writing a piece (<1500 words) to a specific prompt.
We don’t have to use the prompt, but I’m doing it as I actually have trouble writing to prompts and I thought it might be good to practice. We have to submit our stories by the Thursday of that week and we are then responsible for getting critiques of the stories of the other members of our groups submitted by the following Wednesday.
My first observation is that interestingly, there appear to be two distinct subsets of writers. I fall into the category that starts to write but does not pay much attention to the word limit. When I finish the story, I then edit it down to get it under 1500 words. You can tell if someone writes like this as we all have stories just under the limit (1485-1499 words). The writers in the other subset are better at writing short. People not in my subset seem to submit things in the 100-600 word range. These tend to be beautifully written, and highly crafted, but often with less plot. There really doesn’t seem to be much between these two extremes. At least so far.
For my first week, I wrote a flash piece of psychological horror. I don’t normally write horror of any stripe. This was, therefore, again a stretch for me. However, I thought it was a good time to try this as at least one of the other writers in my group mainly writes horror. I felt leaning in and taking on horror may help me expand my skills in inserting tension and ambiguity into my writing.
It was definitely a stretch, but I think a fairly successful one. The other thing that came out of week 1 was in critiquing one of my fellow writer’s pieces I found out that although it was SciFi, a genre I am very comfortable with, it was intended as a humorous piece. Frankly, writing humor terrifies me even more than writing horror, and so I was concerned that in critiquing humor I may not have anything substantive to add. However, attempting the critique really got me thinking about how to approach humor. One of the things I realized (and was able to comment on) was that the first steps of writing humorous pieces are in some ways the same as any genre writing. First, you have to know who you are writing for. Middle-grade fantasy is different from adult grimdark. Similarly, fart jokes that may make 12-year-olds snigger, may not work so well as if writing for more mature audiences or markets that perceive themselves to be more sophisticated than this.
Anyway, so far, it has been well worth my investment of time. This is as much for allowing me to stretch myself and think about writing in surprising ways, as the pieces actually produced. But for now I must go. The prompt for week 2 just released and I have some writing to do!
Gideon P. Smith 