Patience in Flash Fiction Writing by Allison Symes

Patience in Flash Fiction Writing

by Allison Symes

Given flash fiction is so short, is patience necessary? Surely you just dash off a couple of hundred words and send it off to a publisher or put it on your website. Hmm… no! Patience does pay off because flash fiction is precision writing. It takes time to get that right.

One of the things I love most about flash fiction writing is I can set my characters whenever and wherever I want - and I do. I’ve always loved inventing people and long thought this was the best aspect to any story telling so this is win-win for me. As there is no room for much description, flash stories have to be character led so I outline what I need to know about “my people” (or other species of choice) before I write their stories up.

And this is where the patience comes in. I have found patience at the outlining stage of writing saves me a lot of editing grief later. For one thing, there are no plot holes as I’ve already worked out the basics of what I need to know to be able to write the story up at all. For another, it also means I am far less likely to go off at an interesting but unhelpful tangent (and I suspect most writers have been there more times than they might care to admit).

So I’ve got my character(s) lined up, now what do I do with them? Give them a decent plot line of course but often the character can dictate the plots they are likely to be in. So in outlining my characters I have often got them and my story structure in place in one “hit”.

So again time and patience exercised at this point pays off. I have rushed straight into a story twice in my time. Twice I abandoned stories. Definitely not a coincidence that. I found I just hadn’t thought my characters through well enough and I boxed myself into a frankly boring corner so the only thing to do

was go back to basics and take the time to outline a character properly and do the job properly. I look at character name, character type (they don’t have to be human either), mood of story, and theme of story to help me get my people right.

Mind you, I don’t always know the name of a character when I start out so I use “it” for the time being. As I draft a story either a suitable name will come to mind, I’ll note it and put it in later, or I decide to leave my character as an “it”.

Patience

While the light lasted, danger abated, but then that was always the way of things, wasn’t it?

The creature cursed. Her prey seemed to have endless ways of keeping that light going. Neither did she like the look of what she’d heard them call fire. The moment the light was out she’d have them though. They’d been drinking. She just needed one of them to be careless and extinguish that light and then she and her offspring would be well fed for a good week.

Why couldn’t the humans co-operate? It wasn’t as if she asked for much. If she couldn’t have their livestock, and they’d taken huge precautions to protect them (she really did not like the creatures with the growls and the teeth), she’d have to feed on the humans themselves. What other option was there? The likes of her were never going to turn veggie.

Ends Allison Symes - 2021

This can work well for my darker stories. An “it” can be far more scary than a named character and you can get your readers wondering what exactly “it” is.

For example, in my story Patience, which I hope will make it into my next collection, I deliberately don’t spell out what the creature is as I want your imaginations to go into overdrive on it! So patience is a writing virtue as well then. It has taken me a long time to realise this, which is perhaps ironic, but it is good I know this now! I don’t plot everything out in advance either. I’ve learned I have to give myself navigation room as I draft my story but I do know who my character is, what their major trait is, and I usually have an idea of how the ending is going to be. Sometimes better ideas come along as I draft so I make a note of them and come back to them later.

I’ve found it pays to put those ideas aside and look at them in the cold light of day to assess properly whether they were as good as I thought they were. Sometimes they are, sometimes I wonder what I was thinking of, coming up with that! But again being patient with yourself and giving yourself the time to assess properly pays.

In the flurry of creativity, it can be hard to make yourself slow down and take time out like that. All I can say is it works and not just for flash fiction. Patience is a wonderful theme to write to as well because it is open. You can show patience being demonstrated in your characters or, conversely, show what the lack of it does for them. There is potential for tragedy and comedy here. I hope you have fun writing to the theme. Website: https://allisonsymescollectedworks.com/ Books: http://author.to/AllisonSymesAuthorCent.

Her Youtube channel, with book trailers and story videos, is at https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCPCiePD4p_vWp4bz2d80SJA/ With her non-fiction hat on, Allison blogs for online magazine, Chandler’s Ford Today, often on topics of interest to writers. Her weekly column can be found at http://chandlersfordtoday.co.uk/author/ allison-symes/ Allison also blogs for Authors Electric and More Than Writers, the blog spot for the Association of Christian Writers.

Allison Symes, who loves reading and writing quirky fiction, is published by Chapeltown Books, CafeLit, and Bridge House Publishing. Her flash fiction collections, Tripping The Flash Fantastic and From Light to Dark and Back Again are out in Kindle and paperback. She has been a winner of the Waterloo Arts Festival writing competition three years in a row where the brief was to write to a set theme to a 1000 words maximum.