Eventually, in order to level up, you have to start getting a lot better at things you suck at rather than 0.1% better in areas of existing competence. To that end, last year, I started working on short fiction. I have a natural inclination to complicate and expand, so I’ve always struggled with the tight focus required by a small word count. I’ve come to the conclusion choosing the right subject is the most crucial step—don’t take a novel-sized idea and try to smoosh it into a 5,000-word story. My book-related “bonus” stories tend to burst out of my self-imposed container because I have ALL THE THINGS to work with, but the standalones have been better behaved. Kind of pedestrian, but they accomplish the goal of telling a complete story in no more than 5,000 words. I have no intention of submitting stories I know aren’t “special” to paying markets, but they’re good enough for self-promo.
Reader, I wrote something I think has a little bit of “special”—and it’s only 1,300 words. That qualifies as flash fiction in some places. Me, Queen of Embiggening, writing FLASH FICTION. Can you even imagine? I’m not confident it sticks the landing, and I’m even less confident the humor will be appreciated by anyone, but one of the two markets I think would most likely take it had a submission window open just three days after I finished, so I took the plunge.
Other than that super-fun stack of hardship grant applications a couple of years ago, I haven’t subbed anything in a decade. I do not know how to write a persuasive cover letter for fiction that short, especially when I have no relevant genre credentials to fill up space, so that poor story will have to fend for itself. We’ll see how it goes! Worst that can happen is it’ll be a cute addition to the supporter benefits story stockpile, as originally intended.[efn_note]Either the story gets accepted or I get to use the title card I made with pancakes and tentacles, so I win either way.[/efn_note]
I ignored my synopsis and had to jump back a scene to patch a hole I noticed while writing the synopsis but missed while actually revising. I’ll be hypervigilant about it for a couple of weeks, not notice any benefit, and slack off right at the point where it causes a disaster.[efn_note]Once upon a time, I was sorting through dry beans pre-soup, and it occurred to me that never in my life have I encountered anything more objectionable than a slightly discolored bean that I was then compelled to throw away (or throw in my pie crust weight collection) to justify the sorting process. I declared in that moment that I would sort no more! And immediately laid my fingers upon a bean-size hunk of gravel. The moral of this story is: Always check your synopsis so somebody doesn’t break a tooth.[/efn_note] Lather, rinse, repeat!
A later draft will be dedicated to polishing word choice, but sometimes the solution to another problem (in this case, a transition) lies in plugging better words into the same sentence. Generic first try:
The owner of the window box would have a grievance against the mare come morning.
Slightly more specific:
The cook who tended the window box would have a grievance against the mare come morning.
Following the throughline of specificity:
The cook who tended the window box would have a grievance against the mare come breakfast.
If I’d made the herb thief’s victim an herbalist, the event leading to the discovery of the theft would have to be something else. Since I’d previously established this town is only a piss stop on the road where an herbalist wouldn’t exactly flourish professionally, somebody feeding their family made more sense (and I didn’t have to go down a rabbit hole about herbalist activities for one transitional sentence).
Made myself a note for the next round that it needs to be more clear Heroine knows her former mentor tried to kill her pre-story. Right now, it’s clear there was An Incident, but there’s a missing link between that and her present preference to avoid those who would like her to be less alive. I think the tension lies not in whether she was betrayed after decades of loyal service but why. She’d know this mentor didn’t make a mistake in sending her into the lethal situation unprepared, and also that this mentor won’t leave the job unfinished, so it’s a mistake for me to be ambiguous about it. It may require only another single-sentence addition to clarify, but I’m not going to backtrack now to figure out where it belongs. We assume the previous 14,000 words will be fixed later and write forward as though we’re in conversation with the correct version. I don’t recommend that approach for structural changes that reconfigure the supports beneath you, but when the change is mostly cosmetic, it’s safe to add it to the to-do list and move on.
I hate the few transitional bits where Heroine is alone. Even when she’s talking to her horse or reacting to a letter from a character she won’t meet until later, having something to play off is more interesting than thinking about her next move. She does need to think about her next move! But I need to look at either condensing those parts or injecting something to interact with, even if it’s just a prop to reflect how she’s leaning (so to speak). Condensing is definitely a next-draft problem, and a prop is something I’ll have to divine from the whole text. What will she have access to in all of these situations that she can use as a fidget? It doesn’t have to be exactly the same object, but something I can employ consistently.[efn_note]Yes, Virginia, a lot of those adorable quirks you think are integral to your favorite characters were afterthoughts to solve problems that have nothing to do with character development.[/efn_note] And so the Revision 3 list grows…
Heroine has some insight into a culture she’s visiting because she spent the first years of her life in it. I, a clumsy clod, felt it necessary to overexplain a few things there’s absolutely no reason for her to think about when she sees them. Since a couple of these observations add absolutely nothing of value or even interest, snip snip. She acts out her semi-belonging in enough ways. Readers don’t benefit from an infodump of minutiae.