Flash fiction is an excellent writing exercise, but it's a very different animal from longer-form writing. In the last two months, I joined a writing forum that has monthly flash fiction competitions, and my first idea was a great idea (well, I thought so...) but it was just too much for flash fiction!
Let me explain: if you're limited to 650 words--and I mean a hard limit--you had better make sure you restrict the action in your story to a small enough list that you can still add some descriptive words and all that good stuff.
So, considering the first story, the seed phrase was "The Old Cellar Door." I had a funny idea of someone finding something suspicious in the cellar of an old house they were flipping. I wanted to play around with the reader's expectations, making things seem mysterious, then mundane, then mysterious.
...It was a disaster. The first draft that I plunked out after an hour of brainstorming was over 2000 words. It was three times longer than the limit. So I pruned. And pruned. And pruned. To the point where I was using punctuation to help get ideas across without wasting a word.
As a result, I neutered the story of nearly all descriptive language and simplified the action so much that it was ridiculous. I had simply chosen too large of a story for flash fiction of that length. Even worse, I didn't bother saving the original, longer version. Talk about a derp moment--I felt it right after I cut about half of the length and realized that I hadn't saved until then.
Here it is: my July submission--A Hell of an Anti-Climax
My friend Sam flips houses, and he always drags me along. Last year, it was a little cottage by a river. Today, a stately mansion behind a rusty iron fence.
“You've got to see inside!” he said, leaping out of the car. It was three stories of filthy brick. The windows were crusty gray. Inside, the floors were damaged hardwood. The walls were discolored and peeling. I could see pipes through holes, and nasty water stains.
“It's a... fixer-upper,” was all I could muster.
“It has potential!” He practically sang it.
Potential energy maybe. To fall on us.
He grinned. “I'm working from the basement up.”
Downstairs, he showed me around. It was surprisingly modern--studs and drywall. As we passed the west wall, I spied something odd. A shallow carving in the drywall said “1980.”
I peered at it. “Have you seen this?”
“No.” He shrugged. “A commemoration, maybe?” He leaned in for a closer look, but slipped, and boom! Punched a hole in the wall with his elbow. While he dusted himself off, I noticed: Behind the engraving, there were planks, not stone.
We broke it open. Sam yammered about occult artifacts the whole time. He reads too much Lovecraft.
We found a door, two feet square, covering a hole in the foundation. We tried to open it, but it resisted with an ungodly creak. I grabbed some oil--a few drops did the trick.
Sam yelled as a tiny menagerie crawled out. Spiders, centipedes, you name it. The hole was two feet deep with dirt walls, which explained the bugs. I grabbed another can (pesticide) and went to town. Before long, nothing was moving, and we vacuumed them up.
Inside, a heap of junk. First, a dented pocket watch. Sam grabbed a bag and photographs slid out. “Ghost photos! Look! Orbs and everything!” I blew on it, removing the “orbs.” It was dirty and faded, that's all. Before I could even show it to him, he tossed me another bag.
Inside was a stained doll with a threadbare cord. I gave it a pull, and the string rolled back inside slowly, making a raspy, rattling hiss. It was a little creepy.
Next: a wooden box. “Look!” Sam shouted. “A face!”
They were eerily arranged knots. Come on. Inside were newspaper clippings, surprisingly intact.
Next was a big jar. Sam grabbed a rag and wiped it. A bloated white serpent stared out at us.
Not gonna lie, we both leapt backwards. After a deep breath, I asked, “What did you say was the name of the original owner?”
“Norwood.”
“What Norwood?”
“Uh... Doctor Norwood. Herpetology.”
I rolled my eyes. It was a specimen.
Finally, a bag of waxy paper. Sam reached inside. “It's a spirit board!”
“A what?”
“Spirit board... Trademarks, you know?”
Whatever.
Quite. The. Pile. Clueless, we started reading the newspapers. Oddly, each was a clipping of some weird legend. I was reading about the Dover Demon when inspiration struck. I turned the clipping over. On the back was an obituary, for little Regina Norwood, April 24th, 1977.
Sam grabbed another. November 12, 1974, Honey Island Swamp Monster. On the back, a blurb about the Norwoods' wedding. The clipping about the Jersey Devil had something about a high school football game.
“It's a time capsule,” I murmured. I glanced at the pocket watch. I could guess whose photo was inside.
“Huh. Then why'd they disappear?”
I glared and almost blurted something, but his stupid grin tipped me off.
We pulled everything out, everything but the spirit board. At last, I grabbed it and set it on the floor.
The moment it touched, there was an unearthly hum. We held our breath, and a few seconds later, the furnace clicked and turned on. We laughed.
Then the glowing red portal appeared.
See that? Totally butchered. So this month, with the prompt "Apocalyptic Moments," I resolved to greatly simplify the action in the story and thereby allow myself to create a story that actually fits into 650 words. See this instead:
Presenting: my August submission--Weight
The streaks hanging across the dyed-pink, sunset sky were grim proof of the situation. They stood out in sharp contrast to the gently rolling fields that splayed out in all directions from the base.
“Satisfied, Major?” The Colonel held open the door to the bunker, his hat dangling from his free hand. It looked as if none of us would have to worry about dress regulations ever again. I took one more look across the sky and stepped back inside the dimly-lit concrete building. Down the hallway, we turned left into the command center.
“Confirm the situation with me once more, if you don't mind, Colonel.” I said, trying to keep my voice low and even.
“At 1850 hours, we received a garbled transmission from the Capitol. Apparently, there had been a near-miss by a high-yield nuclear warhead. The orders went out from the Capitol to all of our silos over the next seven minutes, but the transmissions cut off before we received direct orders. All attempts to make contact with the Capitol since then have gotten nothing but static in return.”
“And the other bases?”
“We've received confirmation from eighty percent of the bases that they launched their payloads successfully. The other twenty percent went offline before we could confirm with them. We haven't heard anything from anyone in ten minutes.”
“We're the last ones,” I murmured.
“Quite possibly, yes.” The Colonel stepped over to the boxes where our launch keys were held. He turned his key in the lock and two small doors opened in the wall, each holding a single key embedded in a blood-red plastic case. I walked over and picked up mine, cracking the case open and extracting the key. The two consoles were on opposite sides of the room. We walked to our stations.
“We may only have a few minutes, or it may already be too late,” the Colonel snapped. “We should launch while we still have time.”
“We haven't received orders to do so,” I protested.
“The chain of command is broken, as far as we can tell,” he replied, a dark flash in his eyes. “Of the cities on our target list, we were unable to confirm that any other bases launched on three of them.” His eyes locked to mine, a nasty gleam across the blue of his irises. “We are the only ones who can achieve those objectives. We have to launch now.”
Achieve. Objectives. I looked at the key in my hand. A tiny little piece of stamped steel, light as a feather, yet heavy as three whole cities.
“Major, now,” repeated the Colonel.
I looked up. “I can't do it,” I said. “I... I won't.”
A vein twitched at the Colonel's temple. “Sergeant,” he ordered the man sitting next to me, “the Major is relieved of his duties as Executive Officer. Confiscate his key and insert it into the console.”
The Sergeant looked at the Colonel, then at me. He hesitated.
“You don't have authority to do that, Colonel,” I warned. “Rank aside, my duty as Executive Officer is not up to question by the base commander without a direct order from the General.”
“Do it,” commanded the Colonel. The Sergeant stood, and took a step toward me.
I dropped the key onto the floor. Was I the only one who heard the deafening thud as it hit? It was like a lead brick. I lifted my foot and ground the key into the concrete with my heel. It was like every nerve in my body was concentrated there as I felt the thin metal of the key bend and warp. Three cities.
The Sergeant stopped. The Colonel glared at me, eyes overflowing with hate. “I hope you realize what you've done,” he spat.
“I do.”
See how much better that is? A significant portion of the improvement is due to choosing a smaller set of scenes and actions than the previous story. My first draft of A Hell of an Anti-Climax had a similar amount of descriptive language but I had to cut it all out to get it down in word count. What I should have done was kept the original draft of that story and re-brainstormed something shorter for the prompt.
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