Bev Vincent

If you’ve ever read an author’s blog for any length of time, or followed his or her Facebook feed, you will no doubt be familiar with the tradition of posting sporadic or daily word counts. It is, perhaps, the only metric that writers have available to measure our productivity.

My favorite anecdote comes via Stephen King in On Writing in which he recounts of a possibly apocryphal encounter between James Joyce and a friend. The friend finds Joyce in a posture of utter despair at his writing desk. Being familiar with Joyce’s issues, the friend asks, “How many words did you get written today?” Joyce answers, “Seven.” The friend is impressed. “That’s good…for you.” To which Joyce responds, “But I don’t know what order they go in!”

People comment on how prolific certain writers are, producing two or three books a year, even more. When I stop to do the math, I’m astonished that more writers aren’t that prolific. On a typical day, which for me means an uninterrupted writing window of no more than 90 minutes, I can write 1000 words. Some days it’s 750, some days it’s 1250, but 1000 is a good figure. If I did that every day for a year, I’d have the total word count of three decent-sized novels. If I were able to write longer, I could imagine writing 3-4000 words per day. I think my personal record is something on the order of 8000, which I cranked out at a beach house while on a working vacation during a NaNoWriMo marathon.

Of course, not all “writing” involves producing new words. On another sort of productive writing day, I can crank out -500 words. Yes, that’s negative five hundred, which means I’ve cut that much fat from a manuscript. I tend to write long on the first draft and it’s unusual if I can’t remove at least 10-15 percent of the total word count from a short story upon revision. How does one measure that type of productivity? It’s a different type of accomplishment, one that is at least as important as the one that created those words in the first place.

An efficiency expert might look at my process and tell me how much better off I’d be if I hadn’t written those 10-15% extra words in the first place, but I simply can’t. To do so would require editing every sentence as I wrote it and that would interrupt the flow, that mysterious gush of words that comes from a source I can’t define. I wouldn’t dare place a governor on that lest it slow to a trickle and stop. I don’t mind editing yesterday’s work before I start today’s—that’s one of my favorite ways to get that gusher going again—but I have to write things that I know deep down won’t all survive. At least not in that shape or order.

What about the days we spend on the internet doing research, or driving around a neighborhood to pick up local color, or reading a book to gather information on a particular subject, or simply sitting in a dark room or taking a walk to think about the work and where it’s headed? Our word count meters don’t record that creative homework, but it is part of the process, too, and contributes to the end product. Those words that we count don’t always just spring into our minds. We have to feed the mind with information at times.

The ritual of posting word counts is one way that we assure anyone reading our blogs—and ourselves—that we are hard at it. Doing the work. If too many days pass without anything substantial to show for them, we start feeling nervous, like a batter in a slump. At the end of the day, though, all the research and ruminating in the world is for naught if we don’t get AIC (ass in chair) and produce words. Because words count.

P.S. In case you’re interested, I wrote 2000 words today. Nearly seven hundred in this essay and a little over 1300 on my current work in progress. A very good day indeed.

No one can tell you when to start a short story.

People can give you all kinds of advice about how to write one, but only you can decide when you are prepared to start.

This is something I deal with all the time. I’ll have a window of opportunity where I can work on a short story, and I’ll have a market in mind, and all I do is spin my wheels when I try to think about the story itself.

Case in point: I want to submit a story to an anthology that has a submission deadline fast approaching. When I first heard about the theme back in 2010, I did some relevant research, created a file, scribbled some notes and put it aside to gestate. Now that several months have passed, I’m only a little bit closer to having a story than I did back then.

That’s not entirely true. Last weekend, I started doing some location research. I have a scenario of sorts in mind. In fact, I plan to resurrect a couple of characters from another story, and I know why they are where they are and how the story opens, more or less. I stumbled around looking for a setting and I found one that is absolutely perfect. So, for the past couple of days I’ve been learning everything I can about this place. I wandered its streets on Google Earth (and isn’t that an impressive tool). I found news stories and a few videos that give me an even better sense of the location and the scenario that forms that background for the location and the story.

But I still don’t really know what is going to happen to the characters after they make a significant discovery.

Sometimes, a story happens like this: anthology theme, “clever” take on the theme, figure out who the main characters are and what they want, start writing.

Right now, I have the anthology theme, my twist on the theme and the characters, but I still don’t feel ready to start writing because I haven’t come up with the consequences of the twist.

It is possible, on occasion, to start with these elements and let the words flow from that mystical source from which they come. The characters do things and the story develops. I don’t know where the story is going, but it goes.

And yet, when I get to the computer these past few days, I can’t bring myself to create that new Word document and write the first words. That tells me the story isn’t quite ready. I’ve plowed ahead and hit brick walls often enough to believe that this sort-of block (something akin to Mike Noonan’s block in Bag of Bones, though not nearly so severe) is telling me I’ll be wasting my time if I go that route. I just need to think about the story a little more. I can see over the first hill or two, but there’s at least one more hill I need to crest before I begin. I don’t need to see all the way to the end—I rarely do with short stories, but I need to see far enough to build up that momentum that will help me get there.

That being said, though, there’s nothing like a looming deadline for motivation. At some point, if I really want to submit to this market, I need to stop dithering and start writing. And hoping the story comes…from that mystical source from which they all come.

I’m doing something a little unusual today. Not with this blog—in real life. For two-and-a-half hours, I’m going to be standing in front of an audience of writers and other interested (hopefully) parties talking about my writing career trajectory in a presentation titled (though not by me): Skills Learned on the Path to Publication. It is sponsored by the Houston Writers Guild and takes place at the Sugar Land (Houston) library.

As I was thinking about my writing career to date I wondered: where should I start? Have I always been a writer? Well, yes and no. Because I grew up in a rural setting with few neighbors my own age and only one channel of television, I became a voracious reader. I probably would have been a reader in any setting, but who knows?  I think reading leads to the desire to write in many people. I certainly took my stabs at it at an early age. I wrote an Agatha Christie knock-off for an eighth grade English assignment. Along with two other stories, mine was cited by the teacher as “good enough to publish.” High praise, and completely untrue, but it was the sort of encouragement I needed. At least the teacher recognized some potential.

I remember tackling a novel one summer in my teens. I wrote it on a plastic-shelled manual typewriter, nothing nearly so romantic as the old Royals or Caronas of earlier generations, but it was mine. I wrote on mill paper, which was plentiful since my father worked in the paper mill. Rough paper about the same color of brown as some fast food chain napkins. My influences at that point were Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury and Charlie’s Angels. I remember very little about the plot except that it had to do with murder among a group of acquaintances who were traveling somewhere, one of them a Farrah clone described in Spillane’s lurid prose. Did I mention I was a teenager? I got at least a hundred pages into that book, typing a page at a time with no idea where I was going or what I was doing. Alas (or, perhaps, fortunately) that manuscript is forever lost.

When I went to university, I continued to write. Having discovered horror novels and stories, I began writing short stories in that genre. Most of them were handwritten in a blank journal with the university crest on the front. Story ideas were listed in the back pages, and the stories themselves sloped and slanted across the lineless pages. Many of them were completed and typed up, though some trailed off into blank space without resolution. I used to share these stories with some of my dorm neighbors, but I never considered submitting one for publication. I wouldn’t have had a clue how to go about doing such a thing.

Then I ratcheted things up a notch. Twilight Zone magazine was in its heyday and they announced a short story contest, which I decided I would enter. I can’t remember for sure if my submission was typed on white paper or on the mill paper I was still using for scratch. Somehow, I suspect the latter. I probably violated every manuscript rule under the sun, including stapling the pages together and failing to double space. None of my typescripts from that era survive.

The story was called “A Change in the Weather” and had to do with a young boy trapped in a country store by a particularly virulent and no-doubt supernatural storm. Peter Straub was one of the judges for that contest. I am very happy to report that he has no recollection of my story whatsoever. Dan Simmons won the contest. Did I mention I was way out of my league? Oh, well. Small steps. Live and learn.

Unlike my early novel attempt, those short stories still exist in holographic form. For a long time I couldn’t find them, but I finally turned up the journals a number of years ago. In fact, I’ve rewritten a number of them and even had a few published over the years. The core ideas weren’t all that bad, though the execution was amateurish. Some of them are hopeless, like a rip-off of The Mist crossed with “Trucks” that has a bunch of people trapped in a greasy spoon diner after all the dogs in a city (maybe in THE WORLD!) go mad and start attacking people. (Frankly, the story, simply called “Dogs,” isn’t as good as it sounds!)

Now we get to the gap years. If you aren’t familiar with the term, a “gap year” is a year someone (usually young) takes off between one stage of his or her life and the next. Between high school and college, or between undergrad and grad school. Usually the person travels or works.

My “gap year” from writing lasted from about 1987 through 1999.

I honestly can’t explain where my interest in writing went for all those years, and why it returned. I certainly didn’t stop reading voraciously. For two of those years, I was living overseas, so I traveled and worked, but I certainly had a lot of  alone time when I could have been writing if I’d been so inspired. For most the rest of those years, I was living by myself in an apartment in a foreign country (the U.S.!), again not writing. It simply didn’t occur to me that it was something I might want to do with my copious free time.

Then, the urge reappeared. At first, I was handicapped. I would dig my notebook computer out of its carrying case and set it up on whatever perch was convenient, write a few pages, and then return the computer to its hiding place where it would remain for days, weeks or months. The process of starting to write had a level of inertia that I could easily allow to overcome me. If I was going to write, something had to change.

My wife, bless her soul, asked me what I wanted for Christmas in late 1998. After some consideration, I answered that I wanted a place to write. Somewhere permanent, somewhere that could remain undisturbed, where I could sit down, turn on the computer and start writing without having to find a place to set up. She bought a lovely roll-top desk and we found a suitable place to install it. The roll-top was a stroke of brilliance on her part. I tend to generate piles of papers, books, and notes while I am working. At the end of a session I could just back up the day’s work, turn off the computer, pull down the cover and—voila!—my clutter was hidden beneath the handsome, dark, corrugated cover.

That really represents the beginning of my second career as a writer. From that point on, my productivity grew. By 2000 I was being paid to write both short stories and essays and I haven’t stopped since. Writing is now as much a part of my daily routine as breakfast and working out at the gym. I now have my own office, so rolling down the desk’s top is no longer a necessity (nor even remotely possible at the moment).

Sometimes I think I hadn’t lived enough to write when I was younger. What did I know about other people’s lives, let alone my own? I am constantly amazed by very young writers who have something meaningful and universal to say. I know I sure didn’t. Not at 21—not even at 31. Now that I’m in my (very) late 40s I think I’m starting to hit my stride. My necessary gap years are at an end.

I used to write short stories for fun when I was a college student. I shared these creations with a few friends, but I never considered submitting them for publication. I did send one in to the Twilight Zone fiction contest (the contest Dan Simmons one — boy, was I out of my league!) but otherwise I was content to simply create.

Then I became an aspiring writer for far too many years.

We all know aspiring writers. They’re the people who talk a lot about writing, about how they want to write, even about the stories they plan to write, but never get around to the actual process of putting words down on the page. They come up with any number of excuses for why they aren’t writing, some of them valid.

It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I became a writer again. I found the time to write most days, I devoted myself to improving my craft, and I started submitting things for publication.

I met an aspiring writer last week at the place where I normally have breakfast in the morning between my writing session and my day job. I’d been aware of him for a while. Each Thursday morning, he and several other men meet for breakfast. It’s not a very large place, so I often overhear their conversations. This guy talks at length about the novel he wants to write, going into great detail about the characters and the plot, other works it’s similar to, stuff like that. The other men give him a hard time–not because he wants to write, but because he’s been talking about writing for so long.

They aren’t very encouraging. This week I overheard him talk about an article he’d stumbled upon when he was going through his research material for the novel. One of his friends laughed and made a disparaging comment about the amount of dust he must have encountered. I’ve heard him mutter and laugh whenever the subject of the book comes up. They’ve heard it all before.

Last week, the fellow introduced himself to me after seeing a flyer I’d posted on the message board about my most recent book. He waited until the others were gone and proceeded to ask me questions about my writing. More than once he replied wistfully about how he wanted to do this and wanted to do that, but he couldn’t find time. I described my routine to him and I could see his internal conflict. He wanted to be able to do something similar, but for some reason he didn’t seem convinced that he could pull it off. I’m not sure what his stumbling block was — maybe he didn’t really have any faith in his ability to pull off a novel. Maybe he had talked about the book for so long that he had essentially already written it in his mind and so to put it down on paper seemed like drudgery. Perhaps his personal circumstances — family obligations or the demands of his day job — did not provide him with the necessary time and energy to work on his writing for any amount of time on a regular basis.

It’s probably difficult for any one of us to explain the transformation — what it is that convinces us to change from being aspiring writers to the real thing. I remember the excuses I used to come up with in the years before I started writing again. I had nowhere permanent to work. Every time I wanted to start working, I had to set up my computer somewhere and assemble my papers, and it just took too long. I didn’t want to lock myself away in a room and ignore the rest of the family. All very good excuses, and all surmountable, at least in my case. My wife bought me a rolltop desk, and that took care of the logistics. I summoned the gumption to get up at 5 a.m. each day, a time when no one else in the house was awake, to do my work, so I didn’t have to worry about ignoring people. And I mustered the stick-to-it-iveness to keep at it, day after day, week in, week out.

There’s a quote attributed to Dorothy Parker that says, “I hate writing, I love having written.” Aspiring writers never get to enjoy the second part.

The biggest problem with my first novel, I think, was the fact that it straddled genres or defied easy classification. I used to refer to it as a “maybe ghost story.” It’s not all that unusual a concept. There’s a ghost in the book if you believe one character, and it’s all in the character’s mind if you believe another.

Graham Joyce does this all the time, to great effect. For every putative supernatural event in his books, there is almost always an equally mundane alternate explanation. Mass hysteria. Delusions. Dreams. The affects of mind-altering substances. Misperception. Psychosis.

As a reader, I have no trouble whatsoever allowing my imagination to accept ghosts and vampires and any of the other tropes of the supernatural. The only time I have problems is when the author tries to explain something using real-world science that doesn’t make sense. That’s one of the reasons I disliked Cell, for example. The pulse worked for me as an inexplicable event, but once the hand waving about rebooting brains and save-to-disk memories kicked in, I checked out.

However, I have a much harder time with the supernatural as a writer. I’ve written stories where inexplicable things happen, some I’m quite proud of. I think of “Special Delivery,” published in Cemetery Dance, where a writer has boxes of ideas delivered to his door. That’s clearly supernatural, but to me it falls more into the realm of the inexplicable.

I have a hard time pulling off ghosts and werewolves and vampires and zombies with a straight face. My clinical, methodical mind almost always looks for the mundane explanation. I’m not very interested in these supernatural creatures themselves. In the stories where I’ve used them, my focus is more on the other characters’ reactions.

I’ve written two zombie stories that don’t have a single active zombie in them, for all intents and purposes. In one, “Groundwood,” workers in a converted paper mill dispose of zombie carcasses. In another, a group of survivors make a last-ditch attempt to flee to somewhere safe. The zombies are almost McGuffins in those cases. In my only werewolf story, the protagonist only thinks he’s a werewolf when, in fact, he’s just a homicidal maniac.

I like writing suspense stories, and the supernatural can be used to generate suspense, but it’s not strictly necessary. My first published story, “Harming Obsession,” concerns a man with an obsessive-compulsive disorder that is amplified by something he has to do on Halloween.

These days, I read more crime fiction than anything else, and my writing is evolving in that direction, too. I was recently asked to write a contemporary vampire story for the eVolVe anthology. It didn’t take me long to come up with an idea, but it was an idea for a crime story rather than one that involved vampires as a menace. What if vampires were the objects of hate crime, I asked myself. The protagonist is a cop who has to investigate vampires as victims rather than as victimizers. I was delighted by this idea, because it let me explore something classic and—let’s be honest—overexposed these days from a different angle.

The novel I’m working on now is far easier to classify. It’s a straight crime novel with a private detective protagonist, although I’m throwing in a couple of other angles to make it more interesting. For this book, at least, I plan to abandon anything supernatural, because that just feels right. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up the ghosties and the ghoulies for good. There are a couple of crime series where eerie and inexplicable things happen, and I’m open to that possibility in future works.

For the time being, however, I’m sticking to the real world. That’s scary enough for me, most of the time.

I’m not sure how relevant this essay is to writing. Perhaps it is only to the extent that it pertains to who I am.

For the past month or two, I’ve been exploring my roots. I believe that you have to reach a certain age (I can see 50 on the horizon) before starting to wonder about such matters in earnest. It’s a shame, really, that this curiosity usually doesn’t manifest earlier in life, when there are more people around from earlier generations who know stuff first-hand. It wouldn’t have taken me the better part of a month to find out simple details about my grandmother’s mother if I had bothered to ask my grandmother before she died at the age of 99, for example. Similarly, I recall anecdotes about my grandfather, but only in the vague, hazy way that I remember books I read when I was 20. Now that my parents are gone, few people are left who remember these stories.

I grew up in Eastern Canada. My mother’s family was full of McThises and McThats. My paternal grandmother was a Skene, a family that originated near Aberdeen, Scotland. I knew that my grandfather Vincent emigrated from England early in the 20^th century. I visited distant relatives when I spent a summer in Oxford in 1984, but it didn’t occur to me to ask questions about that part of the family when I had the opportunity. I thought there might also be a little Irish in the mix, but I defined myself as Scottish/English.

My British relatives referred to us as the “French Canadian” cousins. I felt bad about deflating that myth, telling them that, no, we weren’t French—the only French I knew I learned in school and my father turned around cereal boxes in grocery stores so the English side faced out.

And yet, behind many rumors and myths, there is often a germ of truth. Turns out my Father’s grandmother was French. Once I stumbled onto that part of the family tree, it exploded. The French have done a much better job of making genealogical information available online than the British. While I can trace parts of the Vincent and Skene lines back to the late 17^th or early 18^th century, the central portion of my family tree is chock full of my great-grandmother’s ancestors. In some cases I’ve been able to go back as far as the 1460s.

Along the way, I’ve discovered some fascinating bits of family history. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was burned alive by the Iroquois in 1653 in Quebec. His young son was captured and may have grown up among the Iroquois. Shades of Dances With Wolves or The Last of the Mohicans. Some of my ancestors were forcibly deported from Nova Scotia in 1755 as part of le Grand Dérangement, commonly known as the expulsion of the Acadians, which was inspiration for the famous poem Evangeline by Longfellow and is the reason we have Cajuns in Louisiana. Another ancestor may have headed in the opposite direction, a United Empire Loyalists who wished to remain true to the King of England, so he moved from the US to Canada. A couple of the women in my family were Filles du Roi, sent from France to Quebec to balance out the genders and boost colonization during the time of King Louis XIV.

I’ve found first cousins who married each other, and sisters from one family who married brothers from another, which turns the layout of the family tree into a real mess. I haven’t identified any royalty, but I turned up someone who sold drugs to royalty—the official apothacaire to Catherine de Medici, queen consort of King Henry II of France in the 1540s and 50s. The Vincents also connect to a Sicilian family who moved to France and then England in the early 1800s. They were famous luthiers, and many of the violins, guitars, cellos and bows they constructed are still around to this day, and fairly valuable.

I’ve been rereading Ross MacDonald’s noir crime novels lately. In his books, past generations usually have a huge impact on the present. Forgotten or unknown family connections are the motivations behind heinous crimes. Generations diverge (as in the two McCormack brothers in my tree who moved from the Isle of Arran in the 1820s—one family became McCormicks and the other MacCormacks over the years) but there are still blood ties, no matter how distant.

All these details are circulating inside my head. Will they ever find themselves in stories? Who knows, but I feel invigorated by this new information. I dream about distant times. Even though my bloodline is at best 1/16^th French, I’m newly curious about the Acadian story and French history. I want to know what was going on when my ancestors were alive.

Entire communities packed up from France or Britain and moved to the New World, hoping for a better life. Some found it (many were granted large tracts of land to clear and farm), others didn’t. These are the giants on whose shoulders my life stands.

This is how I see this pertaining to writing: I know something new and interesting about myself. If we look at certain (or, perhaps, all) acts of writing as self-discovery, I now have new fuel to run that engine. No, I’m not going to start writing historical fiction, but I have something more to explore. Somehow the things I have learned over the past two months will likely influence me in unforeseen ways for the rest of my life.

by Bev Vincent

Three minutes from now, right about when you’re almost finished reading this essay, a bomb is going to go off. You don’t know this, but everyone else does. Sure, I could have just set the bomb off without telling anyone, but that would have caused only a brief moment of shock. This way, everyone else is going to watch those red LEDs counting down from 3:00 to 2:00 to 1:00 to 0:30 and, ultimately, to 0:01. Everyone will be screaming at you to stop reading and do something about the damned bomb. Three minutes chock full of tension and suspense and reader involvement.

It’s not a new idea—Alfred Hitchcock wrote about it nearly forty years ago. He also concluded by saying that the bomb must not go off or “the audience will be as mad as hell with us, they’ll be disgusted . . . An audience needs that relief after you’ve put them through the ringer.”

Perhaps readers of this essay can think of situations where the bomb should go off, but that’s not my point. Since my writing has turned more in the direction of crime/suspense lately, I’ve been thinking about the ways we create suspense and tension.

(Are you keeping an eye on that timer? It’s getting closer to 0:00 all the time!)

Recently, I watched the second season of the Showtime series Dexter. The first episode is brilliant. In case you’re unfamiliar with the show the main character, Dexter Morgan, is a serial killer—but he’s also a blood splatter expert with the Miami Police Department. His adoptive father, a cop, recognized Dexter’s personality disorder at an early age and gave him guidance and an outlet for his urges: kill only murderers who have escaped punishment. This moral code allows the audience to root for him, albeit in a perverse way.

At the beginning of the season, Dexter’s life has pretty much returned to normal after the turmoil he endured with the ice truck killer. However, by the end of the first hour, everything has fallen apart. He’s facing not just one crisis but three or four. He’s become homicidally impotent—he fails to execute one of his intended victims. A second victim escapes and might be able to identify him. At the same time, his girlfriend believes (correctly) that he had something to do with her abusive ex-husband’s return to prison. To deflect her suspicions, he confesses to being a drug addict, which means he has to agree to attend Narc-Anon meetings. Finally, the place where he disposes of his bodies has been discovered and dozens of his victims are bound for the forensics lab. His colleagues and friends are talking about him constantly—without realizing it.

For the rest of the season he operates like one of those guys who spin plates atop poles. While he attends to one crisis, the others all start to wobble, so he has to leave what he’s doing to handle something else. In the best (for us as viewers—not for Dexter) scenarios, there’s a stopwatch attached to a particular crisis. If he doesn’t do X in Y minutes, he’s screwed.

(How is that clock doing, by the way? Don’t forget about the bomb!)

The looming deadline is our friend when it comes to writing suspense, though it’s missing from many classic mysteries, or used ineffectively. If Hercules Poirot doesn’t solve the mystery before the Orient Express is freed from the avalanche, someone else might die. That’s too vague to create tension and there’s little genuine danger (beyond the risk of professional embarrassment) to the main characters.

On the other hand, if Dexter doesn’t break into a police lab by 7 a.m. tomorrow, a surveillance video will reveal him on the deck of his boat wiping away evidence that he used it to transport bodies. That’s bad enough, but he has to handle several other equally important crises between now and then. 7:00 keeps looming without him getting any closer to the lab.

A few years ago, I read a “literary thriller.” While the novel was certainly well written and the characterization was rich and detailed, the book lacked key elements to make it compelling. The main character was hired to search a warehouse full of crates of ancient books for a particular volume, but the only deadline to his task was the fact that he was supposed to leave for London in two weeks to take on a new job. If it became an issue, he could have made a few phone calls and rearranged his schedule, I suppose. Not exactly a critical deadline. Also, there didn’t seem to be serious consequences if he didn’t find the book. He wasn’t going to die, nor was anyone else that readers cared about. There was more to it than that, of course, but once the other trappings were stripped away, it boiled down to: No time clock, no risk—no suspense. That meant readers weren’t urging the protagonist to action.

(By the way, what does the timer say now? Shouldn’t you be doing something about it?)

I embarked on an interesting challenge a few months ago—writing a thriller short story. At first glance, it didn’t seem like a problem, but it proved harder than I thought it would be. In 5000 words or less, I had to set up a challenge, get readers sufficiently invested in the characters to care about what happened to them, set the story in motion and arrive at a satisfying solution. All in fewer than five times as many words as are in this essay.

I soon discovered why so many thrillers suffer from thin characterization—pacing requirements don’t allow much room for character exploration. I spent so much time creating crises, getting the protagonist past them and then hitting him with the next problem before he had a chance to recover that I didn’t have the luxury for anything else. Readers learn about him by the way he reacted to and solved challenges, but I couldn’t really delve into his past. I had to ignore my natural tendency to have him reflect about his situation at length because that would have slowed the story down—and that clock was tick tick ticking away, with people determined to kill him to prevent him from achieving his goal.

The next time you find yourself reading or watching something that accelerates your pulse, makes you want to turn the pages faster, has you shouting at the screen or the page

(Bomb! There’s a bomb! It’s about to go off!)

take a step back afterward and scrutinize what the author did to achieve this effect.

Oh, by the way, if you pull out the red wire, the timer will stop and the bomb will be defused.

Did I mention that I’m colorblind?

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If I do this right, this post will be exactly 500 words (not counting the title). Why? Because it shouldn’t take more than that to discuss (not “talk about”) flash fiction, the class of stories shorter than X words (where X could be 1000, 500, 250…). For example:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

This six-word “story,” penned by Ernest Hemingway, never a garrulous writer to begin with, is often cited as the ne plus ultra of flash fiction. Despite its brevity, it packs a fearsome wallop. Does it have a protagonist? Sure—the unseen parents. Is there conflict? The worst kind. Resolution? Ah, yes, and a poignant one at that.

Flash stories often resemble prose poems. Not many writers go to Hemingway-esque extremes (but here are some.) It’s challenging enough to create a beginning, middle and end in a few hundred words, let alone just a few.

I regard writing flash stories as another way of improving my craft and honing my word choice acumen. Normally, I inspect every sentence to see if it’s necessary. With flash fiction, I scrutinize every word. Is there one that means the same as these two? My writing becomes more precise and the ruthless editing process is akin to a fire sale: almost everything must go. Not many story ideas are well served by such a confined space. It needs to be a small, punchy story, usually told in a single scene with very few characters.

Years ago, I distilled a 3000-word story to a 500-word flash version. I’m not sure it was an entirely successful exercise, but it made me think differently about narrative and dialog. How can I represent things without actually saying them? What’s the best way to draw readers into the creative process? Didn’t those six words above activate your mind when you read them? Tell me you didn’t see the shoes, white, pristine and forlorn, laces neatly tied in bows. Were they on a mantelpiece like a souvenir, or in a box in the closet like a family secret? Did you, however briefly, consider a scenario that explained what happened to the baby?

When there is a hard upper limit on word count, the way I work changes. I write a bit, take stock of where I am, and then unwrite as much as possible to provide breathing room. I often choose present tense because it requires fewer words as a rule. Dialog becomes terser than noir. Only the very best adjectives survive, and precious few adverbs do. Verbs sizzle.

Flash stories work especially well in online publications. They occupy only a few screen pages and require little scrolling. They can be read, well, in the time it took you to read this essay. Like poems, they conjure up vivid imagery and fully engage the reader’s imagination.

As creative exercises, they make writers more aware of language, all its nuances and shades and textures, and of the impact of every written word. That’s pure poetry, in my opinion.