Installment # 7 Is Up At Avenir Eclectia

I'm kind of excited about this one.

It's my first attempt to interact with other people's characters, Grace's Maddie, and Kat's Jax.
I hope to do more of this in the future.

http://www.avenireclectia.com/2011/10/meeting-at-maddies.html

Installment # 6 Is Up On Avenir Eclectia

Dangerous Jobs, #6 of my story thread is up on Avenir Eclectia.

http://www.avenireclectia.com/2011/10/dangerous-jobs.html

It's fun pulling some of the stories together.

Power of Imagination

I Reckon entirely upon the reader to add for himself the subjective elements that are lacking in the story.
--Anton Chekhov

It is true that writers have imagination. But so do readers.
I've heard it said that there are actually two stories contained in every book. There is the story that the writer wrote and then the story the reader reads.
I know this is true for me.
Have you ever read a book and then tried to watch a movie made from it. It never looks anything like I imagined, even with movies that stick close to the book. How the movie is visually made is based on the imagination and vision of someone else. And their pictures and take away info is different from everybody elses.

The reader fills in the holes and creates their own visual of a story that may differ a bit from what the writer envisioned. But this is not a bad thing.

And flash or micro-fiction leave more holes than regular story telling. Because word count is so low, fewer words are used. It's kind of like trying to get a overloaded airplane or other flying ship off the ground. It's too heavy and you have to start throwing things overboard.
In a story, a lot of description has to get tossed out. Not all of it, by any means. There has to be some setting, otherwise our characters are floating in space with nothing to attach to. But there are a lot of holes, a lot of details left out because they have to be. If they aren't, then the writing is all description with little or no action or plot.

So as flash fiction writers, we have to have faith in the imagination of the reader, that it will be strong enough to fill in the details. I find this leap of faith exhilarating

Avoiding the "Skim Zone"

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as thought writer had stated them -- Ernest Hemingway

I also remember reading somewhere that a writer should only write what the reader will read, implying that there should be no skim-worthy prose in what we write.

I'm a novel writer trying to write flash or micro fiction for Avenir Eclectia. It is a true challenge to get "The Big Picture" down in micro sound bites. Even though I look at each piece as a chapter to a whole, they are very short chapters. AND the power in each chapter has to be ramped up, no setting or info dump filler allowed.

This became abundantly clear when I had a 'chapter' that I was working on and it wasn't working. Long and short, I realized that it simply wasn't powerful enough nor important enough to justify its existence on Avenir Eclectia.

So what did I do?

The only thing I could do.

I scrapped the whole piece.

It was painful but doable. And ultimately, it was a blessed release to let the thing go rather than to fight with it to make it into something it couldn't be. The important information that I wanted to convey will make an appearance as a sentence or two in another piece that will keep the reader reading and avoid the "skim-zone".

Installment # 5 Is Up

Installment number 5, "Aid Work?" is up on Avenir Eclectia.

http://www.avenireclectia.com/2011/10/aid-work.html

Enjoy.