Elements and Classification

Much like Hip Hop, story, for me, has four elements*: character, setting, conflict and resolution.

My rule for the shorts I’ve been writing is to try and include at least three from the list, as well as attempting to craft a semblance of beginning, middle and end - even when I’m trying to follow William Goldman’s advice to come in as late as possible and get out as early as you can.

I think I’ve been moderately successful this month, with only a very few sailing in to the land of vignette rather than being a fully fledged story.

I also very much like Orson Scott Card’s concept of MICE (Milieu, Idea, Character and Event) and I think my four elements are strongly correlated.

Genre, on the other hand, has always been a thornier problem. Record shops always confuse me with their plethora of genres and sub-genres.  And according to my mp3 tags I like a multi-headed hydra of ambiguously titled genres that seem to bear no relation to what I’m listening to, with artists sorted differently depending on album or even track.

I’ll admit I’ve always preferred alphabetical order to organise my music, and I had a friend once who categorized his 12” sleeves by colour, but when it comes to fiction it’s more difficult. I think most of what I write would be classified as speculative fiction, which seems happily to contain horror, science fiction and fantasy, but even within these sub-genres it feels there’s a lot of cross over. Purists may well disagree.

Notwithstanding. I’ve made a first weak stab at categorising my stories so that they have a context that reflects my intent and hopefully this’ll helps readers who are looking for a hit of something specific.

Some are still category-less: if anyone would like to suggest categories for these orphans, feel free.

The other thing I’ve noticed this month is that some of my stories have begun referencing each other; being drawn together under some unseen internal magnetic field. I’m not going to point out which ones yet, although hopefully they’ll be obvious.

What I am going to do it to try and tie up some of the threads into what I hope will be a coherent whole by the end of this month, by which point I’ll label them and give them their own little page.

*as it happens, there seems to be no actual consensus on how many elements there are, but this works well enough for me. 

Both original and good...

I've reached my first milestone.

I've been doing this almost a month so far, and by my reckoning I started on the 4th and I've written 23 stories, meaning I owe the pot 3.

There'll be another story coming this evening, about a guy with an interesting restaurant. I'll have some catch-up to do after that. Although perhaps I shouldn't promise the next story too soon, 23 is an enigmatic number after all, just ask William Burroughs. (Time to dig out that tinfoil hat).

Reading back through my 23 I'm pretty pleased. I've managed to condense my thoughts into a very small format and mostly, I think, they hold up.

Some of the ideas were a bit too large and cutting and refining has made them different from my original intention, but still, they're there, on screen, for people to read; a bunch of strange things happening to ordinary people.

I've created some characters and a location or two that I think I might re-visit. I'm pretty sure the Cellar that Leach looks after is a large place indeed, and things grow there.

I'm not the first person to try doing this - I mean, I stole the number of words from Twitter (sort of), and other people have been doing stories of 55 words, 3x69 words and some people have delivered up one a day since 2005 - Flash Fiction has been around for a while. But I hope I can maintain the pace over the next few months, and so far as I can tell, I'm the only one doing all the work myself.

It'll be an interesting journey for me, I hope that I can encourage a few people along with me.

Speak to you next month.