Friday Flash Fiction

Today's audio instalment is up over at http://ianhocking.com/Fiction_Flash/Fiction_Flash/Fiction_Flash.html.

Flash fiction

Question: Is flash fiction an art form in itself, or an excuse to write for about thirty seconds, look challengingly at the cat and say, "And"? Who knows. But flash fiction - also known as sudden fiction, Kato-from-the-cupboard prose, and mashed stanza - has a peculiar appeal. It's short; sharp. Very occasionally shocking.

You'll find many bloggers dabbling with flash fiction. A brief glance at my newsreader app reveals sciffy author Gareth D Jones, Managing Director of the Velcro City Tourist Board Paul Raven, and sciffy author Gareth L Powell, all of whom are blogging flash fiction on Fridays.

Readers of this blog - hey, Dad - will be aware that I've ventured into the flash fiction before. See Stone Sun, for example.

But, Saturday morning, when I was reading the Guardian Weekend, I noticed several 'new media' types on the cover (podcasters, mostly, including Alex Albrecht.) I mentioned to my girlfriend how it's possible now to produce professional(ish) quality audio and video without big-money backing. I must have sounded rather pompous and knowing, because she said, "Well, why don't you do one?"

I blinked once.

Twice.

And here it is, m'readers. My FICTION FLASH. As a correspondent of mine, TheDudeAbides, noted, FICTION FLASH has a Twitter-like feel to it, and I'm happy about that.

FICTION FLASH will be released every Friday evening (GMT). It has an iTunes 'explicit' tag because of the occasional strong language. It will tend not to be science fiction; for some reason I'm not able to fathom, my short fiction seems to be of the non-genre sort. Episodes should be about one minute in length. It might be fun to have some guest flash fictioners - if you're interested, let me know.

Click here to go to the FICTION FLASH website.

Click here to open FICTION FLASH in iTunes

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Fiction flash: Mix tape

There is an element of capture and preservation in the act of creating a mix tape for a friend. ___ is a poet. He understands metric; blends new words as hues from the primes; writes with a wooden foundation pen. It is summer as he swaps out the second cassette. James Brown for The Kinks. It is summer in his poems too. It is...it is as his left hand makes the chords shapes of Lola that he decides to take his car and drive to the golf course, drive across the golf course, ripping the fuck from the grass of the golf course, and launch off the cliff and into the sea. But ___ is a poet. There is, first, the last song of the mix tape.

Trouble At StoryMill

I'm trying a rather different approach to the writing of my next book. That is, I'm going to plan it. Not in great detail; just at a level of granularity that should help me avoid some of the more cataclysmic culs de sac that I've wandered down in the past.

This thing I'm typing on isn't just a type writer. It also computes. So I've attempted - variously - to engage it in the business of helping me organise the novel.

Organising a novel is like herding cats remotely using yet another cat who is completely indifferent to your whistles, hollers of "Come by!" and attempts to use your crook as a javelin on those maddeningly uncooperative but ultimately charming moggies.

I've spent a couple of hours today with an application called StoryMill, released by Mariner Software. It's an application that somewhat takes after Scrivener (though I wouldn't want to suggest plagiarism; the three-paned, database-like organisational approach is a good way to approach the novel).



My impression was favourable at first. It's a very Mac-like application that observes Apple's human-interface guidelines.

On the leftmost panel, above, you'll notice the breakdown into chapters, actors, scenes, locations and so on. This is a great idea. You can create a list of actors, for example, and select one from the drop-down list when you're in a given chapter - signifying that the actor is present in the chapter. Likewise, you can then return to 'actor' list and see all the chapters that contain a given actor. So far so good; this is an excellent and intuitive implementation.

The bit I was most desperate to try - and the bit that has subsequently brought my mood quite, quite low - is the timeline option on the menu bar. Doesn't it look beautiful? Here, let's click on it:



If only the buggersome thing worked.

Allow me to set up just how disappointing this is. For months, I've been searching high and low for an application that will allow me to graphically represent a story: a 'flowable chart', if you dig, that indicates the main- and sub-plots of a novel; uses connecting arrows; and degrades gracefully when information is removed. Having looked at OmniGraffle, Keynote, Lord knoweth how many free mind-map applications, and even the staggeringly expensive Final Draft, there still does not seem to be a story plotting application available for the Mac.

What you see in the above screenshot bears about the same relation to the actual functioning of the timeline feature as...oh, I'm too weary for an outlandish metaphor. Make up your own. Involving monkeys, I'd suggest.

What it should do is this: Allow you set real-time start and finish times for a scene; assign it to a plot thread; and link it through such that clicking on a scene title brings up the text comprising the scene. Brilliant! Authors like me can then finally stop re-drawing huge plot maps whose iterations take about a week and become steadily less tidy.

What it actually does:

• Allows you to create scene but, unless the scene is very long, its representation becomes invisible. Then you have to switch to a list view in order to edit the scene, or manually change the scale. How this should be fixed: The timeline should automatically scale to the earliest and latest times in the story.
• Brings up the scene representation one minute, then removes it the next. It does so with such impish randomness that you really hope that the thing is actually working - then it breaks. How this should be fixed: It's just a bug; fix it before releasing the software.
• It does not live update information about the scenes when information about them is altered in other windows. So, if you change the start time of a scene elsewhere, this new start time is not reflected in the timeline view. Closing the window and opening it again doesn't seem to help. How this should be fixed: If the application will not synchronise between elements that should be synchronised, constrain the user so only one element can be altered at a time.
• Some of the fields relating to the scenes seem to be broken. For example, I can set up a smart list (good idea) that accurately uses data like who is in the scene, but the date field won't work. I can't set up a smart field that produces a timeline of dates between 1907 and 1908, say. How this should be fixed: it's just another bug.

Overall, I really tried to like this application. It appears - pardon my ultra-casual glance at the website - to be a new iteration of an older program called Avenir, so you'd think that it would actually work. Why is this a final release candidate? Parts of the software fundamentally don't work. Moreover, the trial period is measured in terms of open-close cycles, not days or weeks, and since I've had to open and close my document about twenty times trying to get parts of the program talking to one another, I'm at the point where I need to make a decision about buying it. I won't, I suspect, be doing so.

Anyone else using software to represent story plots? Surely there must be at least one program out there that works.

Post script: I feel quite bad about this post, by the way. I've spent a longish time on the forums trying to find workarounds and the chap who wrote the software seems very nice. The application does have several excellent features...I'm just too grumpy to list them right now. Alright, just one: the progress bar on the toolbar is great. And one more: and there are some unusual proofing aids, such as a lexical frequency indicator. What's that? Oh, it's like the flux capacitor, only more so.

Post post script: I should point out that I'm running OS X Leopard 10.5.2 on a 2 GHz first-gen MacBook Pro in a lovely red Speck case. My mouse mat is from the Kennedy Space Center.

Paul Cornell on Writing

Paul Cornell is one of the writers on the rebooted Doctor Who (and, alarmingly, Robin Hood). He wrote the DW episodes Father's Day - the one with the church and the bat thingies and Billie Piper's dad saving the day - and Human Nature/Family of Blood - the one with the doctor living as a human teacher in pre-Great War England. I reckon he's one of the best writers on telly at the moment. A few moments ago, the BBC Writers' Room newsletter appeared in my inbox with a link to an interview with Paul. Here are highlights.

If someone wants to write for a living, what advice would you give them?

I have one sentence. I have actually lots more but my one sentence is: It is your job as a writer to seek out harsh criticism of your work and change because of it.

On writing:

I think there are two good books, but only two good books, on how to write. One is "Story" by Robert McKee, which is basically everything you need to know from top to bottom. And the other is Stephen King's "On Writing" which is three-quarters an autobiography, but the little gems he has in the last quarter are worth the price of the book alone.

Tell us a little bit about your writing routine.

Well I never believe those writers who say I get up at seven o'clock in the morning, put on my business suit, go to my office and work an eight hour day, stopping only for a cup of tea at lunch time. I go for amount. I will write two thousand good words of prose, or five pages of comics, or five pages of screenplay in a working day. If I do that by lunch time then I can do what only writers can do and pop off to the cinema in the afternoons, which is the whole point of being a writer. It's what it's for. But if I don't manage to do it during the day I may even be up until the early hours hacking it out.

Flash Fiction: Stone Sun

It is all for a right turn of the head, mid-field, and there is the sunset. The mud explodes from foot to foot, from foot to foot, and the now-gone sun makes a stain. My airless mouth hangs in shock. My hands flop and a stone trips me back to last Friday, discussing the hard problems of consciousness with some students. Finally: a bird. What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to run and run?

The royal road to research

Plagiarism: passing off another's work as your own. It's a tricky issue, and one highlighted with aplomb in an article recently posted by Alma Alexander on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists blog. To paraphrase Ms Alexander, plagiarism is an emotionally-charged word whose darker connotations should not be, er, connoted in the case of those carrying out specific forms of research. Novelists, for example.

For the most part, I agree with Alexander's post, though I wince at this sentence:

Academia puts it thusly, that lifting information from just one source is plagiarising; lifting from many sources is research.

Indeed we do not. I've spent several tedious (but necessary) two-hour seminars with my first year psychology undergraduates setting out the parameters of plagiarism. [Side note: On the mid-course evaluation questionnaire, students were asked: 'What would you like to see more of in this seminar series?' One answer: 'I'd like more of those really long seminars where we do plagiarism and referencing, please'. The 'please' kills me.]

I teach plagiarism as this: When you include something - could be a criticism, a description, anything - in an essay or a report and you do not provide a correctly referenced source for that something, then you are plagiarising. By omission, you imply that you are the creator of that something. You also obscure the work that you've done in the construction of the essay (range, depth and your understanding of certain papers).

Now, plagiarism is a sliding scale. "Freud was rather pants" might be a useful summary of much work into the worth of early psychoanalysis (a somewhat stubborn stain on the rep of psychology, that) and I'm not going to a mark a student too harshly if this statement isn't referenced; the student is quite capable of coming to this conclusion themselves, even if the conclusion peppers the literature. But if the student writes, "It might be argued that Freud considered dreams to be the royal road to the subconscious," and does not include a reference, my nostrils will twitch. If the whole essay stinks - i.e. it includes an HTML horizontal line that the student hasn't been able to delete since copying the text wholesale from Wikipedia - then I'll press the plagiarism alarm beneath my desk, which is linked to the Vice Chancellor's heavy mob.

Ostensibly, the issue of plagiarism in regard to literature is different, but I'm not so sure. Basically, the consensus seems to be: You can take things from other people's work because (a) they're probably dead (most people are, at this point in our evolutionary history); (b) it's too bothersome to attribute originality, so why go to all that effort?

Well, that may be true on occasion. I've no doubt that Norman Mailer's last book (The Castle in the Forest) contains a great deal of research into the early life of Adolf Hitler and I'm certain that, at its close, I'll have no idea what sources he used. As a reader, do I need to? Probably not. And yet, there are elements of the book that I've - either correctly or incorrectly - identified as original to Mailer. The idea, perhaps, of God as the Dumkopf, or that Fallen Angels fiddled with Hitler's childhood. If I were to look at Mailer's sources and see a book that introduced this idea, I would feel somewhat let down.

At the back of my mind is the notion that there is a compact between the reader and the writer. It has many levels. Verisimilitude is one. Meaning is another. A third, perhaps, is historical accuracy unless fictional demands cause the writer to swerve around it. I understand, I think, the reaction of those who felt a little cheated that important parts of McEwan's Atonement were not really authored by him. (Please excuse the fact that I haven't read the novel.) To author something is to provide it with a meaning in context. If the context and meaning already exist in the primary material, it is a natural reaction for the reader to think that the value of the book has diminished. It is a form of cheating outside the cheating permitted by the tacit compact. There is a sense in which the materials of a book must be digested and re-configured; not inserted wholesale. (Though having read some beautiful passages during the research for my current book, the idea is bloody tempting.)

I'm one of those writers who lists his sources and helpers at the end of the book. Not to take the moral high-ground in a plagiarism sense, but I still have the academic urge to cite my references. Not, either, in a PhD-like way (my thesis references ran to over fifty pages, I think) but just to indicate to the reader the provenance of the book, in research terms at least. Its themes and character are mine. I also want the people who helped me to know that their aid was appreciated. Two Boeing 747 pilots have read over the bit of my second novel where I describe an air crash from the point of view of a pilot (opined one: 'I don't think you've understood the basic principles of flight'); it would have been literally impossible to do it without them, and it would be odd not to cite them as a source.

Anyway, the dishes won't wash themselves. Take a look at Alexander's article. It raises some interesting issues.

Fiction flash: The Pilgrim

His sadness is my sadness; this man in the subway with his back against the tiles and a Russian-looking cap open by his crossed ankles. His eyes are hard on the cap. He might be expecting magic. I wonder, passing, giving up none of my money, whether his stare is an answer to coming police questions about moving on. How has the young man etched himself into this routine? Are the pennies in the cap his? Do the tiles at his back remember him when he is moved on? The subway tells the Canterbury Tales in cartoonish, life-sized figures. A knight; a baker; a wife.