exlibrislarsen

Earthbound Fiction has agreed to publish “What the Moon Saw,” a 500-word flash-fiction piece about a bullied boy who wants to become a werewolf. It’s my first 500-word story, but not my first 500-word effort. Stories that short are hard.

Imagine including (without wedging) all the narrative elements into a story of no more than a page: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement. Sure, those things would be easy to summarize in a page or less, but to actually tell a complete story, a compelling story, along the way? I’ve tried. A bunch. “What the Moon Saw” was my first success.

And in doing so, I’ve discovered something that I should have known all along. Flash fiction–good flash fiction–reads almost exactly like prose poetry, which is poetry written in paragraph form (and no, it almost never rhymes). A good writer of flash fiction has to have a poet’s sensibility, and ability to condense ideas into the fewest words possible without losing any meaning. I’m not saying that “What the Moon Saw” is poetry. Writing it like that seems a little too conceited. But it does have more poetic elements than most of my writing, which was purely accidental. Call it a happy accident. Call it serendipity.

I’ll post news on a publication date when I receive it.

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