To Flash or Not to Flash?
A flash piece that I wrote a while back was rejected today. Ah, the sadness! This market actually includes a bit of feedback in the rejection letter, which is really nice. So, the feedback on this piece was that it was good and the characters were interesting, but there wasn’t enough detail in the setting. I believe the exact phrasing was that it was like the characters were talking in a void.
I went back and looked at the piece, and it was true. I had an idea of the setting in my head, but it wasn’t there on the page. So, I went back and revised the piece to get some of that in. And what happens? I end up about 150 words over the 1,000 maximum for the story to be considered flash.
Then I had to decide… edit it back down to flash length or give it a spin as-is. Part of me thinks that if you’re within spitting distance of being flash you should go for it. Missing it by 500 words is OK, but missing it by a hundred feels like I didn’t try hard enough to edit.
Then again, after rereading what I wrote, I like the additions. I think they get rid of that talking in a void thing and make the piece better. So maybe it’s better to leave it in and not worry about the arbitrary cut-off. Just let the story be the length it wants/needs to be.
In the end, I decided to give the story a shot at the longer length and emailed it out to a new market. The market I chose is hard to get into, so who knows what will happen. If I try it a few places at the longer length and get no bites, maybe I’ll try to get it back into the flash category. We’ll see.
What about you writers out there? Do you let your story length come about organically, or do you try to make it fit a certain word count (drabble, flash, short, etc.)?
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I have a daring middle-of-the-road response! That is, the story will be as long as it needs to be, or it’ll be a broken story. A tight structure is just that - tight, meaning it has little room to stretch or squish. A story ought to be as long as it ought to be. If it doesn’t fit the market - well, there are lots of markets out there.
On the other hand… stories that don’t rely as much on plotting can afford it. If you need to make it longer, you can use the space to enrich the characters, the setting, the themes, etc., and if you do it well, it may not show - or if it does show, it doesn’t damage the story. Conversely, editing a story down to a word count can tighten the plotting and make it clip along. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s a complex issue that cannot be answered one way or the other, but must be determined on a story-by-story basis. Or, we could look at it this way. If a story hits its perfect word count on the first time, great, that’s how long it needs to be. If you must expand it, or revise it to tighten it, all you’re doing is getting it as long as it needs to be. There’s a point where it stops benefiting the story, and I guess the mark of a good author is to know where that point is.