I recently attended the British National Science Fiction Convention - Eastercon - where I joined a workshop. The moderators came up with a title, 'The Sound of Snow', and then gave us poor hapless aspiring writers 50 minutes to write a story. I'm usually more comfortable at 10,000 words when it comes to short fiction. This is 900 and is the first piece of flash fiction I've ever done. (Mike's asked me before to visit Liberty Hall but I've always shied away, never thinking I'd be up to the task of doing a peice of flash fiction with such a rigid time limit.)
Originally I thought I was going to be writing a story about death, but quickly I realized that what I was actually writing about was the process of creation itself: making fiction, making love, making anything. I have left this as is, i.e. 1st draft. I started with the image of a child standing at a window and initially I thought the child was grieving over the lost of its mother. And then, for whatever reason, a song from some years ago came to mind, "What if God was one of us?" The song and the image created the story I needed...
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There is a room with a window, in front of which a child stands. The room is contained within a sphere, which floats within a void. The void is a true void. There are no stars, nor stardust from which to form them. Outside the room the child watches snow falling. In truth there is no snow, at least not in the void. Perhaps what the child is really seeing is a vision of the dust that will one day come, creating the stars that will one day be. But not this day. For day is time and in this void there is also no time...
--I need a name, the child proclaims, as it watches the snow that is not there falling outside the window.
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Posted by colorbird (Member # 3425) on :
I would start with the sentence "Day is time and in this void there is no time." That hooks me right there.
Very interesting premise.
Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :
Interesting...more of a free-form verse than prose. I'm not much good with free-form verse longer than a page, unfortunately.
Posted by thexmedic (Member # 2844) on :
It was working really well for me up until that last line. It had a lovely, poetic tone to it, that carried the reader along. Then the last line sort of clunks a bit.
I think the problem is with "I need a name, the child proclaims"
The child's question is couched in very down to earth language. It's not really inkeeping with the tone of the first few lines. This would be fine if you didn't then immediately switch back to the previous tone. Plus "proclaims" smacks of thesaurus-itis.
But the first group of lines are lovely.
Posted by Mystic (Member # 2673) on :
That was really cool sounding. I think you shouldn't call the room a room though. It just felt out of place with all the words, but maybe that is just me. Can I just make a guess and say that this is the primordial ball of existence from which the Big Bang came from? Just speculating.
Posted by Novice (Member # 3379) on :
You say, "The room is contained within a spere, which floats within a void." This implies that the sphere contains physical matter, including a room and a child. But what else? What is outside the room, but still within the sphere? Later you talk about snow, and I assumed that the snow was falling within the sphere, outside the room...but then you say there isn't really any snow at all. Are the sphere and the room the same, with the same boundaries? If this is the case, you have created too much confusion by referring to them separately.
You are not clear whether the child is inside "the room", or outside. The first paragraph reads as if the child is inside, looking out through a window. But then the second paragraph says, "Outside the room the child watches snow falling..."
"For day is time and in this void there is also no time..." What about inside the sphere? You have already established that the physical properties inside the sphere are different from the void, but you haven't elaborated on HOW they are different.
On the whole, I do like the surreal tone of this fragment. But the logic is contradictory, and too much contradiction weakens your attempted paradox. Personally, I am drawn to poetic prose, which you do very well here. But the premise needs to be able to stand up to a second and third reading.
Posted by Sara Genge (Member # 3468) on :
Beautiful A pleasure to read The last line does sounds strange. It's too long, but now I'm commenting this as if it were poetry... It can pass for a poem if you like, or you can gradually string it into prose so as not to traumatize anyone with a sudden change of style. Cool as heck.
Posted by CamSavWin (Member # 3478) on :
I thought it was a bit persnickety, actually. Personally, I wouldn't get so philosophical in the first lines. I always prefer character first, then philosophy. And "true void" sounds kinda like "more perfect." But there was a rhythm that I liked, and I think you're onto something.
Posted by Nietge (Member # 3474) on :
The free form was indeed a pleasure to read, poetic...but perhaps it's a good idea to be careful about using static 'be-ing' verbs in a starting hook--I may be wrong on this tho. If it's an intentional rule-breaking you were after here, it was done well in my opinion...I would be motivated to read further.
Posted by mikemunsil (Member # 2109) on :
I like this and think it is worth working further on. Before I would start worrying about the form, I would work to complete a first draft. Then I would try to decide what form I wanted (poetic prose, simple prose, poetic storytelling, etc) before I polished it.
Interestingly enough, the first flash challenge I ever tried, over at Scrawl, resulted in a poem rather than a story, and ended up as my first published poem.
Your text shows a strong grasp of language and the rythyms of the language. Finish this piece and continue to work to incorporate the flow into your other prose. You will end up with a strong narrative voice that can help to carry your reader along with you as you develop your theme.
Many of LH's writers have found that the flash challenges (what we do is better described as writing in a flash, rather then flash writing) result in themes and stories that they would never have imagined they would be writing in. The pressure and need for on-the-spot creativity seems to tap some inner well that many of us do not realize that we have.
Further, many of us do not write in the short form as our primary form of choice. We do it because (using Jeraliey's analogy) it is the writing equivalent of an athlete's cross-training. We do it for the same reasons that athletes cross-train; to improve in ways that we never realized that we could.
Hatrackers are always welcome to cross-train with their fellows at LH.