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Any number of creative people have stressed the importance of limits. Whether it's a sonnet or haiku, flash fiction--whatever, working within specific boundaries is a terrific challenge and learning opportunity. Too bad that stream of consciousness has become an entry point for lazy amateurs who aren't interested in learning anything at all.

I just happened to flash on a story idea last night as I was falling asleep, but it seemed to have very little potential except for cliches. Maybe I'll see what I can do with it.

I've tried short-short fiction before; a lot of it is, as someone has mentioned, an excuse for people to put out cliched, quasi-stream-of-consciousness work. Some of my stuff comes out that way even when I'm not trying for that effect. I find, though, that if you avoid the present tense and don't automatically use first-person narrators, you can mostly eliminate the dreamy/fluffy tone. But those particular tropes seem well at home in very terse writing, for some reason.

Here's my attempt:

Tradition

The turkey was almost ready when the noise came from the basement. Downstairs, Randall was giving Charlie the hardest beating his six-year-old fists could muster. Nate pulled his son from his nephew and asked them both who started it. Each blamed the other; Nate didn't think Randall would pick a fight with someone who had two years and three inches on him, but you can never tell with kids.

Will sent Charlie to his room; Nate said he'd punish Randall when they got home, but they both knew it was just for show. Charlie being sent to his room with cable and Nintendo was no punishment, and the worst thing Nate would give Randall was a lecture. Not like the bruises and the fat lip Dad gave Will that time he snuck up and nailed Nate's groin with the plastic baseball bat.

"He'll be perfectly fine, in time," said the doctor.

And look, asshole, thought Nate. I'm perfectly fine.

Before he tucked him in that night, Nate lectured Randall: it was wrong to keep hitting Charlie after he'd won. But he was still impressed by what he'd seen: chin tucked in, guard up, aiming for the large torso rather than the tiny head--Randall had learned a lot since Nate gave him those gloves last Christmas.

Alice said he should have been stricter, but Nate assured her Randall would be okay. "It's just a phase boys go through," he said. "He'll grow out of it in time."

[ Parent ]

It even has a very good point and idea. And you sum up Nate very well in the short space available. Good work.
--
When in doubt,
turn around,
cry and shout

spdyvkng - my homepage
[ Parent ]

Friday Afternoon Funk

``Is this seat taken?'' he asked.

``It's yours,'' I answered, looking up from my Friday afternoon funk.

``I love this place,'' he remarked, trying to establish a connection. Since my Friday funks are largely about being unconnected, I thought I should at least make an effort to connect.

``Yeah, the terrace is nice this time of year,'' I offered. ``Beer, popcorn, sailboats, the sunset, ducks. It just doesn't get any better.''

He looked at me sharply, considering this.

``Well, at least for me,'' I said, hinting at my want of connection.

He picked up the cue. ``It's better with friends, surely? If you have any,'' he said. Then hurrying on, ``I mean, not you, me. I've just arrived and I don't know anybody.''

``No, no, it's fine,'' I laughed. ``All my friends have, um, friends, if you know what I mean. So here I am, alone on a Friday evening.''

He nodded, grunting assent. A duck came up to beg for popcorn, so we fed him for a while, until we attracted a crowd.

``Pushy little buggers, aren't they?'' he laughed.

``They think people were created to feed popcorn to ducks,'' I said.

More silence.

``Another beer?'' he asked, as mine ran dry.

I considered. Another beer would be a Bad Thing, but it appealed somehow. ``What time is it?'' I asked.

He squinted at the scarlet sun, and held up his hand at arm's length to measure her reluctance to submit to whatever the horizon had planned for her in the dark of night. ``I dunno, about eight?'' he guessed.

``Hmm. Guess not. I should go.'' I said, not moving.

``I suppose.''

We walked out together.

``I'm going right,'' he said, as I turned left.

``Nice talking to you,'' I said, hesitating.

He hesitated, also. Cleared his throat. Opened his mouth, shut it. Said something as a bus roared up.

``What?'' I mouthed.

He shrugged his shoulder, got on the bus, and was gone.

Another Friday evening funk.

Exploring dark places since last Thursday

Just as solitary as in Marquez ;)
--
When in doubt,
turn around,
cry and shout

spdyvkng - my homepage
[ Parent ]

I really don't know the proper form here - whether it is appropriate to criticize stories posted to the forum - but I can't ignore this egregious example of saidism or saidism substitution.

In your short-short, I found the following examples:

"Asked," "answered," "remarked," "offered," "laughed," 'guessed," and "mouthed," without counting the numerous actual "saids" or pseudo-saids, such as "grunting assent" and the embellished saids, such as "I said, hesitating."

I have noticed that over-attribution is common in romantic fiction, but, IMHO, it is overkill elsewhere. (okay, I consider it overkill in romantic fiction as well, but that is another topic).

I apologize if I caused offense.

[ Parent ]

I'd be interested to hear any rules of thumb on the use of "he said..." and various euphemisms. If find that I tend to overdo it myself, but I don't know a concrete way of deciding on its use in a particular instance.
<p>
I do find that if I cut out every instance of it that isn't vitally necessary (such as when who the speaker is might be ambiguous), my dialog is much snappier. I've recently writeen a couple of passages of two or more pages of daialog without a single attribution, but there were only two speakers, and they tended to use each other's names a lot (it was a situation where doing that doesn't ring phoney or forced).
<p>
So maybe that's all the rule of thumb that's necessary.

[ Parent ]

They're rather hard to phrase, sometimes, because writing is such a subjective thing.

Anyhow, I also think that the minimum possible number of speech tags is the right amount, and that "said" is one of those invisible words that we can use frequently without a problem. It's definitely better to use "said" ten times than it is to come up with ten different, unusual tags, because those unusual tags are not invisible, making people notice them and pulling them away from content and into presentation. The minimum possible number is also less than a lot of people might think.

I also think that instead of speech tags, interspersing the dialogue with action works well. It tells you who's saying what at the same time as it lets you know what's going on with the characters. Sometimes changing a "saidism" to action is as easy as changing the punctuation:

"Yes, you're right," he laughed.

would be a "saidism" (laughed replaces said), but

"Yes, you're right." He laughed.

wouldn't, because he finishes talking, then laughs as a separate sentence.

One good exercise I've seen is to strip all speech tags and action (basically anything outside the quotation marks) from your dialogue and see if you can still tell who's talking - even if there's more than two people in the conversation. If you can't, the character's "voice" and/or their stance in the discussion (which side in an argument, or their general attitude at the time) isn't clear enough. After the characters' voices are improved, you can add in the action outside the dialogue, then a few speech tags where absolutely necessary. I've tried it a few times, and it really improves things.

--
Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

with what I thought. Your point about "said" being invisible, while its euphemisms are not is an interesting one.

The exercise of stripping out all attributions and putting them in later as needed is a good idea. It reminds me of an exercise I do where I strip out all adjectives. It invariably makes the passage more readable and even more descriptive, and it points out some underlying weaknesses that the adjectives were only a band-aid for in the first place.

[ Parent ]

Well, "said" isn't quite as invisible as "the" or "he" or "she" are, but it's a lot more invisible than the myriad alternatives that a lot of people try to use to avoid repetition.

Yet another reason following rules blindly is bad: there's this one "rule" that says that you shouldn't repeat the same word more than n times in a given page. (n varies depending on who you ask.) So you get stuff like Said Bookisms and the Burly Detective Syndrome, where people try desperately to avoid repeating "said" and the character's given name, respectively, despite the fact that those words are perfectly acceptible "repeaters" - it's long, unusual polysyllabics that you should avoid repeating too close together, just because they're a mouthful and hard to read. (The linked page lists "vertiginous" as an example of a word you don't want to repeat too often.)

--
Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

I'm usually long-win^Hin the habit of writing long, complex stories, so something with a limit like this is a change for me. It was fun.

Just because, I decided to add another limit to myself, and took your challenge literally: 60 lines by 80 characters. I decided to allow myself a two-space indent at the beginning of paragraphs just so you could tell when a paragraph changed, but apart from that... it's a brick.

Except for the bit about either scoop or netscape not liking monospaced fonts, that is. If the right edge is ragged, you can look here to see it as a brick.

The wind rushed past, cold even through her layers. She tugged her scarf over her nose again, fogging up her glasses with every breath. It was almost winter. "Kid, you've got to watch yourself." Her scolding was muffled by the scarf. A quick glance at the kid earned her a withering look, as if he could handle cold. She shook her head, and pushed her scarf higher. He did seem to be relatively impervious to the conditions. Always had been, as long as she'd known him. Not a long time, though; she remembered finding him, begging on the street, everyone turning away from the strange light in his eyes. People walked around him, even more than they normally did to beggars. She had watched him, and watched him do his best to make her notice him. He focussed on her, drawing her into his eyes. Those eyes. She stopped shivering, unable to pull away. He had said he was a seer, an oracle, and he needed her to fulfill a prophecy. Who believed in silly things like prophecies these days? And yet, she was here - following him where? He smiled, the edges of his eyes crinkling, then turned away silently, to keep going wherever he was leading her. The full force of the wind hit again, making her stagger. Odd, how he was so different - and still the corners of those eyes would wrinkle, just like a human's. He wasn't human, though. He was an oracle. She was starting to believe him, now, after seeing him in action. Astounding. They hurried through the storm - if he was correct, this was not just a storm, but THE storm, the one that would cause a disaster of biblical proportions. The television in a store window flickered, the signal disrupted by the clouds above them. Every television was tuned to the news, and the news on every channel was the storm. A voice drifted towards her, ripped to shreds by the wind. "Hurry." He was almost a block ahead now, and still moving. She somehow ripped herself away from the horrible, beautiful, satellite picture of the planet's coming end. She stamped her feet as she jogged, trying to restore circulation. Eventually the street passed a field, and the wind whipped in every direction, unimpeded by the buildings. She stopped anyhow, drinking in the view. The tower swayed, its tip moving visibly in the wind. They needed the highest point, he had told her. The tower had been renovated and heightened, restoring it to its old status of highest tower, but the style wasn't changed from the original Eiffel tower. The oracle, or whatever he was, was running now, straight for the base of the tower. "They won't let us up there!" she yelled, then pulled her scarf down and tried again. He kept running, despite her call, so she sighed and started to run too. "They will, I've made sure of that." He slowed, to let her catch up. "We have no time for argument, so I made sure, the same way you arrived here this month." Those eyes grabbed her again, and the vicious wind faded into the background. A moment later, his eyes started doing their kaleidoscope dance, the thing they do that scared the people on the street - what they do when he is seeing things the humans can't see. "There's nobody on the tower," he said. "We can get up now." "No kidding there's nobody on the tower," she said, and looked up at it. "You would be crazy to go up when it's swaying like that." She shook her head again. He led her across the plaza underneath the tower to the nearest leg and pulled the door open quickly. She looked at the stairs and craned her neck back, up to the tower above. They started up the stairs. Even this low, she could feel the vibration humming through the metal as the tower flexed. They ran up the stairs to the lowest deck. Even that was closed to storm-watchers; the high winds made the stairs they were climbing up unsafe, despite the enclosure. They passed the first level, and continued. She slowed, and unzipped her jacket to cool off. A gust of wind stole her hat, and pinned it to the wire mesh wall, but they didn't stop. Past the second level, up the long haul to the old top level, the tower a dancing maniac under their feet. She held desperately to the handrail, and kept climbing. From the third level, onto the stairs leading up onto the new section and the relocated radio transmitter. He was out of sight now, going much faster than she could. At the door to the maintenance room, above the top tourist area and up narrow stairs he waited, gesturing for her to open the door and go ahead. "You have to hook yourself up to the..." He stopped suddenly, and went inside. The room was full of modern radio equipment, locked away in their shiny closed boxes with nothing for staff to use but a couple of keyboards and dark monitors. He stared at her in dismay, and looked human for the first time. "It's gone."

Damn, that was fun...

--
Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?

You took my limit all too seriously.

I was waiting for something tremendous all the way, especially when there were just three paragraphs left. I must say I was disappointed at the ending.
--
When in doubt,
turn around,
cry and shout

spdyvkng - my homepage
[ Parent ]

Yeah, it was. I'm not sure what this is telling me, but I tend to stay away from happy endings. Sick of hollywood, I guess :-)

I suppose it didn't really come through in what I wrote, but this sort of grew from an idea I'd had a while ago, about a prophecy and the prophet who was created for it... then the world changed and the prophet didn't, because he wasn't human and couldn't change. So it made it rather difficult to fulfill the prophecy, as you might imagine.

--
Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

The ending you had there didn't resolve anything. It was just like hearing a good joke mangled by a poor narrator: You expect a punch line.

It don't have to be a happy ending. I don't feel that the drama in the ending is enough. It needs more to really hit the reader as profound.
--
When in doubt,
turn around,
cry and shout

spdyvkng - my homepage
[ Parent ]

Resolution is something I need to work on a bit. Actually, middles I need to work on a bit too. I have a couple of shorts with pretty weak middles, that don't really set up the ending properly.

Any constructive criticism? (and it doesn't have to fit within the 60by80 limit anymore, I guess, though that would be cool if it did)

--
Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

The story builds up well. Throughout it the suspense is built and I'm just about ready to jump ahead.

In the beginning I'm a bit uncertain about what is going on.I kind of thought the kid was someone in passing. But as soon as you got around to talking about his eyes and stuff I begun to find the thread.

There was some parts in the middle where I felt lost again. The end is nigh part didn't quite catch my imagination.

I was expecting the main character to die in a flash of lightning or similar by the end. And was disappointed she wasn't.
--
When in doubt,
turn around,
cry and shout

spdyvkng - my homepage
[ Parent ]

Janra, my eyes make it just about impossible for me to read bricks. Sorry, I just couldn't handle yours. Allowing a space between paragraphs doesn't really alter the actual line count.

I think I'll put it up on my personal pages in a more conventional form (ie, with spaces between paragraphs) just because I rather like it.

Sorry about making it hard to read... I just wanted to make a brick.

--
Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

There's an orginazation named Oulipo, for "Ouvrir de Litterature Potentielle" or "Workshop of Potential Literature", whose members include, among others, Italo Calvino and Georges Perec. (If you haven't read Calvino's Cosmicomics, do yourself a favor.) Their entire raison d'etre is to discover what literary works arise when you constrain yourself to seemingly arbitrary limitations. I haven't read Perec, but his novel La Disparation supposedly tells a coherent story despite the fact that, except for the three instances in his name on the title page, he never once uses the letter 'e'.

I found a page here that talks a little about them, and links to some other resources.

This I must try. Writing a total without that. It is hard. Totally. I think only using now works. Is is simply working. Was isn't.
--
When in doubt,
turn around,
cry and shout

spdyvkng - my homepage
[ Parent ]

Without an e in the text you can't express things like "the world". At least you can take some words in French and say the same without e. (Ie. nouns in English needs "the" while in French you can vary with the gender.)

I even think it would work well in Norwegian.
--
When in doubt,
turn around,
cry and shout

spdyvkng - my homepage
[ Parent ]

True, "e" may be just too prevalent in English. Perhaps another vowel, like "o" or "u," would be more appropriate.

[ Parent ]

It isn't difficult to construct a paragraph whilst omitting words containing that most common non-consonant in my vocabulary, which you can find forthwith following "d."

[ Parent ]

The languages are so similar i think it would be almost impossible(and a waste of time) to learn one if you already knew the other.
So i guess you have one Swedish and one Norweigan parent?

PS. I'm Swedish. DS.

Ok, I've just been issued a challenge from a friend. After reading the 'Burlish Detective' link above he challenged me to write a story of no more than 5000 words that incorporates all the nasties mentioned on the page.

Word is open and I'm on the case :)

If it's funny enough I'll post it here.

Regs,
Gitm

--- This space for rent.

That should be a bad (in a good way) story.
--
Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

Working within limits