To celebrate Michael A. Kechula’s thirty-first post on Flashes in the Dark last week, I had a chat with the author about his art and what keeps him at it.

 

Why do you have such an abiding love for short fiction? 

MIKE:  I continue to love flash fiction tales, especially when they pack lots of storytelling in as few words as possible.  I rarely read novels or short stories, anymore, because they’re usually so overloaded with trivial details they bore me.    

Do you remember when you wrote your first tale, and what it was about?  

MIKE:  I attempted to write my first flash fiction story just eight years ago when I joined FlashXer, a Yahoo flash-fiction exercise group.   I was a total failure.  I couldn’t develop flash to save my life.  I was about to quit the group when I had a sudden inspiration.  It led to a story that reaped kudos from members of FlashXer.  Encouraged by their responses, I sent the story to Alien Skin Magazine.  To my amazement, the editor bought it that day.   

The story, “$39.50 A Plate,” was also my first-ever sci-fi tale.  The title of the story refers to the price of fresh Martian spaghetti.   It’s quite a mish-mash of storytelling that mentions Planet X  (which is supposed to ram into Mars and Earth),  a Martian female, an American truck driver,  Martian spaghetti that’s alive and must be eaten a certain way,  a radio talk show, a diner that suddenly appears in the desert, and chocolate chip cookies.  I’ll never be able to explain how I worked all these ideas into a flash fiction tale.   

By the way, I’m now the moderator of FlashXer.  I issue three prompts per week to members.  Membership is open to anyone who wishes to exercise their ability to develop flash fiction for publication.   If interested in becoming a member, look up the site on Yahoo, and subscribe.  However, we are not a mutual appreciation society that will say your story is wonderful when it isn’t.  Several members, especially me, give thorough critiques.  Our objective is to help members make their work irresistible to magazine, anthology, and contest editors.   
  
As a writer, what has been the most challenging thing to learn?
 
MIKE:  How to develop any kind of fiction, after a 27-year career as a professional writer of nonfiction.  Before retiring in 1994, I was a successful developer of self-study books and online courseware.  I completed 29 nonfiction books and 15 extensive online courses, most of which were sold by my employer, IBM, to customers.  When I took a buyout from IBM, I figured I’d try something new and switch to developing fiction.  Well, was I ever in for a big surprise.  Turned out I was a complete flop when it came to fiction.  I couldn’t come up with any interesting story ideas.  Worse, I couldn’t get a sentence on paper that I thought was worthwhile.   I don’t know why I was stricken with such a block, but it lasted several years.  I was able to overcome it with lots of help from Dr. Sheri Rosenthal, PhD, who taught creative writing at a college in Las Vegas.      
  
Of all your stories, are there some that stand out as favorites?
 
MIKE:   Yes, quite a few of them, because I’ve been lucky enough to get 400+ stories published in the past eight years in 140 magazines and 43 anthologies in 6 countries.  Also won first prize in 12 flash fiction writing contests and second place in 8 others.  Here are some of my many favorites:
 
“Midnight Hugs” is about a guy who’s hired by a crazed scientist to hug three female corpses for five minutes each, every night at midnight.  The idea is that by doing so, he can transfer his vital essences to the dead woman to bring them back to life.  If successful, scientist figured he’s win a Nobel Prize.
 
“A Great Star,” in which a private detective is contracted by a movie studio to go to Haiti and capture lots of zombies. Seems the studio wants to be the first in history to include real zombies in a forthcoming movie they figure will be a blockbuster.  He manages to capture one, but she is extremely vicious and bites his face, and gets away.  Her bite causes endless streams of pus to drip from his face.  Modern medicines can’t stop the flow.  Neither can his participation in weird rituals and offering sacrifices to voodoo gods.  Obviously the poor slob is doomed.
 
“Alien Fingers,” in which a guy with a push cart sells alien fingers for five cents each.  They make great sandwiches that are super with mustard, onions, and sauerkraut. Freshly amputated from Martians, flash frozen, and shipped to Earth for our enjoyment.  The Martians get a gold star for each amputation, which they paste in a book.  When it’s full, they get a free trip to Disneyland.  The protag finds them quite delicious.  He has six in a row, and that’s when the fun begins.
 
“First Day of School.”  In this tale, I poke fun at social engineering.  A school board hires a blue gorilla as its newest kindergarten teacher.  How they manage to rationalize doing so this is part of the fun.  However, this tale is quite dark, especially when a mom and her kid run into this new teacher on the first day of school.  Seems the gorilla has a nasty side school officials didn’t know about.  She doesn’t like the smell of donuts.  Unfortunately the kid had just eaten a donut supplied by the principal before the kid met his new teacher.  This spells disaster–which is conveniently rationalized as normal behavior by the principal.   

I could go on, because I had lots of fun writing hundreds of speculative fiction  stories.  Never had a clue that I could create such strange tales.   Actually, I was 64 when I discovered I could write zombie stories, all of which were accepted for publication in various magazines and anthologies.   

What type of story would you like to write that you have not tackled yet?
 
MIKE:  Since I’ve already published sci-fi, fantasy, horror, crime, adventure, and romance stories, I’d like to try a book of flash tales for children.  To that end, I’ve dictated 94 original, children’s, fantasy stories into a voice recorder, as they occurred to me over the past few years.  Total listening time for these tales is about 9-1/2 hours.  Now I need to buy a transcriber, or find out if Dragon voice translating software can work from voice recordings.   Once the 94 stores are transferred to computer files, I’ll select two dozen of the best, polish them, and submit the manuscript to a children’s publisher.  By the way, none of the stories involve dragons, monsters, or dark, nefarious characters.  My intention was to create fantasy tales that young kids would find humorous.  In my tales, nobody dies, nobody is the victim of spells, and nobody gets hurt.       

Why do you think that horror is such an enduring form of fiction?
 
MIKE:  Probably because horror tales are often quite entertaining.   Especially when they have elements of humor.  The idea of humorous horror sounds like an oxymoron. 
 
What makes flash fiction a difficult form to write in? 

MIKE:  I’d like to answer this by giving observations based on my experiences in transforming dozens of novelists and short story authors into flash fiction developers.  First of all, it’s nearly impossible to find anyone who teaches how to write flash fiction that sells.  Consequently new authors aren’t fully aware of flash development techniques, which are NOT the same as those used for novels and short stories.   For example, all my new students tended to make the same errors, a few of which are listed below:
 
1.      Their story concepts were often too ambitious to work as flash fiction tales, which are stories of 1,000 words or less.
2.      Opening sentences were often dynamic.  However, many changed the subject in the very next sentence.  Example:   Frank was on his way to rob a bank.  His mother was making a cherry pie for dinner.   3.      Very often, they moved the story backward via backstory, when flash is supposed to always move forward.  In fact, it should move forward relentlessly.   For example, one of my students opened a story with a guy on his way to rob a bank.  But then, he immediately changed the subject and for the rest of the story talked about the guy’s history as a bank robber form 1950 to 1960.  He used so many words on that, that few were left to tell us about the bank robbery the protag was about to commit. 4.      All had a tendency to write inflated prose.  By that I mean they used a dozen or more words to say something that could have been said in fewer words.  For example:  His mind voyaged hard into several scenarios to try and task out his predicament.   All this really says is:  He tried find ways to resolve his problem.
5.      All had a tendency to load their manuscripts with trivial details that weren’t vital to the plot.  The biggest offenders were action tags that accompanied almost every line of dialog.  For example, a character couldn’t just say, “I don’t like this soup.”  We had to be told what she did with her body when saying these words, such as wrinkling her nose, shifting in her chair, and scratching her head.    
  
 Do you have a favorite monster?
 
MIKE:  Zombies.   Nothing warms my heart more than reading about a bunch of marauding zombies attacking the population.       
  
Do you have any projects on the horizon? If so, would you’ d like to share?
 
MIKE:  I just signed contracts with my publisher for two new books that will be published in October as Ebooks and paperbacks.  The first is a self-study book that teaches how to write genre micro-fiction tales of 200 words or less.  Title:  “Writing Genre Micro-Fiction The Minimalist Way – A Self-Study Book.”   The second is a collection of 100 speculative flash tales, many of which were previously published by magazines and anthologies in several countries.  Title:  “Martians, Monsters, and Pepperoni Pizza.”    
The publication of these two books will give me a total of six in the marketplace.  The other four are:   
“A Full Deck of Zombies – 61 Speculative Fiction Tales”
“The Area 51 Option and 70 More Speculative Fiction Tales”
“I Never Kissed Judy Garland and Other Tales of Romance”
“Writing Genre Flash Fiction The Minimalist Way – A Self-Study Book.”  
All the stores in the first two books listed above were were previously published by magazines in Australia, Canada, England, India, Scotland, and US.  Several won writing contests.   
 
Who are some of your favorite authors?
 
MIKE:   The French master of the very short story, Guy de Maupassant (1850 – 1893).  Also the English novelist, W. Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965).   

If there is one thing that you would like readers to know about you, what would it be?
 
MIKE:   When it comes to developing flash and micro-fiction, I’m a minimalist.  That means my objectives are to tell as much story as possible in as few words as possible without sacrificing a smooth read.  When I was an editor for five different online and print magazines, I favored submissions that met those objectives.      

What do you find inspiring as a writer?
 
MIKE:  Everyday experiences that I can distort and transform into sci-fi, fantasy, and horror tales.     

Do you have any advice for up and coming writers?
 
MIKE:   Yes.  However, I’ll avoid the usual clichés published authors typically offer to newbies, such as write every day, and read a lot to write a lot.   Some may find my advice a bit controversial, especially when they read item 3 below.  That’s where I suggest newbies forget most of what they’ve learned in creative writing courses, if they want to be highly successful flash fiction developers.  So, here are three tips for their  consideration:      
1.       Think of yourself as a story developer, not a writer.  Magazine, anthology, and contest editors seek stories, not writers.  To prove this, read lots of magazine and anthology guidelines, and this will become apparent.  Check the guidelines of this magazine you’re now reading to test the veracity of what I’m saying.   Seems the only time editors mention writers in guidelines is when they discuss who owns rights to the story once it’s accepted for publication.
 
Here’s another reason why you should think of yourself as a story developer:  at least 1-billion people on this planet have some degree of writing ability.  Millions can write better than you and me.  However, not all have a knack for developing compelling stories.  If this weren’t true, 1-billion people with would get their work published regularly.      

If you think of yourself only as a writer, you could end up expending lots of word count to show how talented and artsy you are as a word smith.  The danger of that when it comes to flash fiction is you’ll burn up word count on needless, word-wasting, trivial details.  Here’s an example of a word-waster:  opening stories with weather reports when the weather has absolutely nothing to do with the plot.  Another kind of word-waster is the inclusion of similes in flash fiction.  They often draw attention to themselves, and away from the story.  Sometimes they are so unusual they throw readers out of the story.  

If you want a full list of word-wasters that can creep into your first drafts, see my book, “Writing Flash Fiction The Minimalist Way – A Self-Study Book.”  It’s available as an Ebook from www.BooksForaBuck.com  and paperback from www.amazon.com.  I wrote this book after analyzing and formally critiquing 6,000+ flash fiction stories over the past eight years.   If you go to my Ebook publisher’s site, you can read the first chapter of this book for free.   
2.      Acquire at least one voice recorder.  Keep them at strategic places around the house. For example, put one on your nightstand before you go to bed.  Never know when you’ll wake up with a story idea that’s been marinating while you’ve been dreaming.  Put one in your car when you plan to be on the road for an hour or more.  This will allow you to record fleeting story concepts that often come to mind at the most inopportune times.  It’s far easier to dictate your thoughts the moment they occur, than to write them on paper.  Pen and paper aren’t always handy when a story idea hits you out of nowhere.  And even if they are, you might not get to them fast enough, before the idea slips away, forever.   

The recorder is also valuable for fine tuning and polishing your stories.  When you finish your first draft, read your story aloud and record it.  Then play the story back several times, and listen closely for potential weak points in your narrative and dialog.   
By the way, I have 4 voice recorders spread around the house.  Best investment I ever made for story development.               
3.      If you’re going to focus on developing flash fiction, forget 99.99% of what you learned in creative writing courses.  Almost nothing you learned in those courses prepared you to develop flash fiction.  I know from experience after attending a bunch of them at colleges and universities in California, Nevada, and Arizona.  The thrust of those courses is to help you develop novels and longer short stories.  Meanwhile, development methods for novels and short stories are vastly different from those used to develop flash fiction.  That’s because they’re different literary forms.   What works best for one doesn’t work well for the other.   

Many new story developers forget that flash fiction refers to a story that can be read in a flash.  Further, they often try to make flash a kind of mini-novel.  I’m very familiar with all the mistakes new authors tend to make when attempting to switch from developing novels and short stories to developing flash fiction.  That’s because I’ve conducted online courses to transform dozens of novelists/short story developers into flash and micro developers.  I’ve done this at no charge on a Yahoo writing site I own.   All my students have found getting published very quickly and very frequently.  One of them did so well, she beat me in a fiction writing contest.  I’m extremely proud of her.  

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©2011 Lori Titus

I had the chance to interview Matthew Funk about horror, killers, gumbo, and the makings of a great story.　

What do you think separates horror from literary fiction?

In Horror, fear has to be felt, beating hard, at dramatic point in the story.

While I find many genre distinctions arbitrary, I think that one holds true about the Horror genre: Its dramatic developments have to be infused with fear. Put plainly, this means that every time something big happens in the story—something that wrenches the narrative in one direction or another—it has to have a major element of fear in it.

I’ve written before that fear has to be in the veins of every story. Without something at risk, a story can’t carry the heart of the reader. In Horror, I believe that risk has to be something truly ghastly—mortality, mutilation or some other fatal transformation. Literary fiction’s stories can subsist on the little fears of love lost or dreams deferred, but Horror stories must be populated with lost lives and devastated identities.

Marketing opinion differs with me: For the purposes of stocking bookshelves, Horror stories just need some manner of grotesque monster. Cast a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf in the plot of any Nora Roberts book, and marketing labels it a Horror novel. I suppose that I can’t much argue, given that monsters have been the meat and potatoes of Horror fiction since the term was coined. All the same, it seems silly to me sometimes that the sultry, hack-and-slash action-romances of Lilith Saintcrow share a shelf with the stark, ghastly descent into human depravity dished out by Ketchum, Lee or Laymon.

You’ve written books, screenplays, and short stories. Which presents the most challenge?

Novels present the most challenge.

Writing a short story is a matter of making a single statement—whether that’s a scene, a twist, a punchline or a discreet set of dramatic events. You can only have so many moving parts, and they’re all directed toward a central message. Sure, subplots can survive in a short story, but unless they somehow help that central message resonate, like bass under guitar play, they’re just flab.

A novel demands sub plots, elaborate sequences of events, and more than one message. I’ve seen “one message” novels, but they are neither terribly long nor terribly good. For a novel to truly be a handsome model of its art, it has to have plenty of flesh to it and an intriguing bone structure—an interesting shape to the plot in the way it twists and turns.

Screenwriting must be more limited by its nature. Even if a screenplay is going to have more substance than a short story—and some screenplays, even feature-length, don’t really need to—then it has to keep the writing pared down. A screenwriter writes to a formula. They have to hit a certain length, pacing and brevity of prose.

With a novel, there is no real formula: There are just you, infinite ideas, zero rules and a heap of blank pages.

Conversely, what flows more easily?

For me, a novel, actually.

The first works to win my affection and fire my imagination were serial fiction: Comic books, fantasy series and pulps driven by characters larger than any one story, with names like Holmes, Drizzt and Conan.

My imagination feeds best on a vast, sprawling terrain. It demands far more concentration to crisply cut a story down to certain set confines than it does to let my mind roam a huge pastureland of backstory, subplot and future threads of fate.

In sum, size may take more effort, but it comes more naturally to me.

How has your background in political science affected your writing?

It infuses it with greater depth and detail.

I believe as much can be said about any realm of scholarship, not just the discipline of political science. A writer harvests stories from their studies, whether accounts of past events, interpersonal dynamics or random, neat ideas. All that data serves to give a story that flesh I mentioned earlier.

In the case of political science, it brings a few distinctive benefits to my writing. Political science is fundamentally an awareness of how power dynamics work, on many levels of human interaction—international, social and personal. That makes it a study of the forms of conflict. Conflict is what propels a story. Other areas of scholarship might be better at divining why people do what they do—psychology, mysticism and biology immediately come to mind—but political science and history are great archives of what people do and how they do it.

In your opinion, what separates a story that is good from one that is unforgettable?

Unforgettable stories take an experience we all share and cast it, beautifully, in a new light.

For a story to be truly unforgettable, the event of reading it has to change us. It has to mark our memory in some way, dividing who were before from who become. In order for a story to inflict that change, it needs to offer us something entirely new.

But “new” doesn’t last on its own. A new bit of information can be a pretty firework and nothing more. For its light to linger, a story has to stir up something already deeply woven into our character. It has to take something already within us—not just an absence, but something bound to our feelings—and shift it.

Unforgettable stories remind us that we always have something more to discover about ourselves.

As an editor, what do you think defines an author’s voice?

Voice is the sound a writer’s imagination makes when it’s sprinting.

It is, I believe, the power of “flow” in a writer’s prose—of rhythm blending with word choice, channeled into paragraph structure, permeating tributaries of plot. It’s when the writer is bringing this all together and finding a level of creative comfort. Their character as a writer congeals. It becomes distinctive.

Voice is difficult to define for some writers. With others, like choppy Chuck Palahnuik or poetic Ellen Hopkins, it’s more obvious. But whether a subtle distinction or a bold one, voice is, in some way, a distinctive quality of a writer. And as I said above, it’s the combination of numerous factors.

Where I may differ with a conventional definition of voice is that I don’t believe the writer’s voice has to speak to an audience to be heard. I think voice is almost wholly an internal process. Just like with learning to speak, it’s difficult to develop a clear and engaging voice without listening to those who listen to you. A writer must listen to their readers to hear the effect their developing voice is having. But ultimately, it’s the writer’s decision—one that’s usually felt, rather than made by force of will—that determines their voice.

Are you working on something now, and can you tell us what it’s about?

I’m working on a novel about New Orleans’ tortured year of recovery after Katrina. I expect it’ll be the first in a trilogy on the subject. It follows one of my frequently featured characters, Jari Jurgis, with her agonies in the saga serving as a mirror for New Orleans’ post-Katrina experience. Each story will be centered around events that reshaped the city but that remain unseen by most of the public.

I am thrilled about it. It is one of the tightest works I’ve done so far, it has many challenging themes and it burns with the fusion of genres, horror and crime, which I find characteristic of my work.

I’m wild for it, and I hope many of my readers will be too.

Do you have a project that has been asking to be written but has been on the shelf for a while?

Kind of. Most projects that I think of, I manage to find time to work on. When I’m in a project, I’m usually submerged in it. There is one project that sits patiently with its feet up on my shoulder, though.

It’s a straight forward revenge story—a pure-hearted and red-handed vendetta that involves a ne’er-do-well with a noble side tracking down his girl’s tormentors and doing ill to them. I would find my way to put a twist on that ancient arc. I know Voodoo, bounce music and the Kentucky Derby are all going to play a part. I know it won’t be pretty. The rest, I’ve yet to cohere.

If you had to chose, what do you find scarier– serial killers or mystical beings?

I find serial killers scarier.

This is for a number of reasons. Foremost, I find that fear is at its most powerful when it’s grounded in fact.

When we’re very young, and fact and wonder are closest cousins, the mythical and the material are almost indistinguishable. We tend to trust others as authorities, especially adults, because we don’t have experience to shape our critical thinking. At that point, mystical beings could be just as scary as serial murderers—for all we know, they both exist. But eventually, we come to learn that mystical beings likely don’t exist or, if they do, they are rarely encountered. Serial killers—and their seamy, human ilk—are monsters that are real and common enough. That’s why I find them more frightening than a werewolf. Lycanthropy may be a horrible curse, but given the odds, it makes more sense to fear a shark bite than a werewolf bite. On the other hand, a murder occurs every 34 minutes in American, given the latest crime stats. That’s scary.

The other reason I find serial killers more frightening is because they’re pitiful. With mystical beings, they tend to be portrayed as deadly and relentless, and in many cases what you see is what you get. By contrast, serial killers customarily look like the sexually repressed geeks and dirty old men they are. They are motivated by their sickness, which is usually rooted in past trauma or kinky dysfunction, mixed in with a basic inability to relate to others. That’s sad and sick, rather than romantically tragic like a vampire bite or a demonic possession.

Real monsters are usually inglorious, shabby, stupid and seedy. That scares me more than an Anne Rice rockstar or a beast from beyond that’s less likely to strike than lightning on a clear day.

Can you pinpoint a particular movie or book that influenced your style as a writer?

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Mind you, I can pinpoint a pile of movies and books that influenced me. It becomes a “choose a needle from a stack of needles” process. Out of all those influences, one has dug particularly deep.

That would be the leading work of Gonzo Journalism, now and for the foreseeable future, Fear and Loathing. It stands out because it didn’t so much determine my style of writing, but it was the foremost influence on my style as a writer—it formed, polished and stuck on a pedestal my ideal identity of an author: A wild, pugnacious rebel who hurls himself into the shame and glamour of dangerous discoveries.

I can say it without shame: I wanted to be like Hunter Thompson. It’s closer even to the truth to say that I wanted to live by the same principles of adventure and passion and spectacle. Those were the causes that inspired me and still inspire much of my writing. I want to have impact, both on the page and off of it.

Challenging writing is great, but I want to be a challenging writer.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

That list would be a long one, but here are a few of the key pieces:

Persist. That has to be number one. Do not worry whether you are a good writer or a bad writer. Make that difference irrelevant. All that matters is that you are a writer. Work from there to improve yourself, but do not doubt your purpose and do not let excuses impede what you do.

Read what you love to write. Steep yourself in the kind of writing you want to produce. This will help you learn what works in that storytelling form and what doesn’t. Many young writers are like kids playing with matches—they have just discovered possession of this incendiary tool and want to burn down everything with it. While that creativity is great—awesome, even—it isn’t all you need to get published. Learn the rules and forms of what you want to write. Elements like length, plot and the pacing of reveals, drama and hook lines have more bearing on getting a story published than brilliance of talent or intelligence. A writer picks up those elements by studying kinds of stories, so study the stories you want to write.

Edit yourself after it’s done. Don’t edit yourself when you’re writing the rough draft, unless it’s something simple like fixing a typo or going with the second way to phrase something that popped into your head rather than the first. And be sure to edit what you are going to send out, reading through it twice and cutting out anything that is unnecessary to the story. Thinking of it in terms of necessity goes a long way toward making a writer into a better storyteller. The inclination is to protect every single precious word produced, but writing comes down to preserving the story over preserving the words.

What’s on your list of books you’d like to read.

Much of my reading is directed toward research, placing books like This is for the Mara Salvatrucha by Samuel Logan, Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics on the Mexican Border by Sebastian Rotella and Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana by Tallant and Saxon at the top of the pile.

I am sure I’ll mix in some entertainment as well. Chevy Stevens’ long-anticipated Still Missing is up there. I want to read what all the fuss is about. I also want to devour Slow Fire by Ken Mercer pretty soon, and The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski, which a friend of mine, fellow author and reviewer, Jimmy Callaway describes as a genre-shaking work. And, no doubt, I’ll read more Richard Laymon, because getting addicted to his sleazy horror is one of the best bad habits I’ve ever developed.

Almost every night, I read a story from My Mother, She Killed Me, My Father, He Ate Me, a superb collection of twisted fairy tales by some of the top modern authors, or one from the Akashic Books’ Noir series. The Akashic volume I’m currently on is New Orleans Noir. Julie Smith, the editor and a stand-out mystery writer herself, did a great job casting New Orleans’ many moods and themes as crime scenes.

What is the one thing you’d like your readers to know about you?

I am especially superstitious. Thirteen questions in this interview made me feel it would be a lucky one. I feel lucky for every reader I have.

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©2011 Lori Titus