Sometimes you have to know when to just give something a rest and a rethink.
I was merrily pounding on my keyboard a story for the flash fiction prompt I posted earlier, having quickly developed an idea earlier in the day — when I came to a sudden impasse.
Two things went wrong.
My imperfect memory of the geography of Seattle was partly to blame. The light rail system did not exist when I lived there and my planned story relied on several elements that were just not the reality of the situation on the ground. When I grew suspicious I checked out a few details and caught that flaw.
That was a hurdle I probably could have overcome. Just change assumptions to fit the real world geography and modify a few words here and there. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.
It was the second problem that caused the bigger issue: I had barely begun the actual tale and I was already close to the half-way mark of my self-imposed 2000-word limit. If I’m being brutally honest with myself, there was far too much exposition for a flash fiction style story. Enough so that I should dump what I wrote and get to the story part and leave the world-building to when I am not trying to write flash fiction.
I believe that the point of writing flash fiction and shorter works is to force an author to pay closer attention to word economy. This evening’s efforts might have worked out better as a true short story (up to 20k words, but generally averaging closer to 10k words) if I wanted to retain those world-building ideas. Thing is: those elements are not essential to the story, only to my own understanding of the story elements. They add zilch to the plot. The reader doesn’t need to know the contents of my exposition to understand the story I had planned on telling. Those detail add spice and inform me, but detract from the core narrative.
Well, Michael… do you consider it a wasted hour? No. I learned a valuable lesson today: that it is easy to get caught up in description, back-story, and those non-narrative elements, dragging down your story as a result. I knew that before I started writing tonight but this was a good time to reinforce that. Sure, excessive exposition often gets caught in editing. By challenge design, however, I am not dedicating much or any time to revisions.
The end result is that I am happy I discovered this before I crossed my word-count threshold because I can now refocus myself on telling the better tale once I clear the clutter in my head (unless tomorrow’s prompt is more compelling to pursue).
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